Civil Service Reform

Two factors dominate the history of professional civil service personnel administration: First, the pursuit of merit; second, the desire for reform. Dating from the passage of the United States Pendleton Act in 1883, through the writings of Max Weber, Woodrow Wilson, and Progressive-era reformers such as Frank Goodnow, and even through the Minnowbrook conference, the Reagan Administration, and the years of National Performance Review, the desire to create an apolitical, competent, and efficient public administration has been premised upon the identification of the most qualified persons, hired based upon some test for fitness and granted tenure for life. Even though various forces have come to challenge exactly how merit is ascertained (use of standardized tests or other hiring procedures, or balanced with other competing values such as diversity and representativeness), few have really questioned the merit principle as a defining value of the civil service.

Yet, discomfort with the performance of the civil service has also generated repeated demands for reform. Often the call has been to make the civil service more efficient or productive, but demands have also been articulated for increased responsiveness of tenured civil servants to political leaders, for improved accountability, ethics, or organizational and individual performance. To secure these objectives, the scope of suggested reforms has varied from minor tinkering with pay, through administrative reorganization, privatization, and the introduction of market incentives, to a wholesale abandonment of merit and tenure systems. While demand for reform seems to take on a quadrennial flavor in the United States—with each new president offering new reforms and critiques of the federal bureaucracy—similar demands to improve the civil service are also popular and voiced around the world.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA 78) was the centerpiece of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to revamp the American civil service. It called for major shakeups in staffing and organizing the federal service, a new compensation system, and a new level of careerists known as the Senior Executive Service (SES). Both sought to improve merit. Other nations around the world have also undertaken efforts in the last quarter century to reform some aspect of the civil service. What these reforms have accomplished and produced is the subject of three recent books.

The edited volume by Pfiffner and Brook is a collection of essays commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the CSRA 78. The book brings together a reappraisal of this reform, as well as speculation on the future of merit and government in a multicultural and global world. Rahman’s work is a United Nations sponsored project, providing a more global view on civil service reform that searches for commonalities among strategies and lessons to be learned. Condrey and Maranto call for abandonment of the merit system and a return to spoils as the organizing principle guiding the civil service. Taken together, these books offer complementary and occasionally contrasting assessments of the state of civil service reform and merit.

Pfiffner and Brook: American Reform at the Close of the Twentieth Century

James Pfiffner’s opening essay provides a context for CSRA 78 as the end of a long period of civil service reform commencing with the Pendleton Act. Through the Progressive Era and into the 1960s—the golden age of merit according to the author—an increasing percentage of the federal service was classified. Confidence in the government’s ability to solve problems culminated in the Great Society, but the failures of Vietnam and the economic recessions of the 1970s cast a pall upon that faith. Nixon, deficit politics, and Watergate undermined the consensus that government was good, and encouraged antigovernment sentiments.

Dwight Ink, a Carter appointee who helped design CSRA 78, claims that the red tape of government was undermining merit. He describes the philosophy of the act: no one has a claim to a government job, those jobs belong to the people, and the people have a right to an effective government free from spoils, discrimination, and incompetence. CSRA 78 was to enhance accountability and pursuit of these other goals by streamlining personnel policies, decentralizing some processes, and centralizing others, replacing the Civil Service Commission with the Merit Service Protection Board and the Federal Labor Relations Authority, enhancing workforce planning, developing better training, instituting merit compensation and probationary periods for new managers, and creating a Senior Executive Service (SES) for top level executives. All were ambitious goals, and Ink notes that the Office of Personnel Management was supposed to take a central role in its implementation, yet it did not. Other important components of CSRA 78 similarly did not pan out.

Carolyn Ban examines CSRA 78 through the lens of National Performance Review (NPR). She sees the former as having a mixed legacy in terms of personnel management reforms, and says both initiatives are part of an ongoing cycle of reforms that have borrowed from the private sector and other countries. Ban, Joel Aberbach, and Bert Rockman see mixed results in the creation of the SES. They surveyed careerists and political appointees, finding the former expressed concern about pay, evaluation, and the political use of transfers.

Part two of the book turns to government performance and measurement. Patricia Ingraham and Donald Moynihan explore the changing notions of performance initiated by CSRA 78 and subsequent reforms. While in 1978 performance issues were examined at the individual level, by 1998 and the NPR, it had shifted to the organizational level. Similarly, Hal Rainey and Edward Kellough explore the many characteristics of high performance government agencies, focusing on the organization’s mission, leadership, and work environment. Barbara Romzek dissects the notion of accountability, asking to whom one is accountable, why, and what behavior is expected. These three chapters provide sophisticated analyses of what it means to be accountable and productive, stressing that the terms have layered meanings.

Finally, the book concludes with chapters by Mark Huddleston, Chester Newland, and Hugh Heclo. Globalization challenges the administrative state and Newland argues that in a globalized world its job may be simply to facilitate market transactions. How will public administrators respond to global forces they cannot control? Globalization raises issues of accountability and governance; for example who is the public that a public administrator must serve? Finally, challenges from unions and interest groups and the need to diversify the workforce also raise questions about whether merit, as traditionally understood, will remain.

Rahman: Global Lessons

Reforming the Civil Service for Government Performance carefully examines government performance by distinguishing among three types of reform—civil service, administrative, and governance. Civil service reform refers to the strengthening of the administrative capacity of the government to perform core functions and to serve the social and economic needs of the public. Administrative reform addresses the rationalizing of the structures of government, such as the coordination and improvement of delivery services. Governance reform addresses improvements in the legal and policy framework—such as improved accountability and transparency.

Rahman explores these three levels of reform through four successive chapters that discuss structural, program, performance, and process-orientated issues. Each chapter also highlights a particular country embodying the types of reforms discussed in that issue area. Structural issues in chapter two address the size and structure of the government, including issues such as shrinking the civil service because of debt problems. Also included are examinations of how to ensure political neutrality of civil servants and how to develop decision-making loops. Malaysia is highlighted here. From its independence in 1957 it has adopted numerous reforms of the civil service, including total quality management, performance measures, and training to foster a better government that is equipped to work with the private sector on economic development. Critical to Malaysia’s success was enlisting private-sector support.

Argentina is highlighted in chapter three. Programmatic issues addressed include strengthening the actual personnel of the civil service. Argentina, under President Menem, undertook significant reform of the civil service, including unloading state enterprises, changing pay structure, addressing corruption, and improving management capacities as part of a program to overhaul the economy. The lesson here is that persistence and political will matters.

After many years of civil war, Uganda lacked the capacity to operate a government that could deliver. So, it commenced many performance and results-orientated processes that sought to create specific goals for government agencies, and which also specified means and systems needed to achieve those ends. Yet these changes were not instigated by outside donors, but were indigenous and, therefore, garnered the necessary backing required for success.

Finally, the chapter on Poland highlights the problems of many former eastern European countries—bloated and out-of-date bureaucracies that need to change to support capitalist economics. Yet changing old habits is hard. Poland is presented as somewhat of a success story in changing basic decision-making processes. Here, the lesson of reform is it is necessary to invest key stakeholders and get them involved in setting the goals and sustaining reform.

The final chapter concludes with a lesson regarding what sustains reform and what does not. Fear of failure, views that reform is boring, and the intransigence of stakeholders and career civil servants bog down reform. But civil service, administrative, and governance reform are critical to economic development, and the chapter develops a host of suggestions—ranging from creating a stable constitutional system to developing the correct internal and external partnerships to sustain changes. While the chapter is thin on details, it does provide solid comparative lessons.

Condrey and Maranto: A Return to Spoils

On its face, the most extensive call for reform is found in Radical Reform of the Civil Service. Condrey and Maranto define radical reform of the civil service as ”personnel system reforms that erode employee tenure or that put decisions regarding promotion, compensation, and particularly hiring and separation in the hands of public managers rather than in personnel offices” (3). The book is a collection of essays built around an article reprinted in this volume that calls for an abandonment of the merit system. Most of the remaining essays explore the implications of this proposition.

Chapter four is the central essay of this book and it, along with chapters five through nine, are reprinted from the January and March 1998 issues of Administration and Society. In chapter four, Maranto articulates an intellectual challenge: The federal merit system should be abandoned and replaced with the nineteenth century spoils system. In making this bold claim, the author first notes that federal workers are not doing a bad job but that they work in a ”severely suboptimal personnel system”(70). In pressing the case for a return to spoils, Maranto compares the former system to a merit system along several dimensions—innovation, corruption, executive leadership, and representation. Pressing the case for spoils, he argues it did not have as much turnover or corruption as one might think. While the modern civil service, as a whole, is quite diverse and representative, its individual organizations are not, and they are not as attuned to executive leadership as the spoils system was. Finally, Maranto argues that other legal and political imperatives now exist that would protect workers from the excesses of spoils.

Responding, Robert Durant, Charles Goodsell, Jack Knott, and William Murray in chapters four through eight respectively, take various exceptions to the plea to return to spoils. Durant agrees with the claim that a rapidly changing environment makes the current mode of civil service and tenure untenable, but he argues for a redefinition of tenure away from the current emphasis on seniority, compliance with rules, and functional specialization, and towards performance-based criteria. Goodsell argues that the nineteenth century spoils depictions that Maranto offers are neither accurate nor applicable, that he ignores the emergence of new forms of corruption were we to return to spoils, that the president would have many incentives to replace far more workers than Maranto envisions, and that the flexibility produced by a return to spoils would not necessarily lead to innovation.

Knott contends that any supposed flaws in the federal government are not the result of the merit system but of the political choices of the many actors, both within and outside the government, that have produced all the rules and procedures that Maranto assails. In comparing the United States merit system to civil service systems found around the world, Knott asserts that perhaps it is our separation of powers form of government (in contrast to a parliamentary system) that produces many of the alleged inefficiencies. Finally, Murray echoes many of the earlier concerns and argues that both the federal government and states have either already implemented or tried many of Maranto’s suggestions and they are neither radical in terms of the results achieved nor in being innovative. Murray also criticizes Maranto’s suggestions for failing to describe what he is seeking to cure or achieve.

The other set of interesting essays in this volume examine life after merit or tenure. Larry Lane and Colleen Woodward describe several federal agencies that operate outside of the traditional merit system, while other chapters turn to lessons from state experiments. Stephen Condrey explores what has happened since Georgia abandoned tenure in1996, finding that state agencies were unprepared to assume their new personnel roles and that cronyism and favoritism appear to be returning to some agencies.

Conclusion: So What Do We Know about Merit and Reform?

By reading these three books what do we know about the past, present, and future of merit and reform? In some ways, there are few surprises that emerge. The Pfiffner and Brook’s volume reminds readers that the concept of merit has changed dramatically from the days of Weber and that changes in governance and the economy will continue to challenge the concept. CSRA 78 was not all it was cracked up to be—merely one of many reforms offered by presidents. Not a surprise, reform is difficult to predict, and more complex and nuanced than is generally realized.

Rahman also offers few surprises, but his careful distinctions are subtle and significant and the case studies instructive. Placing the United States within a broader context of reforms at many levels over the last 20–30 years reveals that we are neither better nor worse in effecting change than other states.

Finally, Condrey and Maranto seek to present a case that the current tenure system does not work and that spoils was not so bad. However, little evidence is given to support either proposition; instead, we are left unclear regarding what radical reform will achieve.

Personnel systems do ossify and need change. One lesson of these three books is that the constant change in personnel systems in the United States and elsewhere is an indication that they have adapted significantly to changing political environments. Moreover, any evaluation of how the civil service system operates needs to include careful comparison to its alternatives. For example, even in the private sector, personnel departments are increasingly taking control of employment decisions to avoid litigation. James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It questioned whether the private sector was more inefficient than similar public-sector agencies, given the multiple goals and political purposes the latter must perform. Finally, examination of publicly-owned utilities and hospitals, as well as recent studies of private versus public prisons provide evidence that perhaps the current government personnel systems may not be as suboptimal as their critics contend.

The real challenges in calling for civil service reform are carefully defining the goals, taking sufficient account of the environmental context, and learning from the lessons of the past. In that regard, the books reviewed here provide valuable assistance.