“Let every man and woman who works in any area of our national government, in any branch, at any level, be able to say with pride and with honor in future years: ‘I served the United States Government in that hour of our nation’s need.’” – President John F. Kennedy Jr., January 30, 1961
Since President Kennedy rightfully lauded the service of American civil servants, many things about the federal government have stayed the same, while much has changed. Civil servants continue to serve with pride, ingenuity, and dedication. The size of the civil service has remained remarkably consistent — about two million people — despite the increasing complexity of the world, government services and roles, and government expenditure, as have the mechanisms and core processes that govern the institution.
On the other hand, management of the civil service is more centralized and tied to the presidency, and many, if not most, presidents since Kennedy have run on platforms that government is largely a problem, if not the problem, rather than a solution. They have governed — including treatment of the civil service — accordingly, often blaming civil servants and the bureaucracy for anything and everything and using arguments to improve managerial control as a justification to increase political influence across the government.
Any future administration will be faced with two problems — first, a federal government that has been hollowed out and in desperate need of support and reinvigoration; and second, an inability to return to what had been. Comprehensive reform to the civil service has been critical for many decades, and now it is unavoidable.
A review of the reforms that have occurred in the last 75 years reveal several truths. Though most efforts to reform the civil service have increasingly consolidated power over the bureaucracy in the hands of the president, no recent president nor Congress has ever seriously attempted to reform the mechanisms and structure of the civil service. Further, while reform efforts have long grappled with how to maintain uniform standards while allowing enough flexibility for the processes to respond to the unique needs of agencies, personnel management is already inconsistent and non-uniform but the many issues and frustrations aren’t due to these flexibilities.
Moving forward, to ensure the federal government can meet the needs of the American public, a new approach is needed: a civil service built for the mission. Rather than maintaining central control for the personnel policies that govern a two million person workforce in hundreds of agencies with a range of diverse, unique, and important missions, Congress should give agencies the authority to hire and manage their people better.
In my new paper, A Civil Service for the Mission, I offer a proposal based on the history of civil service reform for building a framework that will allow agencies to grow and evolve without the constraints of a central bottleneck while maintaining the core values that have underpinned the merit-based civil service for almost 150 years.
This paper proposes three components to a decentralized hiring and personnel management structure:
(1) Decentralization of the hiring process by giving agencies the authorities to design positions, recruiting strategies, assessments, and pay structures.
(2) A centralized center of excellence to offer lessons, best practices, and management expertise, and conduct data collection and dissemination.
(3) A default personnel policy package for agencies that do not want to design their own processes.
For this to succeed where past attempts to give agencies more freedom have failed, legislation must address the core statutory constraints and invest in agency capacity to use their new flexibilities effectively. A mission-based approach will fail if agencies do not have the support, funding, and surge capacity they need to transition from the old system to the new one.
Public trust in government has been falling for nearly 70 years, and Americans want and deserve a government that can deliver and meet their needs. Without comprehensive reform to the civil service, any future administration is unlikely to reverse this trend as their policies and priorities will fall short without the people to implement them well.
