'I Got My Job Through CREEP'
Levine, Arthur
‘I Got My Job Through CREEP’ by Arthur Levine From 1945 until 1969, it is probably safe to say, a majority of federal civil servants either got their jobs during the New Deal or got...
...The Q rating was really used to designate quality...
...But the extended New Deal family knew the rules backward and forward and had developed the bending of them into high art-not, to Arthur Levine is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Lower-paying, entry-level jobs (those from GS-1 to GS-8) are least susceptible to political influence, because they are given out on the basis of competitive examinations...
...One of the fastest-moving HUD officials is Robert Odle, the meek-voiced naif who led off the Watergate hearings...
...Next to it Malekwrote, “Always...
...But the real importance of the manual was that to a limited extent it codified what had previously been purely an oral tradition, handed down from generation to generation within the Civil Service...
...According to Bass, favoritism continues under ACTION’S new director, Dr...
...After five years of appointing his own people (and living with the Kennedy holdovers he neglected to remove), Johnson tried late in 1968 to insure the preservation of his coterie of friends through a number of organizational changes that converted political appointees into career civil servants, all with the approval of the Civil Service Commission...
...One typical referral from the White House to the General Services Administration read: “Enclosed is the resume of Mr...
...Another fortunate CREEP veteran is Rick Fore, a field director for the Nixon campaign...
...You then have a new one written, to be classified at GS- 1 1, describing the duties of that specific staff recruitment officer as directed toward recruitment of recent law graduates for entry-level positions, entry level public information officers for the creative arts, and college news liaison section for your public information shops, and to be responsible for general level recruiting for entry level candidates on the West Coast...
...As John Ehrlichman explained in a Watergate committee hearing, “It was just an itch on our part to get friends in the departments rather than the people that we found there...
...We can then consider applicants they propose...
...The civil service during this period was an extended Roosevelt family...
...The most interesting section of the manual is labeled “Techniques for Removal Through Organizational or Manage men t Procedures...
...He was not the first president to regard the bureaucracy as an obstacle to his otherwise perfect plans for government, but the others had all learned to make some sort of peace with it...
...But after spending a little time with the Schedule C book, the Nixon men began to feel that there was a pitifully small number of non-career executive assignments, those key advisory posts such as deputy assistant secretary...
...In addition, the agency can pack the review panel or write a job description tailored to the resume of a pre-selected candidate...
...They were the great trail-blazers of bureaucracy, people who could still recall names and functions of agencies that died long ago...
...Are these actions enough...
...It said the Commission was too tied to the agencies it monitors...
...There should be no witnesses in the room at the time...
...All in all, there were 8,000 of these “super-grade” jobs, offering $36,000 a year-but these included “non-political” career appointments, too...
...In addition, when faced with Civil Service Commission rejection of their applicant, they would occasionally just cancel the vacancy...
...Malek’s gentleness of character was first noted on a federal level by Walter Hickel’s staff at the Department of Interior, who were given 30 minutes to vacate their offices when their boss was fired in November 1970...
...He was asked, by an Ervin committee staff member, “Was it your understanding that the referral units in the various agencies were to give special consideration to names sent over by the White House that were designated must...
...They also kept vacancies secret from other employees...
...Civil service columnist Mike Causey tells the story of a hated National Institutesof Health employee who was subjected to an unusual type of vendetta...
...In a March 1974 report it found recruitment abuses in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Administrative Office of the United States Courts...
...It also noted violations of conspiracy laws and of Executive Orders governing federal hiring...
...The 1973 GSA study was virtually forced on them when the Commission was presented with a pile of affidavits by some GSA regional officials...
...Another more complicated technique was to tailor job descriptions and requirements to fit the background of the desired appointee...
...The Commission has been misled and they should have recognized irregularities...
...The study said, “Our review of 23 CSC overview reports issued during fiscal 1972 and 1973 disclosed that only four commented on previous findings and recommendations...
...In the fall of 1971, in addition to making weekly personnel progress reports to the White House, ACTION officials established a special “situation room,” where they could view the progress of White-House-backed nominees undergoing selection...
...Your personnel experts judge he could receive an eligibility rating for a GS-11...
...Their next important project was to use these new government workers to help reelect the President...
...The manual cites Health, Education, and Welfare as an example, which could designate, say, Alabama, as a “model state” and then assign unwanted employees to visit various towns...
...They had to have known what was going on...
...Of course, this addiction to memos, as in the Watergate scandal, will provide future generations with the great moral lessons of the Nixon era-don’t put it in writing and don’t tape it...
...At that time, ACTION had an annual budget of $140 million and 1,500 full-time employees...
...Eligibility, too, can be falsified...
...But Malek denied pressuring anyone, despite later findings of favoritism by both congressional and Civil Service Commission investigators...
...Some of us just sat around and read the newspapers...
...Yes, the NRA, AAA, CCC, WPA, FSA...
...They had no tenure and limited terms so that they would not be cautious or timid...
...A NHTSA engineer, a government employee for 30 years, told me, “What’s going on is the degradation of the merit system...
...Subsequent adminis trations-Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy , and J ohns on -had little impact on the career service because they didn’t know how to use its rules to get their own people hired, and by the time they learned the rules, they lacked the will...
...The agency seeking to fill a vacancy sends to the commission a job description and a list of the criteria candidates should meet...
...But it...
...In retrospect it seems clear that Johnson was talking only about high-level appointees and venting his frustration at the Kennedy men he retained...
...The friendly phone call to the right person was simply not good enough for the Nixon Administration...
...In the summer of 1973, the Civil Service Commission found that nearly 30 of the Schedule C appointments that Phillips made went to people who were either unqualified or in “unjustifiable” jobs...
...Unfortunately, Nixon took the advice too literally and-after a brief flirtation with respectability in his first year in office-started applying it to the entire government in 1970...
...He ended up coming to work wearing a miner’s cap, so he could see in his office...
...The manual goes on to describe how to make the specifications so specific that only a pre-selected applicant could qualify...
...His affidavit charged that he was continually pressured to place politically favored applicants into jobs in regional offices...
...Sitting in front of you is your college roommate from Stanford University in California who was born and raised in San Francisco...
...The first thing you do is tear up the old job description that goes with that job...
...One reporter who covers the bureaucracy says, “I don’t think the manual could have been completed without some CSC assistance...
...A P-3 rating, for example, meant that the applicant would neither hurt nor help the President’s reelection, and that he lacked political backing...
...The agency always had a large number of political appointees, a legacy of its early days when institutional flexibility was seen as an important element in the poverty war...
...Malek wrote that, as part of the Responsiveness Program, “We should take action to ensure that the day-to-day departmental operations are conducted as much as possible to support the President’s re-election .” The Administration refined many of its “Responsiveness” techniques down to a science, for they had been implementing them even before the program was officially launched...
...Hampton’s, December 1973 memo to Nixon mentioned the GSA referral unit, and two memos in 1974 added similar information about HUD and the Small Business Administration...
...Bad Apples The Malek-May manual also recommends other techniques to crush unwanted employees...
...The GAO also said the Commission sometimes omits damaging regional findings in final reports...
...you figure out what he can’t stand and then make him do it...
...Eventually, he sought out friends in other divisions who gave him some more meaningful work to do...
...You naturally point out that should he not accept such an offer, and he is later forced to retire through the regular process or his own volition, that his employment references from the Department and his permanent personnel record may not look the same as if he accepted your offer...
...So when the Phillips aides attempted to destroy the agency, these same political posts were at their disposal...
...Your mind sort of atrophies...
...Toward this end they created, midway through 1971, the “Responsiveness Program...
...Some agencies have taken corrective action, ranging from a hiring freeze to case reviews...
...But he denies that any improper influence was used...
...Causey, whose Washington Post column is widely read in the capital, says, “That’s an extreme example, but hounding an employee is the oldest trick in the world...
...The connection could be remote indeed-you may have gotten your job from a friend of the son of a friend of someone who came into the Interior Department under Harold Ickes-but it still worked...
...The Stamp of Approval Administration officials grew adept at getting Nixon loyalists appointed to vacant posts, despite the rigors of the Commission’s certification process...
...In only a few years, it has managed to rival the Interstate Commerce Commission in ineffectiveness...
...In almost all cases, it allowed internal departmental audits to take place before it stepped in...
...Most government employees, especially personnel officials, are at least somewhat familiar with the cronyism and pressure techniques listed in this how-to guide book...
...Those with low ratings were sent computer letters informing them there were no vacancies, when, in fact, there were...
...those were the agencies you could be proud of...
...What you do is to suddenly recognize the outstanding abilities of your employee-victim and immediately seize upon his competence and talent to assign him to a special research and evaluation project...
...For higher positions, the Commission usually makes its decision only after convening a three-member panel that includes two representatives from the agency with the vacant post...
...The final report of the committee pointed out possible violations of the Hatch Act, which limits political participation of government employees...
...The other is really to protect the remaining civil service employees so that there is no danger of dismissing, for example, the career employees in the Internal Revenue Service who refuse to do the dirty work of an H. R. Haldeman or to make way for the friend of a Chuck Colson...
...HUD provides another example of political favoritism at work...
...Of course, inside connections are useful in directing you towards existing vacancies...
...One employee, Joseph Bass, recalls, “It felt like hell...
...It is always suggested that a transfer be accompanied with a promotion, if possible...
...In these various activities, the Nixon Administration’s real departure was tampering with the civil servants, those long-time bureaucrats, protected by tenure after three years, who spend their governmental lives patiently waiting for upper-level vacancies...
...Absolutely...
...Of course, you promise him that he will leave with the finest recommendations...
...Civil Service Commission regulations require that all job vacancies be advertised and opened up to competitive examination...
...Where it Hurts In all the various investigations of the Malek-Nixon system, the focus has been on favoritism, not the damaging impact on the workings of the bureaucracy...
...Trim the .fat...
...There is an inevitable decline in standards that will eventually have an impact on our lives...
...Turnover is considerable...
...He is a must...
...The office dealt with political referral units in the various agencies...
...Then, of course, there’s the beloved “new activity technique,” which isolates undesirable employees by creating an apparently meaningful, but in reality meaningless activity to which they *are all assigned...
...For office facilities,” the manual suggests, “the Department of the Army might be prevailed upon to provide surplus buildings at Fort Rucker, Alabama...
...He also asked for consideration of “the great potential of OSHA as a sales point for fund-raising and general support by employers...
...He also worked as a reporter on a college newspaper...
...The best surprises of all, of course, were all those vacancies popping up each year, hundreds of thousands of them, slots opened up in part by retiring Roosevelt liberals, their social concern worn down over the years...
...The impact of President Ford’s message is yet to be seen...
...be sure, as part of any conspiracy but merely to take care of individual friends of individual members of the family...
...As a result of the publicity, the employees were able to keep their jobs, but they were pulled off their regular assignments and given meaningless jobs...
...The truth is that the information could have come from any of the old Roosevelt veterans or from hundreds of other reasonably sophisticated civil servants...
...will be proposed by OSHA or by NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] .” -1- “While the activities of the Standards Advisory Committee on Agriculture will commence in July, the Committee will concentrate on priorities and long-range planning, rather than on specific standards setting during this period...
...Arnett said at the time that these political appointees had been taken from a White House “must-hire” list...
...He was recently promoted to a GS-16 position as the executive assistant to the general manager of the program...
...Placement of political hacks was systematic, formalized, and copiously documented by internal memos...
...Guenther’s “personnel” plan: “We are drafting an outline of OSHA‘s recruiting and hiring plan for the next six months...
...Rough Stuff The most enduring paper monument to Administration personnel policies and the Rosetta stone for many of the events that have since come to light is the delightful Federal Political Personne I Manual, “Dedi ca ted to the United States Civil Service Commission.’’ It provides a thorough review of Civil Service regulations and amusing instructions on how the conscientious Nixonite could avoid them...
...One obvious step is to make many more jobs available to each new administration to fill with people of its choice...
...George M. Shirey, Jr...
...Phillips took office with a mandate to dismantle the agency, while bringing with him a crew of right-wing political appointees...
...When he finally asks for relief, you tearfully reiterate the importance of the project and state that he must continue to obey travel orders or resign...
...The Alabama State Department of Education, would, I am sure, be more than happy to provide school buses to bus HEW employees between their offices and the nearest town where they would live...
...But in the summer and fall of 1973, a few hundred ACTION staff members were queried about their political philosophies during special regional seminars on the role of ACTION...
...In all likelihood these employees will resign in boredom or disgust...
...So far, a few people have resigned, but no one has been punished...
...His successor, Alvin Arnett, was in turn deposed in July 1974 by a group of right-wing political appointees who claimed that he was too liberal...
...Usually, the agency will “name request” a specific individual they’ve recruited and want to have certified...
...They almost never did anything...
...We can only speculate about the effect this brazen conflict of interest must have had on the quality of inspections...
...His aides felt that you had to control more than the top executives and their aides...
...Merit Probes In giving Malek and his cohorts free reign, the Nixon Administration went far beyond previous administrations in the scope of its political clearance and patronage system...
...By layering your own people into the organization, you insulate those likely to be roadblocks from important positions...
...Some say the staff was either incompetent or in collusion with Nixon aides...
...Candidates are then placed on the register for the areas and grades in which they have been rated as eligible...
...A recent GAO study attacked the Commission for the inadequacy of its personnel management evaluations...
...There had to be flow charts, memos, forms, manuals, computer banks, all the fine mounds of paper that proved something was getting done...
...The former CREEP officer, a mere 30 years old, started work at HUD as a $1 20-a-day consultant in housing management...
...Critics raise the possibility of Civil Service Commission collusion or ignorance...
...Of 30 name requests during 1971 and 1972, the subcommittee found abuses in 18 of the cases...
...Pressure Tactics Royer says that during a visit to Seattle in August 1971, he witnessed candidates for two top regional office jobs cross-examined about their political beliefs...
...Just like...
...OEO Blitzkrieg Social service agencies, like OEO and HEWS Social and Rehabilitation Service, were especially vulnerable to political attack...
...Among the “action” programs Guenther proposed: t “While promulgation and modification activity must continue, no highly controversial standards (i.e., cotton dust, etc...
...To flush out hold-over Democrats, in April 1973 ACTION sent transfertoWashington-or-else letters to 30 politically unreliable employees in regional offices...
...It is during the certification process that the fun begins...
...IP his division, favoritism was shown toward former employees of North American Rockwell, a company that manufactures some of the parts tested by the division...
...One reason for this was that Shriver wanted to keep their vigor and idealism, just the qualities which job security would undermine...
...He answered, “Yes...
...Executive director Bernard Rosen claims that the Commission showed “institutional courage” in launching its investigations, but it appears rather that the Commission failed to 1)encourage insiders to blow the whistle on the operation and 2) move swiftly to initiate its studies...
...A Department of Transportation engineer victimized by pre-selection says, “The Civil Service Commission hasn’t done anything to prevent it...
...The internal reshufflings can be accomplished without consulting the Civil Service Commission, but Commission approval is needed before you can hire new civil servants...
...We were given so many trumped-up assignments that you didn’t feel like going to work in the morning...
...The manual provides helpful hints on how to drive unwelcome employees from their jobs and hire political cronies...
...Please consider his qualifications and get back to me with the possibilities as soon as possible...
...it was not even adequate to go slightly further and appoint the few Executive Level I to V jobs, such as agency heads, general counsels, and so on...
...There were only about 600 of the genuine political plums...
...One affects auto safety, the other the quality and efficiency of justice...
...He received his law degree from Boalt Hall at the University of California...
...Second, the documents prepared would not indicate White House involvement in any way...
...a-3) Special Assignment Technique (The Traveling Salesman) This technique is especially useful for the family man and those who do not enjoy traveling...
...OEO received a lot of publicity during Howard Phillips’ 1973 reign of terror...
...Earlier, Commission investigations of OEO and ACTION found cronyism and mismanagement...
...By 1972, the program was in high gear, manipulating grants, jobs, law enforcement and public relations to win favor for the Republican Party and votes for the incumbent...
...LBJ’s Friends Lyndon Johnson, reared on the government payroll, knew better than the Kennedys how the bureaucracy worked, who to call, what to say...
...Publication of the manual this September in the weekly Federal Times created quite a stir in the capital...
...Malek, a former management consultant and self-made millionaire, brought a new efficiency’ to the traditionally folksy art of patronage...
...As part of the governmentwide patronage scheme, a 100-page primer on how to dodge the federal personnel laws was written by Alan May, a former staff recruitment official for ACTION, the volunteer agency...
...Commission officials respond that they were unable to pin down specific allegations until late 1973, and that due process must in all cases be respected...
...I Got My Job Through CREEP’ by Arthur Levine From 1945 until 1969, it is probably safe to say, a majority of federal civil servants either got their jobs during the New Deal or got them through connections with people who had...
...They only served on paper...
...The Commission has been attacked for not starting the first referral unit probe until June 1973 and for delaying disciplinary ac.tion...
...After his supervisors unsuccessfully asked him to quit, they placed him in a virtual closet, with a tiny desk and chair, no phone or even a light bulb...
...It has required agencies to more thoroughly justify a “name request” candidate and to provide documentation of the extent of recruitment...
...LBJ also managed to appoint his White House political recruiter, John Macy, to the chairmanship of the Civil Service Commission...
...Then he had been a lone Republican, surrounded by New Dealers, and some of that bitterness apparently remained over the years...
...Jeb Magruder in An American Life recalled how Malek once drove through a national park with brakes screeching and horn honking to scare away the bears other tourists had been waiting for an hour to see...
...There is the layering technique-as in “layering” over insubordinates new employees who are loyal and faithful...
...In short you write the job description and selective criteria around your candidate’s Form 17 1 .” * ‘Responsiveness’ Plan So the Administration, not long into its first term, began to put its loyalists into the bureaucracy, using the tactics of Malek‘s manual...
...It was undoubtedly the most systematic ass’ault on the merit system in the nation’s history, another “first” for our history-conscious former president...
...In an informal interview with the Ervin committee, May said that he never intended to politicize the procedure for filling civil service jobs...
...Several months later, 14 civil service employees complained about political influence in the San Francisco regional office...
...The bulk of the staff had Foreign Service Reserve appointments and were therefore exempt from Civil Service requirements...
...was only in the summer of 1974, after Nixon was clearly on the ropes, that the bulk of the Civil Service Commission investigations was concluded...
...But you do expect him to immediately relinquish his duties...
...At one point early in the first term, the White House even drew up this official form to be used when referring politically sensitive appointees to the various agencies : IV.Value of Placement to the President Politically...
...The failure of the Commission to obtain a copy of the Malek manual until July is also disappointing, if not suspicious...
...To the extent that the Kennedy Administration sought, in ways like these, to mold the executive branch in its own image, liberals felt it was a worthy goal because the right-thinking people were in charge...
...At one point, an aide actually wrote on a “Confidential-Eyes Only” memo, “Bum Before Reading...
...Along with his promotion and assignment, your expert is given extensive travel orders criss-crossing him across the country to towns (hopefully with the worst accommodations possible) with a population of 20,000 or under...
...In September, President Ford issued a memorandum to agency and department heads expressing his determination that the merit principles in the Civil Service Act and personnel regulations be carried out...
...Among the highlights are: (a- 1) Frontal Assault You simply call an individual in and tell him he is no longer wanted, that you’ll assist him in finding another job and will keep him around until such time as he finds other employment...
...Unlike most regulatory agencies, which go through a brief period of vigorous enforcement before becoming a captive of special interests, OSHA sold out from the moment of its inception...
...Because of these policies, Royer resigned in February 1972...
...The House committee has already unearthed examples of recruitment abuses in two government agencies...
...OHighest Political Value (Must Place) . OHigh Political Value (Place if possible) OModerate Political Value (Handle courOLittle Political Value (Handle Routeou sly) tinely...
...This provides “a single barrel into which you can dump a large number of widely located bad apples...
...Fooling the System The next step, the certification process, which results in a recommendation of the three top candidates for each vacant post, is more selective...
...Not only were the jobs there, but the ways of filling them with one’s friends were well known, even though they had never been systematically used...
...The Commission also asked the Justice Department to investigate favoritism and evidence of harassment in one of its own agencies, the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency (LEAA...
...In a memo discussing the bureaucracy, Malek wrote, “First, there would be no written communications from the White House to the deparments-all information about the program would be transmitted verbally...
...Who wants a government responsive to a thug...
...When the Nixon Administration came to power in 1969, it was granted an opportunity its predecessors were denied: thousands of jobs were opening up as the old Roosevelt hands were retiring...
...A Secret Code In his affidavit Royer says that ACTION applicants were graded on a personnel code form, which included boxes marked P, Q, and M. If an applicant happened to see the form and ask about the letters, he was told that they stood for Personality, Quality, and Maturity, with ratings from 1 to 5. Actually, these codes were for internal use and stood for Political and Minority...
...Yes, they were to give special consideration...
...Lyndon Johnson may have provided the goad Nixon needed when he admonisned his successor to “clean house” and put Nixon loyalists in key jobs if he wanted to control the government-doubtless in the same tones he reserved for his confidential advice about the tax advantages of presidential papers...
...And in a special pep talk for staff recruiters, Alan May gave a blackboard lecture on how to remove unwanted civil service employees...
...Subject to your approval, it is our intention to provide copies of this detailed plan to the Republican National Committee and the Committee to Re-elect the President...
...Moreover, Royer says recruiting officers were required to “turn off’ hundreds of qualified applicants who lacked the desired political connections...
...Larry O’Brien recalls that in his role as Kennedy’s congressional liaison, political referrals made to him and the White House were passed on to appropriate federal agencies and departments...
...Malek, who later became deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, was once described by Sally Quinn as the kind of person who never could wait behind other cars at an exit, he always had to drive up alongside the others and force his way in...
...The list of Schedule C jobs is known as the “plum book’’ because it is a catalog of potential vacancies occurring when administrations change hands...
...An M-5 rating meant that the unlucky jobseeker was considered unreliable and an opponent of the President...
...The important question is not who is to blame-of course the Nixon people were more to blamebut what is to be done...
...Minority applicants were graded on their value to the President, and the P rating was used to gauge the political importance the White House placed on his appointment...
...In a sworn affidavit submitted to the Watergate committee during the summer, the 29-year-old Republican activist revealed a startling variety of patronage practices...
...He is looking for a GS-13 or 14, PI0 [Public Information Officer] type position...
...Under Nixon, it was elevated to a valuable tool of management...
...Since a promotion is per se beneficial to the employee, it immediately forecloses any claim that the transfer is an adverse action...
...the Democrats did that...
...Until his wife threatens him with divorce unless he quits, you have him out of town and out of the way...
...Some of these past abuses were created from whole cloth, such as the revelations that Larry O’Brien got rid of all disloyal bureaucrats in only 180 days, or that those shrewd Kennedy brothers hired a management consultant firm to survey the executive branch and determine important jobs at all levels...
...George Guenther, former Assistant Secretary for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), wrote in a June 1972 memo of the ways he could use his agency to help the President’s reelection...
...Malek’s Machismo Nixon’s instrument for obtaining bureaucratic control, the leading figure in the following narrative, was Alan May’s mentor, White House aide Frederick Malek...
...Perhaps some of Nixon’s hostility grew out of his own war-time experiences in the Office of Price Administration...
...He will be qualified with the Civil Service so he can fill either a career or non-career slot...
...Some of the major developments: Civil Service Commissions investigations in late 1973 and 1974 unearthed illegal political referral units and job favoritism in the Small Business Administration, the General Services Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and HEWS Social and Rehabilitation Service...
...While studying for the bar he worked at an advertising agency handling newspaper accounts...
...Michael Balzano, but it is now more personal than political...
...He worked under Alan May, who authored the Malek manual and joined ACTION shortly before the July 1, 1971, reorganization that merged VISTA, the Peace Corps, and other volunteer agencies into the conglomeration known as ACTION...
...Established in 1971, OSHA is supposed to help prevent industrial accidents and disease, and is one of the few new creations of the Nixon Administration...
...a-2) Transfer Technique By carefully researching the background of the proposed employee-victim, one can always establish that geographical part of the country and/or organization unit to which the employee would rather resign than obey and accept transfer orders...
...The elaborate civil service procedures inadvertently lent themselves to the goals of the Nixon Administration...
...It should never be used with that fervent, zealous employee committed to Democratic policies and programs, or to the bureaucracy...
...And then there is the larger problem of how the Commission could fail to spot the most massive illegal patronage system in American history...
...The balance has tipped so far in favor of the civil service that new administrations do have a real problem in actually gaining the policy control they were elected to assert...
...The action created a small sensation, and a Senate subcommittee led by Senator Alan Cranston investigated the problem...
...Nixon’s men wanted to fill more than just the 1,200 Schedule C jobs, those defined by the Civil Service Commission as “key policy-de termining jobs, or jobs having a close personal relationship to an agency head or his key officials...
...A congressional investigator told me, “All these appointments have the imprimatur of the Civil Service Commission...
...As the Malek manual explains, “Because of the subjectiveness of the certification process with respect to mid-level and senior level positions there is really no ‘merit’ in the ‘merit system’ save the minimum qualification that a candidate be eligible...
...Although the questionnaires were apparently anonymous, they were specially coded so ACTION officials could identify the respondents...
...Most of the applications that Royer was involved with were for civil service posts in VISTA...
...Still, there was no public outrage when the Kennedy Administration did attempt to “open up” the civil service to “new blood”that is, to hire all those bright whiz kids who wanted only to create Camelot and get their names in the newspapers...
...Yet these abuses were not limited to the Nixon Administration...
...Emphasis in the original...
...An early example is a 1971 memo from Harry Dent of the White House staff to H. R. Haldeman and John Mitchell, which said, “I have also delayed the promotion of the Southeastern OEO man to the no...
...Today, that would be regarded as a blatant conflict of interest...
...This outlook would only seem embarrassing when, years later, Nixon surveyed the bureaucracy and found it lacking...
...Gzution: This technique should only be used for the timid at heart with a giant ego...
...who was a GS-15 special assistant in the “new communities program...
...The manual tells its readers, “It’s the bureaucratic patronage system-they can really insure the certification of someone they have pre-selected, and so can you...
...roughly 200,000 new civil servants are hired each year, while an additional 500,000 positions are filled by promotions, transfers, or reassignments...
...It seemed obvious to anyone who read the newspapers in those days that the civil service was often stagnant, inflexible, and an obstacle to progress...
...A staff member then asked, “Was this in career positions as well as other positions...
...All that was needed was the will to put the two together...
...The report said, “There is convincing evidence of favoritism, pre-sele ction, tailored requirements and selective factors, questionable qualifications and experience-all to the detriment of other qualified applicants who may have been laboring under the misapprehension that there was a good probability that they would gain federal employment, while in reality they had little or no chance...
...Get rid of dead weight...
...More often than not, the fellow didn’t get the job,” he recalls...
...A former staff recruitment officer for ACTION, Stephen Royer, remembers things a bit differently...
...In the personnel field, Nixon aides were obsessed with memos, sending them back and forth in some private ritual, yet fearful all the while that their secret sheets of paper would be discovered...
...HEW was filled with Johnson loyalists when Nixon came into office...
...A good example is a study by the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee’s investigations subcommittee...
...White Answers to October puzzle: House aide Marvin Watson also took pains to clear political nominees for high-level career positions...
...Failure to obey travel orders is grounds for immediate separation...
...He was soon made a political GS-16 at $32,000, and after a few months’ experience was promoted to a $36,000 job as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Housing Management...
...On the whole, the Johnson Administration was not a total stranger to techniques of bureaucratic harassment...
...Protecting the Worker All the assorted outrages raise important questions about the Civil Service Commission’s role in the patronage scandals and its ability to prevent such abuses...
...So the Nixon men chose to extend themselves, reaching down into the lower pay brackets, as well as toying with Foreign Service appointments and legal positions, both exempted from normal civil service requirements...
...But mid-level and seniorlevel bureaucrats, earning between $12,800 and $34,500 a year, are selected through evaluations based on more subjective criteria...
...A more chilling example of improper political influence comes from one of the answers prepared by agency directors under the 1972 “Responsiveness Plan...
...Six hundred wasn’t enough...
...Through the use of quizzes, speeches, films, and “rap” sessions, a high-priced University of Colorado consultant organized seminars designed in part “to effect attitudinal changes to make possible the attainment of the goals of ACTION...
...A White House personnel office was set up to handle the placement of favored personnel into career andnoncareer jobs...
...you had to reach down past the cabinet members and agency heads, past the assistant secretaries and key staffers, down to the career professionals themselves...
...It notes triumphantly, “. . . your candidate will certainly be among the only three who even meet the selective criteria...
...3 spot in OEO until he demonstrates proof-positive that he is rechanneling money from Democrats to RN [Nixon] blacks...
...None of these abuses would have been possible if the Civil Service Commission had not given the blessing of certification to the Administration’s pre-selected candidates...
...A Special Projects Unit researched the ’ background of all applicants...
...There could hardly be a New Frontier if the bureaucracy remained sluggish and unresponsive...
...Taking Over In the days before Nixon, however, the harassment was more sporadic and less political than it became after 1969...
...An administrator can also use the “isolation technique”-setting up a parallel organization to one already in existence and giving that new organization most of the real responsibilities previously vested in the old one...
...Jobs in Camelot To justify these policies and to inspire greater zeal among those who would be carrying them out, the Malek manual cited the patronage sins of previous administrations...
...The staff uncovered evidence that grants, regulatory authority and hiring policies had all been used to guarantee Nixon’s reelection...
...One way they did this was to hire people as consultants and then work to entrench them in career jobs...
...Commission officials contend that the memorandum will play an important role in curbing abuses and setting high leadership standards, but others are not sure...
...The Commission has already conducted several investigations and proposed disciplinary actions...
...Nixon and his aides felt that the bureaucracy was essentially an alien, Democraticinclined force that must be controlled if the Administration was to survive...
...On the basis of the Form 17 1 application, the Civil Service Commission evaluates the applicant’s education and experience, and assigns him an eligibility rating for those jobs for which he has applied...
...Representatives of the American Federation of Government Employees claim that political clearance still continues at OEO...
...And there’s more: the Senate Watergate committee studied a socalled “Responsiveness Plan” intended to mobilize the bureaucracy for Nixon’s reelection effort...
...That same summer, federal court orders halted Phillips’ heavy-handed attack on the agency...
...Participants were given quizzes that asked whether they agreed with statements like, “The goal of ‘eliminating poverty’ is unrealistic” or “Richard Nixon’s election constituted a mandate for closing down OEO and, other social welfare programs...
...And, starting in December 1973, Civil Service Commission Chairman Robert Hampton tried three times to get President Nixon to issue a directive condemning violations of the civil service laws and merit system but was rebuffed each time...
...John Moss and the House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service are currently conducting their own probes of merit system violations...
...It is worth remembering that favoritism and political clearance affects us in ways besides the waste of public funds...
...Ehrlichman answered, “Sure...
...But these new fellows, well, they were clean cut and all but kind of different...
...The tone of the book, with its macabre humor, is reminiscent of Gulag Archipelago-only told from the oppressor’s point of view...
...While researching this article I waded through dozens of such memos directly linking the White House to political influence in the executive branch...
...But the special consideration was not in competition for a specific job, but to ensure that the person was exposed to a range of jobs for which he or she was qualified...
...They just got paid...
...The entire civil service system is threatened...
...When the Peace Corps was formed, Sargent Shriver dispensed with old-fashioned civil service jobs and managed to get the people he wanted by calling them Foreign Service Reserve officers...
...You look for a man’s Achilles heel...
...These jobs were pure political gravy, and went from grades 1 to 15 ($5,000 to $36,000 a year) and ranged from chauffeur to management positions...
...As the manual explains it, here’s how the process works: “Let us assume you have a career opening for a staff recruitment officer...
...Rep...
...For entry-level jobs, the Commission just chooses the people with the three best test scores (with special consideration for veterans...
...It blamed in part the strong emphasis placed on obtaining agency cooperation and the willingness of the Commission to accept empty promises of bureaucratic reform...
Vol. 6 • November 1974 • No. 9
