How To Get a Government Job

...Eisenhower and Kennedy had little impact on the civil service...

...The manual was called the Malek Manual because it was found in Fred Malek’s files...

...There is an express line for those who already know what forms they want...

...The system works this way: you visit your elected representative and remind him of his obligations to you...

...There is something called the quota system, which means that every state has a certain number of jobs-based on population-it can fill in the Washington office...

...But you could have put all the Nixon referral people on the Sequoia and it would still float...

...They coauthored the now famous “Malek Manual,” a 600-page booklet designed to instruct top-level political appointees how to fill career jobs with Nixon types, outlining ways to rid the civil service of career personnel, in general how to activate the “responsiveness program...

...Nixon wanted to do more than just pay off political debts, he wanted to “clean out the Democratic-infested civil service,” as one of his biographers put it...

...Consider the statistics...

...They snow politicians...

...If you had understood Washington better, you might have started your quest for a “name request” government job on Capitol Hill and saved yourself a lot of trouble...

...Richard Nixon became the first president to challenge the control of the civil service by Roosevelt-Truman appointees and their friends...

...Ann Pincus is a Washington writer...

...Many more personnel come in through the buddy system than through political pull...

...This leaves a mere 96 jobs which you can plausibly aim for at the senior level...

...Your ambitions are limited...

...GSA officials immediately turned an accusatory finger back on the Civil Service Commission...

...But if you put all the people involved in the buddy system on the carrier Enterprise, it would sink...

...And there’s no coherent group you’re talking about...

...This leaves 480 senior-level jobs, but don’t get your hopes too high, because 80 per cent of these left-overs are going to be filled by “name requests...

...Good News for Iowans Let’s start with the PACE (Prof e s si o n a 1 Ad m in is t rative Career Examination) level of jobs, which are GS-5 and GS-7 with base salaries of $8,925 and $1 1,046...

...For example, former Secretary of HUD James T. Lynn has stated that he knew nothing about the special referral office with 13 workers in it which operated only two doors down from his own office...

...Occasionally there is a mixup, as when officials at the Department of Defense wanted to hire a certain man and 19 others with iden-tical qualifications came up on the register before him, so they had to hire all 20 persons...

...The politicians now are more cautious than before-they have become fed up with being exposed in the press and accused of participating in crooked deals...

...How To Get a Government Job by Ann Pincus You are a decent, public-spirited American, without obvious defects of character or intelligence, and you want to work in Washington for the government...

...Only ten per cent get jobs...

...Sure, some politicians get jobs for their friends,” he says...

...Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in their new book, The Final Days, quote former White House Special Counsel Fred Buzhardt as saying that Scott and Sampson ran the GSA “as a private employment agency...

...He outlines the competitive process and advises: “The government does not have jobs for the people, it has people for the jobs...

...In Search of a “Name Request” The fmal category to be considered is super grade: GS-16, 17, and 18 (base pay: $36,338...

...You go home, fill out the forms, send them to the Civil Service Commission, and wait up to six weeks to hear whether you are qualified for the GS level for which you have applied...

...The next step up the competitive career job scale is to mid-level, which is grades 9 through 12...

...Surveying the Federal Job Applications Center, you come upon a group of people standing in front of a television set...

...You notice that the bestsounding ones all seem to have “closed” stamped over the cover, which means that the job has been filled...

...After the ’72 elections Nixon wanted an even firmer hold on the bureaucracy...

...Presto...

...Freedman says the public has no real protection from the growing force of the bureaucracy itself: “Agencies in general, to protect their turf, develop their own language...

...The buddy system reigns again...

...Eighty per cent of those jobs are “name requested,” however, which leaves 320 to be filled-presumablyby matching a person’s qualifications against his or her job description and subsequent interviews...

...But for all their meddling, the congressmen-especially the Republicansare still outsiders, and this has been especially true of late...

...Someone pushes a button, and the face of Jim Vance (black anchorman on NBC’s local evening news show) comes on the screen with a 9Gsecond explanation of how to get a federal job...

...That left only 60 career jobs to be filled by persons outside the government...

...Your application is then circulated with “must hire” written on it, and someone somewhere finds room for a GS-13...

...But the situation in Washington has become so muddy that only one certain prediction can be made about the future of the civil service...

...Buddy, Can You Spare a Job A much more common and effective way of getting your name requested is to know someone inside the agency where you want to work...

...That is not all the PACE jobs...

...Or maybe you’re even Willing to settle for the lowest administrative job on the ladder...

...Not only that...

...To make the PACE system even more complicated it should be pointed out that high marks on the exam alone do not get you into the civil service...

...believes that the real subverters of the civil service concept are the civil servants themselves...

...The truth of that statement will become clearer to you in time...

...What you have in mind is something on the order of Executive Assistant to the Federal Disaster Assistance Administrator of the Department of Housing and Urban Development-a mediumlevel civil service job, in other words...

...The mid-level base pay is $13,482 to $19,386, compared to PACE base of $8,925 to $1 1,046...

...And barely more than one per cent get administrative jobs...

...It grew by 600,000 under Lyndon Johnson, but the hiring was done mostly by the old Roosevelt-Truman bureaucrats, with LBJ’s Marvin Watson just trying to make sure the top appointees weren’t pro-Robert Kennedy or at least weren’t anti-LBJ...

...Your senator or congressman would probably have been willing to act as your job placement counselorespecially if you worked in his campaign or contributed money to it...

...What is more startling is that, of the political appointments to this grade, only 12 per cent were filled from the outside...

...Soooo...

...Usually...

...Senator Hugh Scott, the Republican Minority Leader, has been especially adept at using the GSA, thanks to his close friendship with former GSA chief Arthur Sampson...

...Face it,” he says, “bureaucrats can work this system any way they want to...

...Anyway, the combined annual job openings for GS-9 through GS-18, when all the “in-house” and “name request” slots are filled, amounts to a mere 476 vacancies...

...Anything below GS-9, you must also take a written test...

...So you turn to the Civil Service Commission, which was established in 1883 to help and protect people like yourself, and you attempt to apply for a job that suits your interests and qualifications...

...A House subcommittee studying the workings of the merit system has filled eight file cabinets with “must hire” letters to the General Services Administration from various members of Congress seeking jobs for constituents or friends...

...Around 300,000 people apply for civil service jobs through the Washington office each year...

...that are available, because many others are filled from within the agency, in-house promotions, transfers from other agencies or persons coming back into government...

...Of the 1,600 to 2,000 filled from outside the government, 36 per cent are “name requested,” that is, when an agency sends over a personnel request to the Civil Service Commission, they also send over a name to fill the job...

...There never was a greater need for dedicated, hardworking public servants...

...Last fall Charles L. Ryan, a special assistant in the Commission’s Bureau of Recmiting and Examining, said in a deposition that he had personally processed job references from congressmen, White House officials, and even the Civil Service commissioners themselves between the years 1969 and 1973...

...He writes up a job description and a name request and sends it over to the Civil Service Commission...

...You do not take an examination for mid-level jobs in Washington, but you still must compete with about 15,000 others on the register...

...In other words, the odds against you are about 65 to one...

...on the other hand you can have a 75-percent store on the test and possibly be hired because you are from Iowa...

...The disclosure of the “Malek Manual” caused a minor panic among the federal political appointees and nearly everyone began to point a finger at someone else...

...To qualify for a PACE-level job you must take a written examination...

...and to make the agencies’ personnel policies more “responsive” to the Administration’s wishes...

...More on how this works later...

...There are certain qudifications necessary to get on the register, such as education or years of experience...

...Clearly, then, your only rational hope of getting a government job is to find out what a “name request” is, and try to become one yourself...

...Bureaucrats Triumphant In the face of these scandals, the Ford Administration has not attempted to meddle with the civil service...

...You are hired...

...There are an average of 1,600 mid-level jobs available each year to persons not already working in government...

...It’s just common practice...

...The Roosevelt-Truman group, now sprinkled with a few Nixon-era entrants, has regained control of civil service appointments...

...Senior-level jobs, GS-13 through 15 (base pay $22,906 to $3 1,309) are also on the Civil Service register, but, again, nearly all the jobs are filled from within the government itself-95 per cent of them, in fact...

...There are 50,000 people on the Civil Service register who have passed the PACE exam, which means that approximately 50 people are competing for each available PACE job...

...General Accounting Office revelations forced the Civil Service Commission to inquire into violations of the merit system in the General Services Administration, HUD, the Small Business Administration, and CSA (Community Services Administration, formerly Office of Economic Opportunity and now part of ACTION...

...This helps explain why you seem to be meeting the same person over and over again in Washington-someone with #he ideology of Eleanor Roosevelt and the working habits of Step ‘n Fetchit...

...These jobs come in two categories: career and schedule C, the latter meaning by political appointment...

...Civil Service personnel insist that name requests don’t automatically get hired, but they admit that “most” of them do...

...That is, 88 per cent of the political patronage at the super-grade level was “dis-pensed” by the bureaucracy itself...

...First, he established political personnel contacts in most of the federal agencies, whose jobs were to refer Republicans into job vacancies...

...You don’t want to be a National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator, or executive director of the Marine Mammal Commission, or a member of the Railroad Retirement Board...

...Unfortunately, it so happens that there are 30,000 persons on the Civil Service register who qualify as GS-9 or above...

...Agency insiders will be the first to know about a job opening and, knowing both you and the job, they can tailor the description to your experience...

...Gordon Freedman, who has worked in the House Manpower and Civil Service subcommittee for a year...

...Friendship, not merit, is the determining factor in who gets the job...

...But for the moment, you are just another job-seeker, and you stand behind 20 other applicants (the average number of walk-ins is 71 8 per The Washington Monthly/June 1976 day) in the information lines where a member of the Civil Service personnel staff advises you what forms you need...

...You should frame the letter, because the odds are very high that it is the last you’ll hear about that federal job you hoped to get...

...If you are qualified, you receive a letter from the Civil Service, informing you that you are now on the register and that they will let you know if anything turns UP...

...If all goes well, the job description is written so cleverly that only you qualify for the job...

...The people you need to know to use the “buddy system” are mostly Democrats-people who got their government jobs under the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, when the civil service grew from 600,000 to 2.2 million-the friends they subsequently hired, and the friends of those friends...

...His Cabinet officials had less and less control over who was hired in their agencies, and most hirings went from the White House to the special referral offices in the agencies...

...In 1974 nearly all the career super-grade jobs-92 per cent of them-were filled from within the government...

...If President Jimmy Carter (or President Gerald Ford, for that matter) ever tries to clean up the rats’ nest of back-scratching, timewasting, and flim-flam that has developed in many of our federal agencies, he’s certain to be denounced by career civil servants, in quite indignant tones, for political subversion of the “merit system...

...You can have a 100 achievement rating and be from Virginia and not get the job...

...Sure, it’s bad when Nixon deals in political purity, but some of the Civil Service Commission attacks on the White House were so dishonest and self-righteous that they were almost as bad as the White House itself...

...Each year there are between 1,600 and 2,000 PACE jobs in Washington listed on the Civil Service register...

...White House staff members Alan May and Jerry Jones sought to “improve” the referral system...

...If you still want a government job, so much the better...

...They charged the Commission chairman, Robert E. Hampton (a Nixon appointee), with participating in a political patronage ring...

...Meanwhile, you could pause to reflect that the Civil Service Commission employs 3,414 people in Washington, D.C., which is not far short of the 4,000 or so that it hires each year at the GS-5 through GS-18 levels for the entire government...

...He in turn puts pressure on someone in the agency or department where you want to work...

...They don’t socialize together...

...Entering the Civil Service building, you are directed to the Federal Job Applications Center, a reassuringly bureaucratic anteroom, where a series of display cases are filled with descriptions of job openings in the various agencies...