A Kind Word for the Spoils System
Peters, Charles
A Kind Word for the Spoils System by Charles Peters On July 22, Joseph Young, a reliable columnist who covers the civil service for The Washington Star, wrote a story with this...
...You can’t reform the government without having the power to choose the people who work within it...
...He gives you an advance tip on the opening, writes a job description tailored to fit your experience, and then requests your name from the Civil Service Commission...
...consequently anyone who actually makes his living this way can hardly merit respect...
...The problem with achieving all this is that for years Americans have been brainwashed by textbooks that make politics sound bad and civil service gan when the Italian and Irish immigrants took over the elective offices in Boston and the Wasps had to figure out how to salvage something for themselves...
...This is outrageous reasoning...
...They can’t be shy or coy or proud about it: they have to try to persuade...
...We recently reported, for example, the story of an employee of the Internal Revenue Service whose discharge was overturned even though he had repeatedly reported for work dead drunk...
...So instead of abolishing the civil service, I would urge cutting it by 50 per cent, and filling the remaining half with political appointees who can be fired at any time...
...Why do political employees have to be unqualified...
...The exalted physician is the classic example...
...others...
...The terrible disruption of continuity that came from massive personnel changes following each election in West Virginia *as offset in Washington by the excessive defensiveness and caution of civil servants primarily devoted to the protection of the institution for which they worked...
...Forrestal was a Coriolanus...
...My colleague James Fallows recently wrote in the TexasMonthly that we need “the politicians, whose job is openly to ask other people for support...
...that firing a civil servant for incompetence was easy, while in fact it is -Charles Peters...
...The trouble is it won’t work...
...You get a civil service job by knowing someone who is in the agency where you want to work...
...Whatever you call it, it’s quite a loss...
...In-house politics is a dirty little game in most professional worlds...
...Young’s story is backed up by the Democratic platform, which reads: “The reorganization of government which we envision will protect the job rights of civil servants and permit them to more effectively serve the public...
...And anyone who has had a reasonable amount of contact with the federal government has encountered people who should be fired...
...James Forrestal, then Secretary of Deifense and one of countless possible ex,amples, was praised by The New York !Times for being above politics when he didn’t support Truman in 1948...
...His union successfully contended that the IRS should have established programs to detect and treat alcoholism among its employees...
...Political freedom is the freedom to run for office, to support others who run for office, and to win or lose as the electorate may decide...
...Having seen the evils of too much political patronage, I was now exposed to the evils of too much civil service...
...It used to be called just plain “politics,” and the fact that, when we want it to sound good, we have to dress it up as “political process” is a sign of the depths of regard to which politics has sunk, about which more later...
...Oh joyous confirmation of all existing prejudice...
...It’s a particularly thorny situation, though, because part of almost every job is usefulin some cases it’s only 10 per cent, but it’s almost never nothing at all...
...There are few better illus- Only Nicholas Von Hoffman-of all trations of this ignorance than the the men who are paid large salaries Elrod v. Burns case, discussed in the to function as political reporters accompanying article...
...The same principle applies to most other decisions...
...Too often the people who resign or retire on their own are not the ones who should be fired...
...You can require by law that a politically appointed secretary be able to type 50 words a minute, just like the civil service ap*We could eliminate the Hatch Act, of course, but that would give the civil servants the political power to make their jobs even more invulnerable to politics, pointee...
...By the time I left, staff meetings had taken on the character of a series of broken records, as I heard problems discussed again and again as if they were brand new and the agency had no experience to suggest their salutions...
...Furthermore, the civil servant is not accountable to the public he is supposed to be serving...
...Let’s take a look at this assumption...
...Wanting to get that bill enacted into law was one of the reasons I ran for the legislature in the next election, and it was a proud day in my life when the bill, bearing my name, was passed in the following session...
...In the late 1950s, while working on the staff of the West Virginia legislature, I drafted a bill designed to transform a patronage-ridden personnel system into a civil service based on merit and offering genuine career protection for state employees...
...Politicians are inept, partisan, crooked...
...We have an idiotic regard for people who are “above” politics...
...They, and a good many of the rest of us, have forgotten that demo,cratic politics is supposed to be the way we determine who governs this country...
...It’s that, occasionally, unwise or corrupt political decisions may threaten institutions like federal agencies, thus making it in the self-preservative interest of the civil servants who work in them to blow the whistle on whatever wrongdoing is going on...
...We have too many Forrestals now, and what they don’t understand is that being above the mob means being above the practice of democratic poli,tics...
...However kind he may be, people come to him only as supplicants, and he speaks to them with the voice of resonant authority...
...You can’t last long in such a calling if you close your ears to those who disagree...
...Yet fewer than one per cent are fired each year...
...Someday I’m going to start a almost impossible, and that the civil school that will, among other service system is really based on things, teach the members of one merit, instead of friendship...
...With that kind of thing the likely product of a series of hearings and appeals that could last for years, it is the rare administrator who will attempt to fire anyone...
...There is one other reason for not doing away with civil service tenure completely...
...Firing the appointees would violate their First Amendment rights, the Court ruled, because dismissal would punish them for having exercised those rights when they supported the losing Republican candidate for sheriff...
...Finally, the civil service takes two million people out of what it is fashionable to call the political process...
...If you are really good, the thinking goes, you won’t have to scramble...
...Then I came to Washington...
...There are ‘politics’ in these professions, no doubt-but the politics is usually such a seamy, backstairs business that no one can treat it respectably...
...When I worked at the Peace Corps in the 1960s, we had a five-year limit on employment...
...The Court excluded policy-making jobs from its ruling, arguing that that omission alone would be sufficient to keep the system responsive to the electorate...
...There are another 50 to 60 per cent who range from adequate to good...
...Not long ago a governor of my state, trying to appeal to this feeling, said of himself, “I am not a politician, I am a statesman...
...The result was the stimulation offered by a steady infusion of new blood and a much more adventurous group of employees than are attracted by the security of the civil service tenure...
...it’s clear that besides the problem of untouchable incompetents, there’s a problem of jobs that are useless no matter who’s doing them...
...When people in the White House wanted to contain the investigation, it was the civil servants who rebelled, who blew the whistle, who leaked to the press...
...Something has to be done-even though Jimmy Carter may not want to face it now...
...As for selection on pure merit from all the applicants, that is not done now in the civil service...
...people will come to you with offers...
...Professors, writers, and others of the ilk are in the same boat...
...Up From Civil Service I came to this position after a long journey through government that I began on the other side of the civil service question...
...I don’t mean to imply by this, of course, that we should keep all the present jobs and just change people...
...A Kind Word for the Spoils System by Charles Peters On July 22, Joseph Young, a reliable columnist who covers the civil service for The Washington Star, wrote a story with this headline: “Carter Aides Assure U. S. Careerists They Won’t Lose Jobs” It thus appears that Jimmy Carter has committed himself to reforming the bureaucracy without firing anyone...
...Isn’t it possible that a job might be filled better by politicians who are interested in putting together an administration that will do a good enough job to get them reelected...
...They don’t have to listen to the other side because they can pronounce rather than persuade...
...By pulling out he said, in effect, that anyone who is willing to run for President doesn’t deserve the job...
...It would be unrealistic to expect that Carter will abandon this impossible dream before election day-he has, by the way, the support of all the government employees’ unions-but one hopes that by the time of his inauguration, he will realize that he must surrender it if he is to deliver on the central promise Charles Peters is editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly...
...Imagine yourself a supervisor with an employee who does nothing all day but read the paper and take coffee breaks...
...He dnd the Times were astounded when Truman fired him...
...and columnists-has written about In it, a majority of the Supreme this case with the slightest hint of Court made clear that it thought its significance...
...There is now no freedom for those who want to gain office by supporting other candidates who might convince the electorate they could do a better job-and who would do a better job if they could take their own team ihto office with them...
...There is no better illustration of this attitude dnd its currency among conservatives and liberals alike than the recent Supreme Court case of Elrod V. Bums, in which Justices Brennan, Marshall, White, Stewart, and Blackmun joined in ruling that a newly elected Democratic sheriff could not fire Republican political appointees from the previous administration...
...What the Court forgets is that, if the government is to work, policy implementation is just as important as policy making...
...Thinking Of firing him, you might turn to Title 5 of the U. S. Code and peruse parts 752.101 through 752.402 and 772.101 through 772.404, which describe one hearing and appeal right after another...
...There are, of course, some superb civil servantsmaybe ten per cent of the total-who have every right to become indignant at blanket criticism of government workers...
...Whatever its origin, the idea that politics and politicians are bad is now ingrained in many Americans...
...This is why the intellectual community was so delighted by Walter Mondale’s withdrawal from the presidential race...
...The role of the FBI and the CIA during the Watergate scandals shows how cru28 cially important the loyalty of the civil servant to his institution can be...
...Being able to fire people is important for two reasons: 1) to permit you to hire the people you want and to get rid of those you don’t want, and 2) to make it possible for you to attract the kind of risk-takers who are repelled by the safe civil service and the political emasculation it entails...
...But is my freedom of political belief any less threatened if I run for election and lose my elected job when I’m defeated than if I support a candidate and lose my appointed job when he’s defeated...
...There was, however, the same lack of continuity I had seen in West Virginia...
...performance standards and incentives to reward efficiency and inefficiency”-that could not be carried out without dismissals...
...Of course not...
...we are able, objective and virtuousyYwya s their refrain, and it sounded good to their friends across the Charles at Harvard, who then put it into their textbooks from whence the doctrine spread across the land...
...Are the learned judges going to contend that my First Amendment rights are threatened when I run for office and am defeated...
...As Ann Pincus pointed out in “How to Get A Government Job” in our June issue, the present civil service is a patronage machine that instead of being run on a political basis is”run on the basis of friendship...
...For him being above poli,tics really meant being above the mob...
...This is because 93 per cent are under some form of civil service and are therefore virtually impossible to fire...
...No matter how wise the chief, he has to have the right Indians to transform his ideas into action, to get the job done...
...We happy, enlightened few deserve to run the country-but of course we won’t demean ourselves to try...
...Unfortunately, that leaves 30 or 40 per cent in the range downward fr,om marginal to outright incompetent...
...Indeed, the Watergate stories of the FBI and the CIA illustrate both the good and bad sides of the civil servant’s institutional loyalty: an essential if only occasional and self-preservative willingness to stand up to political authority gone wrong, coupled with a mindless and equally self-preservative dedication to covering up his institution’s own sins...
...By the time you reached the end of 772.404, you’d say the hell with it and toss him the sports section...
...The only real advantage I have seen to the career civil servant is continuity...
...I ‘ This is the kind of thing one desperately wants to believe is possible when one is running for office and seeking the votes of both those who deplore the bureaucracy and those whd’ work within it...
...Most people who its ignorance of the executive work in the five groups that govern branch by failing to perceive the us-the executive, legislative, and tragic implications of Elrod for all judicial branches and the press and of us trying to break the hold of the lobbies-have little idea about unaccountable technocrats on the what life is like in any of the vital organs of the government...
...But the Elrod case says that everyone who had a political job on the day it was decided will now keep it for life...
...branch of government what it’s like The press, in turn, demonstrated in the others...
...Indeed, there are words buried in the very next paragraph of the platform-“The Democratic Party is committed to the review and overhaul of the civil service to assure . . . accountability for nonfeasance as well as malfeasance...
...Remember, 200,000 of them are superb people, and the Hatch Act forbids their making their political views known to us.* It is widely assumed, on the other hand, that a political patronage system will result in unqualified people, not selected on merit, making decisions for partisan political reasons...
...If you can be fired only if your job is abolishedas is practically the case with a civil servant-then your only fear is that your agency will be diminished in size in a way that might threaten your job...
...Why shouldn’t they be :made on a partisan basis if the motive behind them is doing a good enough job to be reelected...
...On the other extreme, we have those who never have to persuade anyone of anything-or at least not very often...
...There are some signs that Carter thinks these objectives can be attained through attrition...
...If an Elizabeth Ray is found on Capitol Hill, the Congress, which has no civil service, can fire her and the electorate can unseat Wayne Hays...
...in order to persuade, you must first understand...
...of his campaign: to make the government work...
...But what can we do if they both work at HUD or HEW...
Vol. 8 • September 1976 • No. 7
