A Drag on Our National Security Philip K. Howard
The Washington Post, October 15, 2002 (This article has been reprinted in a number of regional newspapers, including
the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Houston Chronicle, and the St. Petersburg
Times.)
A Department of Homeland Security is essential, both political parties agree,
to avoid a repeat of the failures of coordination and intelligence that allowed
terrorists to slip into the country and clues to be dropped. But the new department
is stalled, perhaps indefinitely, over the application of civil service rules
for its employees. The Democratic majority in the Senate says the proposal does
not "protect the rights of federal workers." President Bush says he won't sign
a bill without "management flexibility."
On the surface, this looks like just a petty political dispute over obscure administrative
details -- bullying Republicans against bleeding-heart Democrats. In fact, the
fight goes to the heart of why government is too often ineffective. Warren Rudman
and Lee Hamilton, co-chairmen of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st
Century, could not be more blunt; they assert that "today's civil service has
become a drag on our national security."
Jim King, head of the Office of Personnel Management under President Bill Clinton,
once noted that the civil service system looks great in theory but trying to accomplish
anything is "like swallowing a 64-pound pill." The layers of internal regulations
would be unimaginable to most Americans. At the core of civil service is one assumption
that paralyzes daily choices: Public employees and their unions can demand a legal
hearing whenever there is a disagreement.
For personnel decisions, the civil service rules operate as a kind of legal air
bag, allowing a disgruntled worker to force the supervisor to prove the wisdom
of an adverse decision, even a negative comment on an evaluation form. The process
of dismissing a worker who is incompetent or worse can take years. (The minimum
generally is 18 months.) Getting rid of someone who has bad judgment is basically
impossible: How would a supervisor prove bad judgment? Last year, according to
the Office of Personnel Management, out of an estimated 64,000 federal employees
who were designated "poor performers," only 434 were dismissed through these legal
hearings: That's seven out of 1,000.
Assigning the best person to a new job is impossible unless you're prepared to
prove in a hearing that more-senior personnel aren't up to the task. After Sept.
11, 2001, the U.S. Customs Service immediately reassigned its best inspectors
to better secure our northern border. The union filed a legal proceeding claiming
that the reassignments required a nationwide survey of interested civil servants,
from which choices should be made on the basis of seniority.
No decision, no matter how important or how trivial, is immune from a legal proceeding
alleging that it violates the rights of federal workers. In August, following
a directive outlining standard protective measures under each of the homeland
security threat levels, the union filed a proceeding to overturn it because it
was issued "without first notifying and affording [the union] the opportunity
to negotiate." Several years ago a decision that U.S. Border Patrol officers should
carry a side-handled club was rejected as not being within their job description.
Imagine being a supervisor in this environment. Do you go through the day thinking
about how to stop terrorists, or are you preoccupied with how to negotiate the
legal minefield of civil service?
The bureaucratic mind-set may be tolerable in a department processing crop reports,
but not where instinct and agility can make the difference between life and death.
The public servants guarding our freedom must be alert to subtle clues and suspicions,
and be willing to go the extra mile to figure out what's really going on. Some
people will be good at it; others will not. Other than our military, which operates
with similar flexibility, it's hard to imagine a greater or graver public responsibility.
Bureaucracy inevitably flows from the absence of personal accountability, because
the only alternative is rule accountability. Having a rule for everything was
an idea that fit neatly with early-20th-century theories that government could
be run like an assembly line, with each person doing his or her delineated task.
But that's much like central planning, and it works just as badly, because it
suppresses the human instincts needed for success.
What's amazing is that anything gets done. That's a tribute to the fact that
most public employees are good, and many superb. Instead of defending the system,
Congress should take note of the one characteristic that all effective public
institutions seem to have in common: an internal culture in which employees basically
ignore the rules, focusing instead on getting the job done.
Public employees are the victims, not the villains, of this system. Imagine being
a dedicated public servant and having to work, day after day, with an incompetent
colleague. The destructive effect on morale, as a personnel report to Clinton
noted, is "far greater than the number of poor employees." Imagine what it's like
to have your instincts of right and wrong suppressed by mind-numbing bureaucracy.
Study after study has confirmed the debilitating effects of working in this kind
of environment, including higher stress and cardiac disease and an "institutional
neurosis marked by apathy, withdrawal, lack of initiative and spontaneity."
Every administration in memory has tried to overhaul the civil service system.
Al Gore's Reinventing Government initiative got beaten back almost at the gate.
The Volcker Commission in 1989 concluded that civil service "is legally trammeled
and intellectually confused" and "certainly not. . .hiring the most meritorious
candidates."
The Carter administration actually succeeded in increasing accountability, but
only for the most senior civil servants. The most effective reformer in recent
history is Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), who in 1996, when he was governor of Georgia,
abolished civil service for all new hires. Almost alone among active political
leaders, Miller has been willing to say that this emperor has no clothes: "Despite
its name, the merit system is not about merit. It offers no reward to good workers.
It only provides cover for bad workers."
No one is advocating a return to the spoils system. Under the proposal supported
by the administration, agencies would still be subject to general strictures against
patronage hiring and arbitrary dismissals. Probably the one weakness of the proposal
in this age of distrust is that it leaves to a later date how to accomplish non-litigation
safeguards. But new safety nets are not hard to imagine -- for example, a management-labor
committee with power to guard against arbitrariness.
What's ultimately needed is a new deal for public servants. The civil service
system is broken. Its worst flaw -- that it suppresses the human element needed
to get the job done -- is precisely what America cannot afford when ferreting
out the terrorists trying to destroy the fabric of our free society. | 
