TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY

Bush Seeks Federal Workforce Overhaul: Nation's Security at Stake, Bush Administration Says (Christopher Lee, June 8, 2003, Washington Post)

The Bush administration, citing national security concerns, is pressing Congress to enact the biggest overhaul of the federal civil service system in a quarter-century.

In the name of reshaping the federal bureaucracy to better counter global terrorism, administration officials are seeking the authority to rewrite long-standing pay and personnel rules governing 746,000 civilian employees at the Department of Defense. The powers would be similar to those won by the administration last year in a contentious battle over the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, which has about 180,000 employees.

Administration officials say the current personnel system is too restrictive, giving managers little flexibility to create a modern workforce. They want to tie pay to performance, discipline bad workers without lengthy appeals, hire employees more quickly and limit union bargaining rights over workplace conditions. Confined to these agencies alone, the changes would affect more than 45 percent of the government's 2 million civilian employees. But few analysts expect the changes to stop with defense-related agencies. [...]

The civil service system dates to the Pendleton Act of 1883, which replaced the "spoils system" of doling out jobs through political patronage with a merit-based system. More changes followed, with the biggest overhaul in recent decades coming under President Jimmy Carter. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 did away with the Civil Service Commission and divided its responsibilities chiefly among three agencies: The Merit Systems Protection Board hears employee appeals; the Federal Labor Relations Authority deals with labor-management relations; and the Office of Personnel Management sets policies to create a level playing field in hiring and pay for all federal civilian workers.

Although some government officials and scholars have called for further changes to make it easier to reward good workers and get rid of poor performers, presidents and most lawmakers over the past 25 years have shown little interest in spending political capital on such arcane and complicated issues. In eight years of promoting "reinventing government," the Clinton administration never found a way to sell major civil service legislation on Capitol Hill, particularly with federal employee unions resistant to major proposals.

Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Pressured by Democrats to create a Department of Homeland Security, Bush eventually embraced the idea. But the president insisted on freedom from many civil service constraints to effectively merge 22 disparate agencies. In April, Rumsfeld asked for similar authority, arguing that Defense needed a more "flexible" workforce to fight terrorism.

What sweet justice if the massive federal bureaucracy, much of which was erected under the bogus cover of "national security concerns" were now to be dismantled under the same dubious aegis. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2003 6:11 PM