Georgia on
my mind: A bold way forward on federal civil service reform, by Peter Hong
There is a stealth resistance
underfoot against President Donald J. Trump and his nascent Administration. It
is deep. It is powerful. It is in his backyard.
And under current law, there is
little he can do about it.
This resistance is the
administrative state. And though rabble-rousing rioters are dominating
the media coverage, the quiet bureaucratic resistance is much more impactful —
and more dangerous.
While the relationship between the
permanent bureaucracy and every new administration entails growing pains, the
hostility of the administrative state toward this new president is
unprecedented. And because its agents — the
more than two-and-a-half million members of the non-defense federal civil
service — are generally protected by
federal law from losing their jobs, the administrative state shows no hint of
surrender or even compromise.
The headlines today are rife with
just some of the more blatant abuses of the administrative state.
Recognizing the problem, President
Trump has begun taking steps to drain the bureaucratic swamp. But it will take more than a few executive actions to rein
in the recklessness of the administrative state.
One key problem facing the Trump
Administration and Congress in its efforts to deconstruct the administrative
state is the inherent sense of an employment entitlement in the federal civil
service system. As
Inez Feltscher Stepman and Jarrett Stepman from the American Legislative
Exchange Council note, meaningful overhaul of the civil
service system will require legislative action repealing at least parts of
the Pendleton
Civil Service Reform Act (establishing
general job “protections” for federal employees) and the Lloyd-LaFollette
Act of 1912 (creating the standard of
“just cause for termination” to remove federal employees).
Even imagining the outcry from
entrenched federal employees and their powerful labor unions is deafening. The
Trump Administration will be roundly accused of “politicizing” the civil
service system and returning it to the corruption and nepotism of the Andrew
Jackson-era “spoils system.”
A successful precedent for
eradicating the entitlement of lifetime public employment can be found in the
state of Georgia. In 1996, Georgia scrapped a 53-year old civil service system
with its antiquated job “protections” and “step” pay grade ladder, replacing it
with a revolutionary (for government) model featuring “at-will” state
employment and “pay-for-performance.” In other words, Georgia transformed
the traditional, entrenched government system emphasizing job security into a
model reflecting the private sector’s emphasis on incentives.
Georgia sunset its old system by
requiring that all state workers hired after July 1, 1996 serve as “at-will”
employees with no civil service protections. While new employees received the
same basic benefits package as their “grandfathered” colleagues, they retained
no seniority rights, e.g., they could not use their seniority to “bump” more
junior employees out of an agency during a downsizing, and no formal rights to
appeal disciplinary actions. New employees could be transferred, demoted,
or promoted at the direction of management.
Also, Georgia’s 99 state agencies no
longer had their hands tied in terms of recruitment, screening, hiring or
firing. Each agency was free to create its own job titles and pay scales for
state jobs. They could discipline and dismiss employees without a formal,
centralized system to slow them down.
With its newly obtained freedom,
agencies had greater latitude to recruit top-notch candidates for
employment. For example, if an agency wanted to attract better candidates
for a lower- or entry-level position, they could simply create a new job title
and pay scale — allowing them to compete for top performers.
Under the new “pay for performance”
system, pay raises were no longer automatic for any state employees, nor were
top performers limited to smaller salary raises due to the antiquated and
highly restrictive “step” pay ladder. In other words, your compensation and
your rise up the ranks would be determined by your performance — not time spent
— on the job.
Most importantly, Georgia’s state
workers are now “at-will” employees (at least 88
percent of them, as of 2012), meaning they
can be disciplined, demoted or even dismissed in a timely manner, simply based
on individual job performance. No longer
is public employment in Georgia considered one of the three certainties in life
(death and taxes to be addressed later).
In a 2002 study of the Georgia civil
service overhaul, Governing Magazine’s
Jonathan Walters noted
the following improvements:
·
More responsibility for agency
personnel staff and hiring authorities;
·
More flexible recruitment;
·
More timely hiring;
·
More flexibility in pay and
promotions;
·
More flexibility in reassignment and
downsizing; and
·
Increased interagency competition
for talented staff.
As Walters suggested, “what Georgia
did wasn’t so much blow up civil service as melt it down.” Since 1996,
other states have followed Georgia’s example with their own, more limited civil
service reforms, including Texas, Florida, and most recently, Wisconsin.
If he is going to carry out his
ambitious agenda to make America great again, President Trump can propose that
Congress via legislation shed the burden of an administrative state determined
to derail him. He cannot afford to allow the “permanent” bureaucracy to remain
permanent. Thanks to state laboratories like Georgia, he has a revolutionary
model for overhaul that Congress can work with.
Peter
Hong is a contributing reporter at Americans for Limited Government.
http://netrightdaily.com/2017/03/georgia-mind-bold-way-forward-federal-civil-service-reform/
No comments:
Post a Comment