Reflections of a Civil Servant

Government Bedeviled

Incompetent, overpaid, and too many are the popular criticisms leveled at Federal Career Civil Servants. Each has a measure of validity - about the same measure, however, they would have if leveled at private industry workers in any very large work force.

Conventional wisdom has it that competence, pay, and numbers are entirely controllable in private industry, where profit is the dictator. Objective analysis would show 'tain't necessarily so. (Consider the railroad industry, for example.) More important, however, is that comparison of the Civil Service with private industry is misleading. They aren't comparable.

The Civil Service Does not Operate for Profit.

Paid with taxpayers' money, Civil Servants assist management of the Public's business, also paid for with taxpayers' dollars. In other words, there is a built in bias in the system. Even if Civil Servants were perfect, there would be resentment over having to pay them — whatever the amount — especially since they are not subject to control by taxpayers. Another difference in the Private Industry-Civil Service equation, one not ordinarily taken into account, concerns loyalty and fealty to the boss.

Who's the Boss?

In private industry, there is one boss: the company. Civil Servants, on the other hand, answer to numerous bosses: a technical agency, the cabinet-level department housing the agency, the Office of Personal Management (formerly non-political but now controlled by the White House), the White House itself, the Congress, the Public. Each has a say, each (except the Public) may initiate or affect a policy which can lead ultimately to reprimand or dismissal. These many demandeurs create a mine field of manipulation and maneuver. The different pressures on Civil Servants as mind-boggling, and efforts to satisfy often fail. Civil Servants are buffeted by conflicts between technical agency and the parent department, by the ramifications flowing from disagreements between a departmental policy supervisor and the White House, by conflicts between the department and the Congress or between the Administration and the Congress. The end result of departmental combinations of these pressures is frustrating and almost always costly. The following examples are minor in terms of cost but are used because they involve widely held views among members of the Public.

Civil Service Idlers

Most Civil Servants are believed to sit around all day reading the newspapers or to take end less coffee breaks. Some do, perhaps too many. But the fact is that some Civil Servants have little to do because their politically appointed masters want it that way. Instructions go out either to slow down or halt selected programs. Some Civil Servants are idle be cause their politically appointed supervisors don't trust them ("holdovers" from a previous Administration), or because Congress has not approved the budget, or because one congressional committee is quarreling with another over implementation of a program, or because the Administration doesn't want to spend money on a program not in its budget but authorized and financed by Congress.

"Faceless Bureaucrats"

The Public needs to understand, when a member of the Cabinet says a program has been altered so that citizens and "not faceless bureaucrats" in Washington may make decisions about benefits, that those "faceless bureaucrats" are politically appointed policy makers not Civil Servants. The policy makers control program implementation: Civil Servants carry out their decisions.

The Public needs to understand that the total number of Civil Servants employed in the Federal Government and their pay scale are decided by the Congress and the President. Disingenuously, Congress has tied its own pay scale to that of Civil Servants in order to hide the amount of money their constituents must cough up to pay them.

The Public needs to understand that it is Congress which has provided employment safeguards for Civil Servants in order to prevent politically motivated actions against them. The safeguards have disadvantages (hard to hire, hard to fire), but so does our system of laws, which is devised to protect the innocent. A system without safeguards would be a political spoils system.

The Civil Service is a tool for management by the Federal Government of the Public's interests. It doesn't have an option for independent action; it doesn't have a political constituency; it is a service (Civil) and its members are servants (civil)! The Civil Service is under the control of politically appointed policy makers — some 2600 of them. They are all that remains of the political spoils system.

Perhaps the most important thing for the Public to understand is that the Civil Service also is a tool for [protecting], as well as managing the Public's interests. Those interests are undermined in favor of special interests when the management of the government is in the hands of only the politically appointed.

The politically appointed in any Administration are totally dependent upon the Civil Service to carry out their responsibilities to the Public. History books, as well as, cartoons, have thoroughly documented the inability of the political apparatus by itself to manage the government for the general public benefit. Too often political appointees lack the skills requisite to mastering the complex Federal system. While some want to learn, and try, their tenure is too short. All to many lack motivation or are incapable. Others enter government only as partisans, imbued with self-importance, motivated by self-aggrandizement, ignorant or contemptuous of public service philosophy: no dollar-a-year men they, rather, the victorious divide the spoils!

The Chief Critics and Abusers

What is apparent, then is the existence of an anomaly. Both the public and the politically appointed are dependent upon the Civil Service. Yet they are its chief critics and abusers. They are shooting themselves in the foot but are hitting themselves in the head! Why? Because, for one thing, the Public does not comprehend that the real catalyst for its criticism is not incompetence, overpayment, and too many; it is dissatisfaction with government policies and programs, which are the responsibility of Congress and the elected and politically appointed officials of the Executive Branch. The other part of the answer is that elected and politically appointed officials consistently foist off onto the Civil Service the blame for flawed or failed policies and programs, in order to preserve their political viability. Both the Public and the politicians are guilty of destructive mindlessness, which is bedeviling government and is leading inexorably toward disestablishment of the Civil Service as an effective tool for managing the government and, thus, protecting the Public's interests.

Depoliticise the Civil Service

We need to re-think the place and role of the Federal Civil Service. It should be depoliticized. "We" means the Public, the politicians, and Civil Servants. A healthy, effective government, managed for the good of all, can't exist absent a healthy, effective Civil Service.

Perhaps general abhorrence of the political spoils system will, in the end, save the Federal Civil Service. But there is great risk in letting the Civil Service deteriorate to the point of reliance on that reaction. The process of improvement will be long. Now is the time to begin.

... Robert Sturgill ...

© Copyright 1989
Institute for domestic Tranquility