YES, PLEASE! REPLACE THE ‘CIVIL’ SERVICE! If you read nothing else today or this week, take the few minutes required to read Glenn’s Substack column on “Rethinking the Civil Service.” If you worry about the intrusive Deep State or the oppressive regulatory power of the Administrative State, the heart of both are the 2.1 million career civil servants working as the executive branch bureaucracy.
“The modern civil service system (post-Pendleton Act) – like so many calamities of the 20th Century – sprang from the brain of Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist before he was president, who wrote of the importance of separating politics from administration. In his view, cool, technocratic administrators would execute the policies chosen by politics – though with the suggestion that politics should generally defer to their expertise. That theory may have seemed beguiling in the late 19th Century, but by the 21st Century it has become clear that that’s not how any of this works,” Glenn explains.
Prior to my journalism career, I spent nearly three years (1982-85) as a Reagan political appointee at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which “manages” the civil service. There were some successes, including especially reforming the pension system from a defined benefit to a defined contribution basis. But the fundamentally unaccountable nature of bureaucracy was only counter-acted by the determined efforts of political appointees seeking to carry out the Reagan policy agenda endorsed by the electorate.
There were surveys at the time that suggested Reagan actually carried a majority of votes among that generation of civil servants. Boy, has that changed! Contemporary studies of campaign contributions by donors who identify themselves as federal workers routinely show 90-95 percent giving to Democratic candidates and causes.
Civil service reform has never been a top-10 public policy issue, but it should be because it is at the root of factors that shape the responsiveness and accountability, and lack thereof, the public gets from federal departments and agencies. Glenn’s analysis is the most perceptive I’ve read in a long time and should be shared widely among everybody who cares about the future of this country as a solid first step toward getting civil service reform front and center in the 2024 campaign.