Once upon a time, career civil servants were hired, at least in theory, based largely upon tests ("civil service exams") purportedly demonstrating their proficiency.
Such tests were suspended quietly 50 years ago.
The civil service became quasi-autonomous, hard for the appointed officials to hire people for and nearly impossible to fire.
Now, "progressives" are fretful Donald Trump is claiming that the president has the authority to, in the catchwords of NBC's "The Apprentice," say "You’re fired!"
The possibility of another Trump presidential term triggers progressive mass hysteria: "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
The left is terrified of Trump’s proposition that a democratically elected (which progressives profess devotion to . . . whenever it advances their sinister agenda) president should be able to fire career civil servants when they refuse to, or only truculently, carry out his policies.
The civil service originated as a reform movement to replace the practice of hiring political loyalists as government workers, known as "patronage." Then the "googoos" ("good" government reformers) decided to base federal hiring on merit.
Bad idea, as Jon Rauch pointed out at The Atlantic in "How American Politics Went Insane." It was one factor in weakening the party structure leading to, in Rauch’s words, the destruction of "intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays."
Mind the shrewd observation of Federal Reserve Governor Henry Wallich: "Experience is the name we give to our past mistakes, reform that which we give to future ones."
The "merit system" died in 1972. Per the Global Government Forum:
"The original civil service test was abolished by the Nixon administration after a lawsuit in 1972 claimed it was biased because black and Latino applicants did not score as well.
"A new test was developed, but those groups continued to score poorly. After another discrimination case, the Carter administration signed a consent decree in 1981 agreeing to abolish it."
Under President Reagan I had the educational experience of serving as a "Schedule C" career civil servant for about a thousand days. I voluntarily left when Reagan left.
And at least back when I was there, the merit tests stayed abolished, replaced, largely, with hiring based on cozy personal connections. Call it "crony bureaucracy."
My disposition wasn’t a good fit with the career civil servant culture which, as Megan McCardle astutely noted entails religiously following well-meant but often inane rules.
"Americans are obsessed with making sure that no government employee, anywhere, ever gets away with anything on the taxpayer dime.
"So we’ve stripped away their discretion, laying out extraordinarily detailed procedures for every single thing they do — which many then hew to exactly, no matter how outdated the guidelines or absurd the results because they know that when anything does go wrong, they will be called to account by politicians who understand very little about their jobs.
"Their safest response when this happens is, 'Look, I was following the letter of the law you guys wrote.'
"Thus, procurement is a glacial process.
"Much of the technology we do buy doesn’t work as well as it should because it was selected to fit guidelines written years ago — often by well-meaning people who were mainly thinking about making politicians happy and keeping the inspector general at bay."
My old boss in the general counsel’s office of the U.S. Department of Energy once confided in me that it would take him up to six months of full-time effort to document the grounds to let him fire a completely nonperforming employee.
And, before my own brief immersion in the civil service, my father, Max Benko, Esq., spent a distinguished career as a New York State career civil servant, rising to the rank of assistant attorney general.
So . . . I know "the administrative state" from the inside. Now let me say, I have plenty of career civil servant friends and acquaintances.
All those I now know are meritorious. My best guess, from experience long ago, is that the good ones represent less than half of the federal workforce.
That other half does mediocre work, or worse. Some of these, of course, are very fine people made mediocre by an inane system. (See McCardle, above.)
Hard core libertarians may rejoice in such ambient mediocrity as it somewhat neutralizes much of the power of Big Government. That said, reality undermines the progressive fairy tale that the roughly 2 million civilian career civil servants who actually run the government — the "deep state" — have, and should have, de facto lifetime tenure.
Smart capable Trump loyalists, like Russ Vought, are preparing, should Trump return, to allow him to replace recalcitrant or unmeritorious federal civil servants.
Those who genuinely respect representative democracy should celebrate the legitimacy of letting the president do the "You’re fired!" thing to federal workers not carrying out the will of the American people.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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