Personnel Management in Government

Politics and Process

Norma M. Riccucci, Katherine C. Naff, Madinah F. Hamidullah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429754470
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With over 20 million people on its payroll, the government is the largest employer in the country. Managing people who do the nation's work is of critical importance to politicians, government leaders, and citizens alike. Personnel Management in Government: Politics and Process, eighth edition, examines the progress and innovations that public personnel professionals are making to address changes in the political, legal, and managerial environment of government. It provides students with a comprehensive understanding of human resource management within its historical and political context in the public sector.

A number of new developments are addressed in the eighth edition, including discussion of:

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• Human resource management in nonprofit organizations in an all-new, dedicated chapter

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• Current and future challenges to recruitment and hiring, including the use of social media in recruitment

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• Privatization and contracting out

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• The rise of employment "at will" policies

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• Digital technology or "digitalization" in HRM and the need to enhance cybersecurity

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• Managing performance with human capital analytics

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• Increased reliance on telework

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• States' attacks on public sector labor unions

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• HRM changes under the Trump administration

Since publication of the first edition in 1977, Personnel Management in Government has addressed issues not yet considered mainstream, but that have proven central to the development of the field over time. This long-standing but no less innovative textbook is required reading for all students of public, government, and non-profit personnel management.

I

The History and Environment of Public Personnel Management

Chapter 1

Civil Service Reform Through the Lens of History

Prologue: President Garfield’s Assassination and the Origins of the Merit System

Just as it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 that fostered the congressional climate essential for the passage of his previously thwarted domestic legislative goals, it was the 1881 assassination of President James A. Garfield—who was elected the year before on a platform that called for complete and radical civil service reform—that created the climate necessary for the passage of the nation’s first significant reform measure: the Pendleton Act of 1883. Hollywood could hardly have written a scenario that was more conducive to reform. Garfield was not shot by a mere political fanatic or run-of-the-mill deranged mind. His assassin, Charles Guiteau, was a disappointed office seeker.

Knowing that the vice president, Chester A. Arthur, was such a thorough supporter of spoils that he was removed from his post as head of the New York Custom House by President Rutherford B. Hayes for notorious partisan abuses, Guiteau approached Garfield at a Washington railroad station on July 2, 1881, and shot him with a pistol. Almost immediately captured, Guiteau explained his action by asserting, “I am a stalwart and Arthur is president now.” Obviously, Guiteau felt that Arthur would be more receptive to his petitions for office than Garfield had been. Although Guiteau was plainly insane, many reasonable people thought that his insanity differed only in degree from that of many political leaders of the period.

Although popular sympathy for civil service reform was certainly in the air, it was an idea whose time had by no means come. Guiteau’s bitter act changed the political climate precipitously, however. The reformers, who took a moralistic tone to begin with, were suddenly able to equate the spoils system with murder. This the public took to heart. Garfield was a martyr to the spoils system. Sympathy for Garfield, who dramatically took more than two months to die as he lingered on in pain, was equated with support for reform. With Garfield’s death on September 19, 1881, the press turned its attention to Guiteau’s sensational trial, in which the defendant, a lawyer, sought to defend himself, and the prosecution introduced into evidence a portion of the deceased martyr’s vertebra. Guiteau was found guilty and hanged on June 30, 1882.

On January 16, 1883, President Arthur signed the Pendleton Act into law, creating the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Civil service reform did not result quite as dramatically from Garfield’s martyrdom as it may appear, however. The Pendleton Act hardly provided the framework of a modern merit system. Its passage, although aided by Garfield’s death, was predominantly a reflection of the political trends of the time.

This prologue illustrates that the proximate cause for civil service reform has often been one or more external events, not the perception by those working inside the system or even in Congress, that change is necessary. Public personnel management seems to be continually in a state of change or transition. While the early reform efforts, which sought to create a merit system, concentrated upon creating institutions, the thrust of present-day efforts is centered on restoring merit and upon reforming institutions. It is a vexing philosophical question as to which reform effort is the more difficult undertaking.

This chapter describes two major elements of reform—the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883 and of the Civil Service Reform Act in 1978. While there have been attempts at further reform since then, including legislation introduced into Congress, none has succeeded in having a lasting effect.

Historical Perspective: Enter the Spoils System

Although a civil service has long been a feature of government, a career civil service based upon merit had, until the twentieth century, been a historical novelty. American civil service reform is generally dated from the post-Civil War period, but the political roots of the reform effort go back much earlier—to the beginning of the republic. The early presidents made very few appointments by today’s standards. But nevertheless, there was widespread resentment that such appointments still tended to go to members of families of social standing even when universal white male suffrage had finally become a reality. Hence Andrew Jackson responded by playing to his plebeian constituency and putting the patrician civil service on notice that it had no natural monopoly on public office. Jackson’s concept of rotation in office was basically conceived as a sincere measure of reform. Of course, Jackson’s spoils doctrine, as it came to be known, would hardly have taken hold as it did were it not for the fact that the country was well prepared to accept it. Indeed, much of the venality of the spoils process was in full flower in state and local governments a full generation before it crept into federal office.

Paradoxically, although the spoils system reached its zenith under Lincoln, its decline can also be dated from his administration, for Lincoln refused to accede to the hitherto observed principle of quadrennial rotation after his reelection in 1864. This was the first significant setback that the principle of rotation had received since Jackson laid out its theoretical justifications. Through the height of the spoils period, however, there existed what some historians have called a “career service.” Many clerks had continuous tenure all through this period, retaining their positions through competence, custom, and neutrality.

Motivation for Civil Service Reform

As the American economy expanded during the last half of the nineteenth century, the orientation of the business community became less and less focused on parochial interests bounded by the neighborhood and more and more oriented toward urban, regional, and international markets. Economic determinists could well argue that the death knell of the spoils system was sounded when the ineptness of government began to hamper the expansion of business. It is noteworthy in this respect that the federal government made some efforts to institute merit-system concepts in the New York Post Office and the New York Custom House several years before the passage of the Pendleton Act. Such reform measures, limited as they were, were a direct result of pressure from a business community that had grown increasingly intolerant of ineptness in the postal service and extortion by the customs service.

Depending upon one’s point of view, the advent of modern merit systems is an economic, political, or moral development. Economic historians would maintain that the demands of industrial expansion—a dependable postal service, a viable transportation network, and so on—necessitated a government service based upon merit. Political analysts could argue that it was the demands of an expanded suffrage and democratic rhetoric that sought to replace favoritism with merit. Economic and political considerations are so intertwined that it is impossible to say which factor is the exact foundation of the merit system. The moral impetus behind reform is even more difficult to define. As moral impulses tend to hide economic and political motives, the weight of moral concern that is undiluted by other considerations is impossible to measure. Nevertheless, the cosmetic effect of moral overtones was of significant aid to the nineteenth-century civil service reform movement in the United States because it accentuated the social legitimacy of the reform proposals.

Support for a merit system was just one of a variety of strategies employed by business interests to have power pass from the politicos to themselves. The political parties of the time were almost totally dependent for their financial base upon assessments made on the wages of their members in public office. The party faithful had long been expected to kick back a percentage of their salary in order to retain their positions. A good portion of the Pendleton Act is devoted to forbidding this and other related methods of extortion. With the decline of patronage, the parties had to seek out new funding sources. Business interests were more than willing to assume this new financial burden and its concomitant influence.

It was congressional disenchantment with the policies of President Andrew Johnson that instigated the first comprehensive and highly publicized proposals for a merit system based upon competitive examinations. Congressman Thomas A. Jenckes, a Republican from Rhode Island, sponsored several bills to curb the patronage power of the president by foisting a merit system upon him. This was a thinly disguised effort to take patronage out of the hands of a president whose appointments tended to antagonize the Congress. Once Johnson was out of office, Jenckes reverted to his original proposal for a presidentially appointed commission to administer a civil service merit system. The Jenckes proposals, however, having to compete for public attention with Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial and the forthcoming Republican national convention, made little impact. Johnson’s impeachment was occasioned by his violation of the Tenure of Office Act of 1867. Many of the opinion leaders of the time, including the Nation and the New York Times, praised the act as a sincere measure of reform that would bring stability to government service. Indeed, the nation’s first impeachment controversy can be viewed as a struggle between the executive branch and the legislative branch for the control of patronage.

In 1869, Ulysses S. Grant, who as a private citizen had sought an appointment as a county engineer, became president. In 1871, on the last day of the legislative session of the 41st Congress, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois attached to an otherwise unrelated appropriations bill a rider that authorized the president to make rules and regulations for the civil service. The rider essentially authorized the president “to prescribe such rules and regulations for the admission of persons into the civil service of the United States as will best promote the efficiency thereof, and ascertain the fitness of each candidate” (U.S. Revised Statutes, Section 1753, 1871).

Grant proceeded to appoint a civil service commission shortly thereafter; several thousand persons were examined, and several hundred were actually appointed. But once the Congress realized that Grant was serious about reform and intent upon cutting into its patronage powers, the program was terminated. Congress refused to appropriate funds for the work of the commission. Although the president formally abolished his commission in 1875, the enabling legislation, the short rider of 1871, remains law to this day.

Although the first federal civil service commission was short-lived, for the first time, the president was given unchallengeable authority over federal government personnel. The reform measures implied by the rider went far beyond the control of personnel. By effectively authorizing the president to provide himself with staff assistance, the rider of 1871 marks the beginning of the presidency’s rise to the actual leadership of the federal administrative apparatus. It was by the authority of this rider and of the later Pendleton Act that the president issued executive orders and rules concerning the civil service.

The policies that this first civil service commission promulgated still haunt merit systems to this day. An analysis of the terminology and concepts developed by Grant’s commission shows that many of the provisions that are taken for granted today in merit systems at all jurisdictional levels were first developed in 1871. These include the “rule of three,” where one of the top three scorers on a civil service test would be considered, theoretically, “best qualified” and hence hired for the job. Another provision was a policy of restricting lateral entry and making initial appointments only at the entrance level. The third mandated that promotion within the service should be decided by competitive examinations limited to those already in the agency. Many state and local jurisdictions have chafed under these and similarly antiquated practices. Not only are they locked in by legal mandates, tradition, and inertia, but public employee unions, finding that such procedures give a decided advantage to seniority over merit and are to the advantage of their members, remain insistent that such provisions remain.

With the demise of the Grant commission, reform took only a few halting steps until the Arthur administration. There is no doubt that civil service reform would have come about without the 1881 assassination of President James A. Garfield. But there is also no doubt that the assassination helped. While Garfield’s assassination was certainly instrumental in creating the appropriate climate for the passage of “An Act to regulate and improve the Civil Service of the United States,” popularly known as the Pendleton Act after Senator Pendleton, historians maintain that the Republican reversals during the mid-term elections of 1882 had the more immediate effect on enactment. Civil service reform had been the deciding issue in a number of congressional contests. When President Arthur signed the Pendleton Act into law on January 16, 1883, and created the United States Civil Service Commission, it was essentially a gesture by reluctant politicians to assuage public opinion and the reform elements.

Pendleton Act of 1883

The Pendleton Act became a remarkably durable piece of legislation. Within it was the framework for personnel management that was at the heart of the federal civil service system until 1979. The act created a civil service commission as the personnel management arm of the president. While it was termed a commission, the U.S. Civil Service Commission (CSC) was by no means independent. It was an executive agency that, for all practical purposes, was subject to the administrative discretion of the president. Its three commissioners, representing both parties, served at the pleasure of the president. The act gave legislative legitimacy to many of the procedures developed by the earlier unsuccessful civil service commission during the Grant administration. Written into the act were requirements for open competitive examinations, probationary periods, and protection from political pressures. While the personnel program was to remain decentralized and in the control of the departments, the commission was authorized to supervise the conduct of examinations and make investigations to determine the degree of departmental enforcement of its rules. Of tremendous significance was the authority given to the president to extend merit-system coverage to federal employees by executive order. Historically, the authority to extend also carried with it the authority to retract. Both Presidents McKinley and Eisenhower had occasion to remove positions from merit coverage by executive order. The Supreme Court’s decision in Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois (1990), however, now makes patronage an unconstitutional basis for personnel actions affecting most public employees.

The Pendleton Act was hardly a total victory for the reformers. It only covered about 10% of the federal se...