Civil Service Reform Is Dead: Long Live Civil Service Reform

• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Author: James R. Thompson
• DOI: 10.1177/0091026020982026
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026020982026

Public Personnel Management

2021, Vol. 50(4) 584 –609

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0091026020982026

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Article

Civil Service Reform

Is Dead: Long Live Civil

Service Reform

James R. Thompson1

Abstract

The federal civil service system is widely regarded as obsolete. The pay of federal

employees bears little relation to the market, narrowly defined jobs hamper the

assignment of tasks, and byzantine hiring rules impede the procurement of needed

skills. The theory of punctuated equilibrium holds that an episode of rapid and

dramatic change portends, that the pressures for change will build and that some

exogenous event will trigger a reform event similar to what happened in the mid-

2000s subsequent to the 9/11 terrorist incident. Does another episode of punctuated

equilibrium impend or is change more likely to occur in an incremental manner?

Distinctive features of the policy subsystem make evident the improbability of

another episode of “grand reform.” Recent developments further highlight a dynamic

element whereby small-scale adjustments are being employed to address some of the

system’s most dysfunctional aspects.

Keywords

civil service reform, federal civil service, punctuated equilibrium theory, incrementalism,

National Security Personnel System

The year 2018 marked the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Service Reform

Act (CSRA) of 1978. Since CSRA, there have been only intermittent demonstrations

of interest in civil service reform on the part of policymakers, the most prominent of

which were the exemptions from portions of the Civil Service Law that Congress

bestowed upon the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002 and the

Department of Defense (DoD) in 2004. The MaxHR program at DHS and the National

1The University of Illinois at Chicago, MC, USA

Corresponding Author:

James R. Thompson, Department of Public Administration, The University of Illinois at Chicago,

MC 278, 400 S. Peoria Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7064, USA.

Email: jthomp@uic.edu

982026PPMXXX10.1177/0091026020982026Public Personnel ManagementThompson

research-article2020

Thompson 585

Security Personnel System (NSPS) at DoD that ensued were considered breakthroughs

in the civil service status quo. However, with the demise of MaxHR in the face of

union opposition and adverse court decisions and with the eventual repeal of the

authorization for NSPS, by 2012 the system had substantially reverted to the pre-2002

status quo.

The temporary breakthrough in the status quo represented by NSPS and MaxHR

came about as a consequence of the policy window that opened subsequent to the 9/11

terrorist attacks, a circumstance in concert with punctuated equilibrium theory (PET;

Baumgartner & Jones, 2009) whereby long periods of stability in a policy subsystem

are “punctuated” by episodes of radical or discontinuous change stimulated by some

exogenous event. Although the eventual repeal of NSPS and MaxHR complicates the

thesis that PET applies in the case of the civil service policy subsystem, that PET

remains a widely cited theory of policy change prompts investigation of the thesis that

some new crisis (such as the COVID-19 pandemic with its associated disruptions)

could serve to open a second reform window.

This article probes the question of whether the PET or its theoretical counterpoint,

the theory of incrementalism, best accounts for the dynamics observed with the civil

service policy subsystem and hence serves as the most valid predictor of where the

system is heading. Civil service reform can be regarded as a test case for PET given

the exceptional stability of that policy subsystem as well as the high degree of consen-

sus among reformers on the need for fundamental change.

The most recent manifestation of this sentiment came in the form of a report by the

National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS). In its

March 2020 report, the commission cited long-standing criticisms of the government’s

selection and hiring processes, including that “ineffective qualification and assessment

mechanisms often fail to deliver candidates that meet agency needs” (p. 64) and that

“competitive examining . . . is too slow—with an average time-to-hire nearly triple

that of private industry—and often fails to advance and hire highly qualified candi-

dates” (p. 64).

The NCMNPS (2020) further cited the General Schedule (GS) system of compen-

sation and classification, long a target of reformers, as an impediment to effective

human resource management (HRM): “the General Schedule’s rigid classification and

compensation system constrains the Federal Government’s capacity to recruit and hire

individuals in emerging specialties, as well as its ability to fully utilize individuals

with cross-disciplinary talent . . .” (p. 65). In a second 2020 report summarizing the

results of the Human Capital Reviews conducted with 24 agency Chief Human Capital

Officers (CHCOs), the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM; 2020) lent sup-

port to NCMNPS’ concerns in its finding that “. . . most agencies consider the current

GS structure to be their single greatest obstacle when competing with the private sec-

tor for new talent and retaining high-performing employees . . .” (p. i).

The findings of both the NCMNPS and of OPM with regard to the government’s

HRM shortcomings coincide with those of other expert groups that have studied the

topic. In 2017, a panel convened by the National Academy of Public Administration

(NAPA) issued a white paper on civil service reform, the core thesis of which was that