Continuity Amid Discontinuity? George W. Bush, Federal Employment Discrimination, and “Big Government Conservatism”

• Author: John L. Crum,Mark D. Bradbury,R. Paul Battaglio
• Published date: 01 December 2010
• DOI: 10.1177/0734371X10381486
• Date: 01 December 2010
• Subject Matter: Articles

Review of Public Personnel Administration

30(4) 445 –466

© 2010 SAGE Publications

Reprints and permission: http://www.

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0734371X10381486

http://roppa.sagepub.com

ROP38148

6ROP30410.1177/0734371X10381486Bradbury et al.Review of Public Personnel Administration

© 2010 SAGE Publications

Reprints and permission: http://www.

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

1Appalachian State University, Boone, NC

2The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson

3U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, Washington, DC

Corresponding Author:

Mark D. Bradbury, Assistant Professor of Public Administration, Department of Government

and Justice Studies, Appalachian State University, PO Box 32107, Boone, NC 28608-2107

Email: bradburymd@appstate.edu

Continuity Amid

Discontinuity?

George W. Bush,

Federal Employment

Discrimination,

and “Big Government

Conservatism”

Mark D. Bradbury1, R. Paul Battaglio, Jr.2,

and John L. Crum3

Abstract

One of the major substantive components of “big government conservatism” was a

decided predisposition against public employee unions, toward privileging managerial

discretion, and yet still maintaining equal opportunity in the workplace. However,

could this predisposition be resolved in practice without harming federal employees’

rights, benefits, and morale in the workplace? To address this question, this ar ticle

examines whether the attitudes of federal employees toward variants of subjective

discrimination in the workplace changed significantly during the George W. Bush

presidency. We find that trends related to perceptions of retaliation and discrimination

have improved in recent years. However, perceptions of retaliation and discrimina-

tion are found to exist among minority and female employees and managers in the

federal workplace that require vigilance. These results suggest that big government

conservatism’s predisposition to pursue equal oppor tunity as opposed to affirmative

action—while diminishing the power of public employee unions and enhancing

managerial prerogatives—either succeeded on its own merits or that the earlier

momentum could not be stopped.

446 Review of Public Personnel Administration 30(4)

Keywords

merit protection, employee discrimination, civil service reform, George W. Bush

Media accounts of the Bush administration were consistently rife with charges of

shoddy treatment of federal workers—and especially scientists and regulators—

who disagreed with its deregulatory (some would say, antiregulatory) philoso-

phy. As the editors of this symposium note in their introduction, President Bush’s

vision of “big government conservatism” also involved using the power of the

federal government to hive off federal jobs to the private sector to, among other

things, work around government agencies, decrease dependence on the state, and

build political support among contractors for the Republican party. As they also

note, packaged within the president’s big government conservative agenda was

a decided effort to enhance managerial prerogative, foster equality of opportu-

nity rather than equality of outcome, and diminish the power of public sector

unions.

However, could these various agendas be integrated in practice and without

demoralizing federal employees who might feel that their rights and protections as

employees were under assault? As both Jim Thompson and Ed Kellough and his col-

leagues report in their contributions to this symposium, and as we shall review briefly

below, the Bush years witnessed a sustained and persistent effort to push ahead the

managerial prerogative component of Bush’s big government conservative human

resource management (HRM) agenda. Less clear to this point in the other articles

as well as in the HRM literature generally is whether managerial prerogative was

allowed to trump employee rights, antidiscrimination, and benefit protections during

the Bush years.

To address this question, this article relies on results from an expansive federal

government employee survey conducted to examine the extent to which they

perceived inappropriate reprisals for employees who engaged in whistle-blowing,

reported unwanted sexual attention, and were denied benefits due to unlawful

discrimination during the Bush years. Our analysis compares employee attitudes

at three points during the presidency of George W. Bush to provide a compelling

bottom-up assessment of the possible effects of that administration’s approach to

HRM on employees’ attitudes. In using such a research design, we contend that,

in effect, a pretest-posttest situation is created because the 2000 survey covers the

Clinton years while the subsequent surveys track developments and trends in the

Bush era. Although hardly a longitudinal design, this approach does allow infer-

ences about the extent to which the Bush administration was able to advance its

agenda without compromising—or being able to compromise—employee protec-

tions or the perceptions that those rights were endangered.