Deprofessionalizing State Governments: The Rise of Public At‐Will Employment

Date01 March 2015
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12334
Published date01 March 2015
Perspective
Paul R. Verkuil is chair of the
Administrative Conference of the United
States and president emeritus of the
College of William and Mary.
E-mail: pverkuil@acus.gov
188 Public Administration Review • March | April 2015
Public Administration Review,
Vol. 75, Iss. 2, pp. 188–189. © 2015 by
The American Society for Public Administration.
DOI: 10.1111/puar.12334.
Paul R. Verkuil
Administrative Conference of the United States
A
trend that bears watching is the state expan-
sion of at-will employment in the public
sector.  ere are 28 states that now fall into
that category to various degrees, and the number may
be growing.  e purpose of at-will employment is
to import business practices into the public sector,
which is not a bad idea in itself, but in application,
salient dif‌f erences between the two sectors can be lost
or ignored. While reasonable grievances against public
employment need to be addressed, there are also
values that need to be preserved.
At-will is the dominant form of employment in the
private sector because it helps ensure that employees
actively contribute to the company’s bottom line.
However, the public sector has dif‌f erent and even
conf‌l icting bottom lines. For one thing, politics and
administration have long been intertwined. Civil
service reform was instituted to overcome the spoils
system and to make public management a profession.
Professionals, whether they be lawyers, doctors, or
accountants in the private sector or senior of‌f‌i cials in
the public, have one thing in common—an ability
to exercise discretion for the public good, checked by
professional norms of behavior as well as by law. John
DiIulio’s (1994) characterization of public servants as
“principled agents” describes what the public should
expect.
In addition to exercising the discretion needed to fulf‌i ll
statutory missions, many public of‌f‌i cials provide the
indispensable ingredient of institutional knowledge—
they understand their agencies’ missions and operations.
As a former university president, when I wanted a deep
answer to a complicated question, I often turned to fac-
ulty members from pertinent f‌i elds. Faculty are society’s
institutional knowledge creators and preservers. Senior
civil servants are, in a way, like faculty: they have deep
knowledge of their f‌i elds that is both indispensable and
irreplaceable if government is to function ef‌f ectively.
Let me give you an example of why this matters.
North Carolina recently made an ef‌f ort to shift
employees in its Department of Environmental and
Natural Resources (DENR) to at-will status. In 2014,
the governor expanded the number of that agency’s
employees exempt from civil service protections from
24 to 179, thereby shrinking and destabilizing the
professional staf‌f (Gabriel 2014).  e agency’s budget
was then severely cut just at the time it was negoti-
ating with Duke Power over a devastating coal ash
spill on the Dan River. As Governor Pat McCrory
was a former chief executive of‌f‌i cer of Duke Power,
the legislature intervened by creating a “nonpoliti-
cal” commission to oversee cleanup of the spills and
appointed a majority of its members.  e governor
is now suing to preserve his constitutional author-
ity. One wonders whether the professionals in the
DENR of‌f‌i ce, had they initially been supported and
not undermined, could have done this job properly all
along. Why invent a constitutionally dubious solution
to a problem that executive agencies were created to
solve in the f‌i rst place?
We need both physical and human infrastructures to
become resilient against environmental disasters like
those in North Carolina or, more broadly, hurricanes
like Katrina and Sandy and terrorist attacks like 9/11.
We desperately need investments in physical infra-
structure such as bridges, berms, and dams, but the
human infrastructure is largely in place, having been
built over the last century. If the system already exists,
why dismantle it? To skeptics, do me a favor: ask those
who come into government in a political role, from
either party, where they would be without senior civil
servants to guide them, inform them, and, if asked,
even lead them.  is is not a political issue; it is a
competency issue that we ignore at our peril.
at said, states and the federal government could
certainly improve their respective civil service systems.
Take two disparate examples: teacher tenure in two
years or less and removal of nonperforming of‌f‌i cials
that takes two years or more.  ese are unacceptable
situations.  e system can and should be f‌i xed, but
it should not be eliminated. Doing so would send us
Deprofessionalizing State Governments:  e Rise
of Public At-Will Employment

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