Water Flowing Uphill: National Implications of State Civil Service Movements

• Author: Donald F. Kettl
• Date: 01 March 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12349
• Published date: 01 March 2015

190 Public Administration Review • March | April 2015

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 2, pp. 190–191. © 2015 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12349.

Perspective

Donald F. Kettl

University of Maryland

Water Flowing Uphill: National Implications of State Civil

Service Movements

C ommentators in Washington are used to

looking at the city as the center of the politi-

cal universe, and it is hard not to argue that

government, business, and media decisions ripple

out across the globe. To a degree often recognized,

however, a host of important ideas are bubbling up

from state and local governments and are fundamen-

tally reshaping Washington politics. High on the list

of improbable impacts is the pressure of state ideas

building on the federal civil service. In his fascinating

analysis, Paul R. Verkuil points out that 28 states have

now embraced at least some form of at-will employ-

ment, which gives government supervisors far greater

power to terminate public employees without having

to go through the extensive employee-protection

process that makes it difficult to fire public employees.

This movement poses fundamental but unexamined

puzzles about how best to align government ’ s human

capital for the challenges it must tackle.

Twenty-five years ago, the Volcker Commission

powerfully made the case for fundamental reform.

It concluded that the “erosion in the attractiveness

of public service at all levels—most specifically in

the federal civil service—undermines the ability of

government to respond effectively to the needs and

aspirations of the American people, and ultimately

damages the democratic process itself” ( 1989 , ix). But

in the years since, its champions have struggled to get

traction. Meanwhile, government human capital has

struggled to keep up with the challenges it faces, the

federal hiring process has broken down, and attacks

on civil servants have escalated.

The 2014 Department of Veterans Affairs scandal,

in which data on wait times for appointments had

been falsified, triggered congressional pressures to

make it easier to fire the elite employees in the federal

Senior Executive Service (SES), one of the hallmark

programs of the most important civil service legisla-

tion of the last half-century. At a July 2014 hearing

questioning “The Viability of the Senior Executive

Service,” Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) argued,

“the committee ’ s oversight work has shown that the

government continues to lack the quality executive

leadership necessary to administer key governmental

services and programs,” a not-so-thinly-veiled assault

on the SES itself. He pointed out that the House of

Representatives had agreed on changes that would

make “senior executives at the VA at-will employees”

(U.S. House of Representatives 2014 , 2).

That federal proposal builds on the at-will movement

flowing uphill from the states. State-inspired move-

ments are nothing new. After all, much of the progres-

sive government reform movement of the late 1800s,

from changes reining in corruption to strategies increas-

ing the efficiency of government operations, bubbled

up from state and local governments to Washington

(Mosher 1968 ; Waldo 1948 ). In the 2000s, the local

Tea Party movement generated enormous government-

cutting energy—as well as candidates carrying its ideas

to Washington. To a degree many Washington insiders

do not recognize, the “flowing uphill” movement is

generating a strong push toward ideas like transforming

the SES into an at-will employment system.

There is little doubt that the government ’ s person-

nel systems have become ossified, trapped in mid-

twentieth thinking at a time when government

needs twenty-first century entrepreneurial energy.

Government performance surely suffers if govern-

ment employment becomes a barrier to flexibility,

innovation, and energy, and there is an overwhelming

consensus that the civil service system needs funda-

mental reform (Partnership for Public Service 2014 ).

But at-will employment in the government reminds us

of Wallace Sayre ’ s famous—and perceptive—observa-

tion that “business and public administration are alike

only in all unimportant respects” ( 1958 , 245). It raises

enormous questions about how to balance the often-

competing goals of accountability, flexibility, innova-

tion, and expertise that lie at the core of the public

service. The at-will movement deserves—indeed,

requires—careful examination before its untested

assumptions subtly reshape governmental practice.

Donald F. Kettl is professor of public

policy at the University of Maryland. He

is also a nonresident senior fellow in The

Volcker Alliance and in Governance Studies

at the Brookings Institution. Among other

books, Kettl is author of

The Politics of the

Administrative Process

and

System Under

Stress

, both published by SAGE/CQ Press.

E-mail : kettl@umd.edu