2Restore Honor and Accountability to Public Service
Over 20 million Americans work for government. About two million work for federal government in a wide range of regulatory, scientific, and administrative jobs. The vast majority work for local government, as teachers, police, and local service providers.
Governing sensibly and fairly requires good leadership, a sensible legal framework, adequate funding, and other factors. Ultimately, however, good government hinges on the performance of public employees. Their skill, values, and dedication to the common good are essential to good government.
The culture of a department is the best indicator of its success. A culture in which people are inspired to work hard, help others, and focus on doing what’s best to achieve the institution’s goals, will be one that is likely to succeed and inspire public trust. On the other hand, a work culture preoccupied with personal entitlements and avoidance of responsibility will practically guarantee failure.
America’s public culture is in trouble, and needs to be remade. The inability to hold public employees accountable has infected public culture with a sense of cynicism and resignation, leading to corrosive behavior and broad public distrust. The 2003 Volcker Commission on federal civil service found deep resentment at “the protections provided to those poor performers among them who impede their own work and drag down the reputation of all government workers.” A 2017 Reuters report found that police unions have made it impossible to discipline or remove police officers with a record of abusive behavior, as happened with the officer now indicted for killing George Floyd. Teachers too are also notoriously unaccountable—in a typical year, only two of California’s 300,000 teachers are dismissed for poor performance.
Work rules imposed by collective bargaining contracts and by out-of-date civil service categories make difficult the most obvious management choices, and guarantee pervasive inefficiency. Public employees quickly learn that what matters is what the rule requires, not doing what’s right. These rigidities further corrode public cultures.
Reinvigorating America’s public culture requires injecting two elements into the employment framework:
First, public employees must have the authority needed to take responsibility. Teachers must have the authority to control the classroom, police must have the job of stopping abuses, inspectors must be free to focus on what’s important, not foot faults, and public health officials in Seattle must be able to start testing immediately for a virulent virus without waiting weeks for approval from Washington. Their supervisors too need authority to do their jobs. Instead, an unintended effect of no accountability is to suffocate public employees under a heavy blanket of rules and procedures: No accountability is Miracle-Gro for bureaucracy.
Reviving responsibility requires getting rid of most work rules and simplifying programs into goal-oriented frameworks so that officials and citizens alike are re-empowered to use their common sense. Only then will public employees have the honor of making a difference.
Second, public employees must be accountable. Accountability is a precondition to being given responsibility. Accountability is also vital to public culture to instill trust that everyone is pulling their weight. There’s no easier way to kill a work culture than for it to be common knowledge that performance doesn’t matter.
Accountability has failed because of a false assumption that job performance can be proved in a legal hearing. But how do you prove someone doesn’t try hard? Or has bad judgment? Or bores the students? Accountability for performance must be determined by the judgment of supervisors and co-workers, not by provable facts. Defenders say accountability is “just a matter of due process,” but the facts show that it is practically impossible to hold public employees accountable. It is not difficult to provide safeguards against unfair personnel judgments by, for example, giving a peer committee authority to veto a decision.
The original goal of the civil service system was to hire and hold accountable public employees based on their individual merit. That’s why it was called “the merit system.” Over the last 140 years, however, the merit system has slowly mutated into a version of the spoils system—where public employees view their jobs as their personal property instead of as a responsibility to serve the public good. As with spoils, this has occurred as a result of political support—specifically, the political activism of public employee unions. Over the past five decades, collective bargaining agreements have imposed layers of protection—such as expunging misconduct from a policeman’s file after a year or two—until jobs became, in essence, the employee’s property.
As with the spoils system, the current public employment systems at all levels of government must be replaced. Because the commonality of unmanageability overwhelms the differences, Congress could appoint one independent commission to recommend new principles for accountability and supervision for public employees at all levels of government.
Congress can itself change the framework of federal civil service. For police, teachers, and other vital public jobs provided by states and localities, Congress can condition federal funding upon overhaul by states of personnel frameworks to permit effective management. There’s no reason for taxpayers nationally to continue to fund ineffective local services.
The goal of public service should be to promote energy, honor, and effectiveness in government. Achieving it requires new employment frameworks built on the solid foundation of individual merit and accountability.