Fixing the civil service must begin with trusting managers

Before the Trump administration blitzed the civil service over the last six weeks, it has been decades since the last major attempt to reform the federal personnel system.

Lawmakers haven’t passed a major bill to broadly restructure federal workforce rules in years. There was the Civil Service Reform Act of 1996, sponsored by Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) that passed the House, but never made any progress in the Senate. In 2008, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) wanted to create a civil service commission to study seven broad areas of the federal personnel system, including compensation, recruiting, retaining employees an policies and barriers to terminating under-performing workers. That bill never got out of committee, let alone get a vote by either body of Congress.

Sure there have been successful attempts at reform along the edges, like the Chance to Compete Act becoming law in 2024 or efforts to address pay issues for specific skillsets like cybersecurity with the Cyber Talent Management System at the Homeland Security Department.

But mostly, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have largely given up on major civil service reform efforts.

While the federal civil service system has been slow to evolve, there is a growing set of successful changes at the state level that lawmakers and agencies could consider. And when the Trump administration’s “shock and awe” strip down of the federal workforce is done, the Manhattan Institute is offering a roadmap for what its authors say are lasting and impactful reforms.

Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

“States can teach the federal civil service about civil service reform because in a lot of different areas the reforms at the state level would be unimaginable to many people in the federal civil service. Many of these state civil service systems have gone to almost complete at-will employment, many of them went to extremely decentralized hiring authority down to individual agency managers with very little oversight from a central personnel office. Many of them have very broad, banded pay scales and a lot of pay flexibility. And many of them have very limited to no collective bargaining for someone who worked in the states,” said Judge Glock, the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in an interview with Federal News Network. “A lot of these states have tens of thousands of public employees in them. They were very large workforces, and many of them been operated under what’s called by academics, even radical civil service reform for decades at this point. The sort of reforms that have worked in Texas and their education bureaucracy, their transportation bureaucracy and their health bureaucracy can certainly be imported in whole or in part, into the Department of Veterans Affairs or the Department of Transportation and other agencies.”

The study, Radical Civil Service Reform Is Not Radical Lessons for the Federal Government from the States, highlights four changes that the authors say, generally speaking, have been successful across several states.

These include:

• At-will employment should be the norm, not the exception, for federal workers.
• Decentralized and flexible hiring should be fully adopted by the federal government.
• More flexibility for pay should be adopted at the federal level.
• Union collective bargaining over the conditions of employment should be banned at the federal level.

Glock said he recognizes that the first three are all doable at the federal level, but the end of collecting bargaining may be more difficult.

“At the very least, we should look closely at the results of these experiments as they were once called in the states, and see what the outcomes have been. Most of the academic literature has been pretty positive about the reforms,” he said. “Now, sometimes the academics will be a little uncertain about whether or not to say, on the whole, they were positive or they created a lot of great outcomes everywhere. But if you look at things from surveys of the public employees in these states, especially the human resource professionals in these states, and if you look at things like the lack of turnover or retention and other of these metrics of civil service success, these states look pretty good. They look a little better than the older, unreformed civil service states like California or New York. I just think there’s a lot of lessons there that haven’t been appreciated at all, frankly, in the DC civil service reform discussion.”

Let’s take the idea of moving the public sector to “at-will” employees, which means, again with some caveats, that your employer can remove you at any particular time and you can leave at any particular time.

No mass politicization

Glock said Georgia, under Gov. Zell Miller, a Democrat, moved to at-will employees in 1996.

“That means they usually didn’t have appeal or grievance rights outside of their own agency. Usually, these agencies did have internal grievance procedures, but they weren’t allowed to bring those to some equivalent of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and they weren’t allowed to bring those to firing or dismissal issues to courts,” he said. “Now, if you look at the states that have done this, there was a lot of understandable concern that you’d see mass politicization, mass turnover after elections, including elections that put a different party into office, and that you might see a decline in employee satisfaction and other sort of metrics. Now, on the whole, that hasn’t happened.”

While Glock said there’s certainly been individual issues in states about some firings and some concerns reported about political actions by supervisors, the data shows the reforms largely have been positive.

He pointed to a survey of Texas human resource managers, which found about 11% said they had ever thought of an instance where politics or connections had influenced a personnel decision. Glock said he didn’t think that is extraordinary as compared to the traditional civil service in Texas or in DC or elsewhere.

He said other data shows there’s some areas that have seen slightly higher turnover and removals, but still in most places, it was nowhere approaching the private sector level of removals.

The move to decentralized hiring authorities in states, such as Florida, Arizona, Kansas and Missouri in the 1990s gave individual agency managers almost “carte blanche discretion” to hire whomever they think best.

“A lot of these states that have moved to more decentralized hiring seem to be working very efficiently. You haven’t seen examples of mass political hiring merely because of preference. I think, partially, because of those constitutional protections that prevent people from being removed merely because they differ with the governor or the president in charge in terms of party or ideology,” he said. “You seem to have more efficiency that you have agencies, again, especially in Texas, which is famous for its decentralized human resource system, where they don’t even have a central personnel office. People can tailor their hiring needs the needs of their own agency. They don’t need to go to the central office all the time to get approval for every hire, every posting or every way they evaluate it.”

Managers given more discretion

The third recommendation of implementing a broad banded pay system isn’t necessarily new to the federal sector. The Government Accountability Office, for example, uses pay bands. The Defense Department piloted pay-for-performance in the early 2000s before abandoning it in 2009.

Glock said that states have had better success, particularly for positions where output measurement is clear.

“What a lot of states, especially Florida, South Carolina and other states, have done is they’ve collapsed their large number of job titles and classification schedules to a very small number, and inside each of those job, position or classification titles, they have pretty broad pay scales in which the top pay can be up to three times the bottom level pay,” he said. “That gives managers a lot more discretion to say, ‘Hey, I know this employee is doing very well. I think they’re performing great. I think I couldn’t get them if I had to pay them just the minimum scale. So, I’m going to pay them than two and a half times what they I normally would pay them.’ The managers in those states say that works. There’s a lot more retention of high-quality employees. That’s been one of the consistent findings of the research studies.”

Glock added that while the current civil service approach to pay includes step increases, the ability to give hiring managers a bigger say in how much they pay employees seems to drive better results.

“The overall lesson that we’re finding in this report is that states that trust their managers more tend to do better,” he said. “States that trust their public employees managers to manage how much their workers get paid, to allocate pay inside their departments, to decide their own disciplinary procedures, to decide their own hiring procedures, tend to do better because those managers closer to the ground tend to know what’s required.”

That concept of trusting your employees to make pay and personnel decisions has been lost to great degree in a system initially built in 1883 and updated in 1978.

The post Fixing the civil service must begin with trusting managers first appeared on Federal News Network.

Vicky