Chapter 3 - Part 1: Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy
Day 8 of reading and sharing my notes on Project 2025 (the long title is Mandate for Leadership 2024: The Conservative Promise, in case you're searching for it).Here's my approach and why I’m doing this.
SUMMARY
We are looking at Chapter 3-Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy of Section 1: Taking the Reins of Government.
This section is written by Donald Devine, Dennis Dean Kirk, and Paul Dans.
According to the Authors section of the document, Devine "is Senior Scholar at The Fun for American Studies ..." He was Reagan's Office of Personnel Management Director "when The Washington Post labeled him 'Reagan's Terrible Swift Sword of the Civil Service' for cutting bureaucracy and reducing spending by billions of dollars," among other things.
Also, according to the Authors section, Kirk is Associate Directors tor for Personnel Policy with the 20205 Presidential Transition Project at The Heritage Foundation. He worked in private law and "served in President George Bush's Administration [it does not specify which Bush] in the U.S. Army's Office of General Counsel ..." He also worked as Associate General Counsel for the Strategic Integration and Business Transformation. "During the Trump Administration, Dennis served in senior positions at the Office of Personnel Management and was nominated by President Trump to be Chairman of the Merit Systems Protection Board."
According to the Editors section, Dans is "Director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at The Heritage Foundation." (He was recently fired, reportedly by Trump.) "Before joining Heritage, he served in the Trump Administration as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, as OPM's White House liaison, and as senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development." he worked in commercial litigation prior to that.
They begin with an overview of why personnel is important. The main personnel agencies in the federal government are The Office of Personnel Management (OPM); the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB); the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA); and the Office of Special Counsel (OSC).
They explain what each agency does and include a paragraph on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the General Services Administration.
Now on to the Analysis and Recommendations section, starting with OPM: Managing the Federal Bureaucracy.
"Since the turn of the 20th century, progressives have sought a system that could effectively select, train, reward, and guard from partisan influence the neutral scientific experts they believe are required to staff the national government and run the administrative state ... Yet, as public frustration with the civil service has grown, generating calls to 'drain the swamp,' it has become clear that their project has had serious unintended consequences."
They argue that while the civil service system "was devised to replace the amateurism and presumed corruption of the old spoils system," it has insulated civil servants from accountability.
They go into the history of various acts from the New Deal to Jimmy Carter's efforts at reform to Reagan's implementation.
"Today, employee evaluation is back to pre-reform levels with almost all rated successful or above, frustrating any relation between pay and performance."
On to the OPM:Merit Hiring in a Merit System. They argue that things went downhill when IQ tests/Professional and Administrative Career Examination general intelligence exam for civil servants went away because civil rights advocates said they were discriminatory.
MY OPINION
I'm not going to get deep into it here because it's outside the scope of this particular project, but there is lots of documentation on the problems with IQ tests.
SUMMARY
"In any event, the federal government has been denied the use of a rigorous entry examination for three decades, relying instead on self-evaluations that have forced managers to resort to subterfuge such as preselecting friends or associates that they believe are competent to obtain qualified employees."
MY OPINION
That's a sweeping statement, and they don't offer any backup. I don't know how federal hiring practices work. If you've been through it, please weigh in.
SUMMARY
They say Obama was testing out some changes "quietly" and "Trump's OPM planned to implement such changes but was delayed because of legal concerns over disparate impact."
MY OPINION
I would like to know more. How was Obama allowed to if Trump was not?
Also, I don't think anyone wants the government hiring unqualified people, so I suspect there's more going on here, particularly because of the language around being "woke" earlier in the document. We'll see as we move forward.