Chapter 3, Part 2 - Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy
Day 9 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).
SUMMARY
We're back in 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. Their bios are on yesterday's post.
This section is "The Centrality of Performance Appraisal."
They say it is difficult to identify good and bad performance in the atmosphere of a bureaucracy. They said the GAO said more than 99% of employees were rated fully successful or above. According to a footnote, that was in 2013.
MY OPINION
It would be interesting to see if that has changed over time.
SUMMARY
They said there are a few reasons for this, including being "accused of racial or sexual discrimination."
They mention that Trump issued an executive order, which Biden overturned, that expedited corrective action for poorly performing employees, sped up disciplinary actions, reduced time for employees to respond to allegations of poor performance, reminded supervisors of expiring probationary periods, prohibited settlements that changed an employee's record, and "reevaluate(d) procedures for agencies to discipline supervisors who retaliate against whistleblowers."
MY OPINION
This all sounds reasonable, but it's quite vague. We don't know what the timelines were to begin with, and if the new timelines are reasonable or designed to oust people they don't want in positions without cause. That bit on whistleblowers makes me wonder. Does reevaluating those procedures mean that supervisors can more easily retaliate against whistleblowers, or that it would be harder to do so? The ambiguity feels intentional because these are generally careful writers.
SUMMARY
"It is essential that political executives build policy goals directly into employee appraisals bot for mission success and for employees to know what is expected." They say good workers, who are often the best critics, often go unrewarded for their efforts.
MY OPINION
I think many of us have been in jobs where good work went unrewarded, so it stands to reason that happens in the federal government, too, and I don't disagree that changes to performance evaluations might help with that.
SUMMARY
The next section is on "Merit Pay."
They say 90% of "major U.S. private companies" use a system of merit pay, and although merit pay has been tried in the government, pay is still mostly based on seniority.
They follow the history of merit pay from Carter through Reagan and how unions worked to block reforms. They say the president and Congress can make reforms, and in the meantime, "political executives" should use "existing pay and especially fiscal awards strategically to reward good performance to the degree allowed by law."
MY OPINION
This is a fundamental philosophical difference, and I think reasonable people can and do disagree about it. Personally, I understand both sides of the argument--unions and collective work vs. merit pay. I haven't looked into the data to see how it actually plays out. I do know as a worker, a union would have pushed for a living wage that I didn't receive through most of my working career, despite my working very long hours and doing excellent work.
SUMMARY
The next section is "Making the Appeals Process Work." The authors say federal workers often don't get fired because the appeals process is too cumbersome.
They go over the backlog of appeals cases and how there are too many different bodies who hear cases depending on the type of case. At the same time, they acknowledge that federal employees only win their cases about 20% of the time. "... the real problem is the time and paperwork involved in the elaborate process that managers must undergo during appeals."
They suggest combining these functions, saying it would simplify the process.
MY OPINION
One of the things they want to change is moving the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cases to the Merit Systems Protection Board. This sounds to me like they want to make it easier to deny discrimination cases. And they want to take investigatory functions from the Office of the Special Counsel and return them to the Office of Personnel Management. I'm not sure why the two were divided. If I may hazard a guess (and it's only a guess), they would be divided to provide some independence. But a lot of this section is about internal workings.
SUMMARY
The next section is just a paragraph, "Making Civil Service Benefits Economically and Administratively Rational." They say there are too many government workers and contractors, and they are paid too much.
The next section is "Market-Based Pay and Benefits." They say studies differ on whether federal workers make more or less than their private-sector counterparts. The Heritage Foundation's study found they are paid 22% more, and that their benefits were more.
They say "the obvious solution" is to make federal pay and benefits more like a "market model." They say the Office of Personnel Management is neutral and should set wages. They say this would require Congress to pass legislation.
MY OPINION
I think we should be pushing private companies to offer more generous benefits and wages instead of making federal workers get less.
SUMMARY
The next section is "Reforming Federal Retirement Benefits." "Career civil servants enjoy retirement benefits that are nearly unheard of in the private sector." Their goal is to move retirement benefits to be closer to private plans.
MY OPINION
Again, I think everyone who has worked should have a generous retirement. The United States is really backward when it comes to how we take care of our elders. Instead of focusing on making things worse for federal workers, we should be making corporations take care of their workers.
SUMMARY
The next section is "GSA: Landlord and Contractor Management." They say because the GSA manages contractors, it should coordinate with the Office of Personnel Management.
The next section is on "Reductions-in-Force." They say that while there are too many federal employees, across the board cuts can actually cost money in contract buyouts and training new employees. They say performance should be the main determinant in who stays and who goes, but that has been opposed by federal managers associations and unions, and Congress hasn't passed the legislation.
The next section is entitled "Impenetrable Bureaucracy." The authors say there is too much duplication of functions in government that should be addressed. "The Trump Administration proposed some possible consolidations, but these were not received favorably in Congress, whose approval is necessary for most such proposals," they said.
On to "Creating a Responsible Career Management Service."
They argue that career civil servants "by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms."
"The desire to infiltrate political appointees improperly into the high career civill service has been widespread in every Administration, whether Democrat or Republican. Democratic Administrations, however, are typically more successful because they require the cooperation of careerists, who generally lean heavily to the Left."
MY OPINION
I don't understand that. Why do Democrats "require the cooperation of careerists" more than Republicans, and why would they be more Left-leaning?
SUMMARY
Honestly, this section is convoluted. It's talking about the roles that career civil servants as opposed to political appointees. They seem to be arguing that in order to keep career civil servants from becoming too political, the president should "create and fill political positions" instead. Trump did this through executive order, and Biden reversed it "at the demand of the civil service associations and unions."
The next section is "Managing Personnel in a Union Environment." The authors argue that if unions push too hard in the private sector, the company will eventually go out of business, so unions are naturally limited, but that isn't the same in the government.
They say FDR opposed unions in the government and it wasn't until JFK that union representation was recognized in the federal government. Then Congress forced Jimmy Carter to bargain with unions.
Trump issued executive orders to renegotiate all union collective bargaining agreements; encouraged agencies to prevent unions from doing union work on government time; and encouraged agencies "to limit labor grievance son removals from service or on challenging performance appraisals and to prioritize performance over seniority when deciding who should be retained following reductions-in-force."
Biden revoked them.
They say, "Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place."
MY OPINION
While getting rid of federal labor unions would be a radical shift, it's not surprising that conservatives are arguing for it.
SUMMARY
Next up, "Fully Staffing the Ranks of Political Appointees."
They say that the president needs to fill political appointments but can have difficulty getting them approved by the Senate. Trump "did not generally remove political appointees from the previous Administration but instead relied mostly on prior political appointees and career civil servants to run the government. Such a reliance on holdovers and bureaucrats led to a lack of agency control and the absolute refusal of the Acting Attorney General from the Obama Administration to obey a direct order from the President."
(That was Sally Yates, who refused to enforce Trump's travel ban from seven Muslim countries because she was concerned it was illegal. Trump fired her.)
They said Trump didn't fill positions partly because the Senate wouldn't confirm them and partly because "several officials announced that they preferred fewer political appointees in the agencies as a way to cut federal spending. ... Any new Administration would be wise to learn that it will need a full cadre of sound political appointees from the beginning if it expects to direct this enormous federal bureaucracy."
The last section in this chapter is "A Reformed Bureaucracy."
It recaps the chapter and concludes:
"Modern progressive politics has simply given the national government more to do than the complex separation-of-powers Constitution allows.
"That progressive system has broken down in our time, and the only real solution is for the national government to do less: to decentralize and privatize as much as possible and then ensure that the remaining bureaucracy is managed effectively along the lines of the enduring principles et out in detail here."
That's it for this chapter and section. The next section is "The Common Defense." (For those wanting some idea, that will be page 120 of 922 in my PDF.)