R.E.S.P.E.C.T. (Or, Why Civil Servants Deserve More Of It, and Appointees Should Get Less Ink and Fewer Chairs)

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have made a couple of points about my argument that there are too many political appointees in government right now, that I think raise an interesting question about how people perceive the federal government and what they see of it. I want to explore their points, because I think they hit on some issues that may seem obvious to those of us who work in and cover the workings of government, but may be invisible to those outside it. Ezra says, postulating a pro-appointee argument:

The counterargument here is that administrations enter office with radically different agendas -- agendas that often have to be imposed on bureaucracies that have spent the last few years doing the opposite thing, and may have liked doing that thing. That's a lot of inertia for one appointee to overcome. So you fan them throughout the bureaucracy to make sure the various departments align with the administration's agenda.

But that sort of strategic appointing is not always necessary. It's hard to imagine the Treasury Department hid a lot of functionaries bitterly opposed to crafting a bank rescue plan.

I think this argument somewhat overstates the extent to which White House-set policy impacts the day-to-day operations of government, and that Ezra's right to say there aren't huge pockets of agenda-driven federal employees. It's one thing to set policy regarding what scientists can say to the press and Congress, for example. A policy decision like that might be something that a new administration wants to reverse, but it doesn't actually stop the scientists from doing research, or change the grants process at the National Science Foundation, much less change how the person who runs telework programs at the National Science Foundation does their job. The Bush administration may have changed how Medicare interacts with prescription drug coverage, but that doesn't change the fact that there are people who need to need to process Medicare applications.

More importantly, I think that what's most important to federal employees is efficacy, rather than ideology. If they work at the National Institutes of Health, they're going to support policies that do the most to support excellent research. If they work for the Army, they want to find effective ways to support the armed forces. When I was researching and reporting a series about faith in the federal workplace more than a year ago, one thing I found was that the very devout employees I talked to, even ones with clearly articulated conservative politics, were directing that energy not towards advancing a political agenda, but towards, for example, challenging themselves and their co-workers to do record amounts of pro-bono work helping low-income people with their tax filings, or creating work environments that helped them deal with the stress brought on by working in public health. The goal was efficacy, not a specific policy spin.

As I wrote in an article in the February issue of our magazine that was about good-government groups, but that I think applies to federal employees as well::

"They want to improve government performance, but it's not pro-environment or anti-environment, pro-education or anti-education," says Jonathan Breul, coordinator of the Government Performance Coalition and executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, which funds management research. "Whatever the education program is, we want to do it better."

So I think the chance of a rank-and-file rebellion in favor of an old policy or against a new one that has to be quashed by an appointee is fairly low. Matt points out that the military model maintains continuity of operations and senior personnel across presidential administrations. And senior civil servants, mostly members of the senior executive service, step in and maintain continuity of operations when political appointees depart, and are there to provide advice and guidance to new political appointees when they arrive. Senior executives could simply do most of those jobs, rather than just occasionally stepping into the breach. The fact that they're blocked from doing some of the upper-level jobs at the Department of Homeland Security that are currently reserved for political appointees is actually prompting some senior executives to leave the Department or retire from government entirely, according to Carol Bonosaro, the president of the Senior Executives Association.

And that gets into an issue Matt raises in another post entirely, how to create a more effective regulatory regime by elevating senior regulators--or other civil servants--so that the public respects them and buys into their decisions more. Matt writes:

At which point the issue becomes, in my mind, less an issue of how would you write better-written regulations and more an issue of how would you create a more effective regulatory agency? In my view, it would require you to make the senior regulators the kind or prestigious people whose views are taken seriously by the media and the congress. The U.S. isn’t such a small government country that we dismiss all public servants out of hand. When a General or Admiral speaks, people listen. And part of that is that even a Colonel or a Lieutenant is a well-respected figure, and everyone appreciates the sacrifice and public-spirited nature of even the lowliest enlisted officer. Similarly, though the Federal Reserve system may yet find a way to discredit itself, the idea that the Fed Chair should have a lot of power and that his views should be taken seriously is pretty widely held.

The Senior Executive Service has 7,000 candidates for that kind of elevation in the public eye. Senior Executives are a special corps within the civil service--you have to rise to one of the highest pay grades in your agency and apply (and it's a rigorous process) to make it into the SES. Once you're there, its an elite corps, responsible for everything from running the Navy's budget, to doing the foundational research that helped determine the mathematical models for detecting the structure of chemical compounds, to coordinating global refugee policy, to running pollution cleanup after Hurricane Katrina. In other words, they're exactly the kind of people who should be helping to shape and implement effective policy, and who should be looked to as credible, non-partisan experts, just like the generals that Matt cites.

And yet, they don't get a lot of attention. Instead, they show up in the news when they're stepping in to save a government program gone awry, being retaliated against for blowing the whistle on favoritism towards Halliburton in the contracting process or in some rare cases getting themselves in trouble. When they do show up in the public eye, the fact that they're members of the SES is explained as if they've come from some sort of exotic small country, rather than an elite corps of civil servants who have existed since 1978.

I get that it's cheesy to say that federal employees deserve more credit, and it seems kind of obvious to say that employees who have been working on programs in agencies for a long time probably know a lot about those programs and have a lot to offer. But I'm saying it anyway. Attention should be paid, by the president, by the media, and by the public.

Political appointees are a way of changing the course of an agency and enforcing the president's agenda. But changing course at the expense of experienced, talented people having a chance to influence that course is a waste of a substantial resource. And at a time of intense partisan divide, agencies and the integrity of their programs might actually better protected from political whiplash if they were governed to a greater extent by people who tack neither left nor right but towards efficacy.