Last week my boss (I’ll call her Claire) called me into her office to discuss an event that she was very upset about. Her boss (I’ll call him Joe) had suggested firing one of her employees (I’ll call her Kathy), and she felt that that suggestion was way off base, not to mention the trauma it would entail. She wanted to discuss it with me, partly because of my familiarity with many of the relevant issues. I had 17 years of experience supervising public health employees, including 5 years as the Chief of the small Epidemiology Branch in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that Claire now heads. So, I had been Claire’s boss for five years before Joe demoted me (Don’t feel sorry for me for that – it was one of the best things that every happened to me). And I had hired Kathy about three years ago.
I was very disappointed and upset to hear that Joe was suggesting the possibility of getting rid of Kathy. When I interviewed Kathy for her job in 2003, the Bush administration was in the process of replacing federal Civil Service positions with federal government contract positions. The purported theory behind this move was that it would make government more “flexible” and “smaller”. At the time, I didn’t have a full appreciation of the consequences of this change, so I had naively told Kathy during our interview that I didn’t expect the lack of Civil Service status to have any appreciable effect on her job security, and that I was pretty sure we would convert her to Civil Service status after a couple of years.
At this point, before continuing with my story, let’s consider the importance of the Civil Service system to our country, and what’s happened to it during Republican rule in the past few years:
Some background on the need for a Civil Service System in the United StatesPrior to the Pendleton Act in 1883, a political patronage system was used in the United States for handing out the great majority of federal (and state and local government) jobs. There were several serious problems with this system, as pointed out in
this article: Because hiring for federal positions was determined by political cronyism rather than by merit, federal employees were far from the most capable of potential employees to begin with; the constant turnover of positions meant that there was little institutional memory or opportunity for most employees to benefit from long experience; poor job security meant that employees generally built up little loyalty to their job; and the political control of federal employees by those in office meant that much time and effort was spent by federal employees on political activities, at the expense of serving the American people. Not specifically mentioned, but probably implied in the article, was the chilling effect of poor job security on the ability of professional federal employees to perform their job in accordance with the needs of the citizens that they were supposed to serve and the dictates of their conscience. For example, a federal employee who was concerned about a serious issue (
for example, global warming) that was ideologically incompatible with the current federal administration could not speak of that issue without risking being fired.
The Pendleton Act of 1883 changed all that by creating a system whereby people were chosen for federal jobs based on merit rather than on political connections. And enhanced job security was provided by that Act by ensuring that federal employees could not be fired based upon political considerations alone. As a result of the Pendleton Act, eventually “nearly all federal jobs” came to be handled by the Civil Service system.
Some people object that the current federal Civil Service system is too lax – that by providing excessive job security it encourages the continuance of incompetent employees in federal positions, at taxpayer expense. In my opinion those concerns are misplaced. I admit that under the current system the federal bureaucracy is sometimes reluctant to remove incompetent employees. But that is not due to inflexibility of current laws – rather I have found that it is generally due to personnel officers who are simply reluctant to make the attempt because they are concerned about potential repercussions.
The demise of the U.S. Civil Service under George BushI was recently amazed to see an article in
The Nation which so closely described what I have been experiencing in the past few years working for the FDA. The article is called “
The Gutting of the Civil Service”, by Dan Zegart:
The article begins by describing a hospital that accidentally transfused some patients with a wrong blood type, resulting in a death and some near deaths. FDA investigators recommended that a warning letter be sent to the hospital, but they were over-ruled by higher ups who thought that that would be too harsh, claiming “there was no evidence of systemic problems.” The article goes on to describe how the above example fits in with the anti-consumer, pro-corporation stance taken by the FDA under George Bush:
The decision was far from surprising. Over the past five years warning letters have become an endangered species at the FDA. According to a recent report by Representative Henry Waxman, the number of such letters issued under Bush-appointed FDA chief counsel Dan Troy plummeted from 1,154 in 2000 to 535 in 2005. Seizures of mislabeled, defective or dangerous products, another key measure of enforcement activity, dipped 44 percent. Waxman's investigators found a disturbing pattern of laissez-faire managers over-ruling field agents trying to discipline wrongdoers – even when deaths had resulted.
The article then explains how the Bush administration has inserted its ideologues into supposedly science based federal agencies, in order to satisfy its corporate supporters:
While the embedding of politicals in career jobs did not originate with Bush, the scale and coordination with which it is being done under this Administration seem unprecedented, according to more than fifty current and former government officials interviewed during an eight-month-long Nation investigation….
Everywhere Dan Troy and his counterparts have gone, three things have happened. First, long-serving careers have been shunted aside, excluded not only from decision-making, but even from providing meaningful input…. FDA careers say that under Bush, unlike previous administrations, when FDA staff went to a meeting at the White House or to brief "the department" – meaning the higher-ups at Health and Human Services – careers were almost never invited…. Meetings at the FDA would nominally include career staff, but the decisions would be made afterward, at a post-meeting huddle for politicals only.
A second method of political control has been simply to redefine civil service jobs as political jobs, or to create new political slots…. Another report by Representative Waxman found that Bush has added 307 new political appointees to the federal payroll, a 12 percent spike that Paul Light of Brookings calls "stunning."… They operate with a single-minded focus that makes them very present in the day-to-day operation of the agencies, all the way down to the field levels."
The third and most disturbing way the Bush Administration has consolidated its hold over the bureaucracy is the embedding of "hidden politicals" in career slots in the executive branch. Candidates are interviewed and selected supposedly on the basis of merit according to civil service procedures, but the real "play" is to hire a politically reliable person…
And as the ideologues come in, the Civil Service professional scientists are driven out:
Thanks to the anti-regulatory course set by Troy and his counterparts at other agencies, many longtime bureaucrats have simply quit. But what is actually happening is more complex and far-reaching than mere brain drain. More accurately, the executive branch is undergoing a brain transplant. An entire culture of civil service professionals loyal to their agency's mission is being systematically replaced with a conservative cadre accountable to the White House… attempting to realign the executive branch permanently by junking a 100-year-old system of merit-based hiring for career bureaucrats. Many longtime staffers… resisted the agency's anti-consumer tilt but could do little about it…. Former FDA officials estimate that between fifty and a hundred senior managers have quit, retired or been demoted, fired or transferred over the past five years… The result of the mass departures has been rudderless, demoralized agencies bleeding institutional memory.
And these changes are by no means limited to the FDA:
The changes at the FDA are but one result of an unprecedented attempt by the Bush team to extend direct political control deep into operational areas throughout the executive bureaucracy, especially at agencies where the Administration has strong policy interests such as the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department and the Interior Department….
The problem described in
The Nation article by Zegart has been dwelt upon previously by others. For example a
poll of FDA scientists taken earlier this year by the “Union of Concerned Scientists” showed that 15% had been “asked, for non-scientific reasons, to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information or my conclusions in an FDA scientific document” and 40% feared retaliation if they voiced concerns about product safety in public.
And I had my own personal (indirect) encounter with Dan Troy when he ordered that a scientific article I had written (previously approved by the FDA) be withdrawn after it had been accepted for publication in
Vascular Surgery. My article talked about ruptured aortic aneurysms and death associated with an endovascular graft, and it questioned the safety of the graft. The decision to withdraw my article from publication came after Troy and other high level FDA decision makers had a long talk with the manufacturer of the device. Someone subsequently leaked the story to the
Wall Street Journal, which published
an article about it.
Back to my storyI have had the good fortune to work as a state or federal Civil Service employee for 18 years of my career. The most important result of that to me is that I could make decisions based on my professional knowledge, judgment and training without having to worry whether or not my employment would be put at risk if I made a decision that was unpopular with upper level management. Since I was responsible for financial support to my family during that period of time, and because it can be very difficult to find employment in my line of work, the prospect of having my continued employment dependent upon the whims of a politically motivated bureaucrat would have been very scary to me, and it is honestly hard for me to fathom how I could be sure of making good decisions under such circumstances. What does one do, for example, if one is
expected by those in power to claim the presence of weapons of mass destruction in
a speech to the United Nations. It can take a lot of courage to go against the grain under such circumstances, and we as a nation cannot afford to depend on most people having the courage to do that. Nor can we afford to put our federal scientists in the position of having to choose between the integrity of their work and the financial support of their families.
It appears that Kathy could be one more casualty of the Bush administration’s cynical attempt to destroy our Civil Service system. She performs basically the same type of work that I and other members of our Branch do. When she was hired to work for our Branch three years ago, under federal policies in operation for more than a century she would have been hired under the Civil Service system. But under the new Bush policies she was instead hired on contract, which meant that she would not have the job security provided by the Civil Service system. Consequently, when she makes professional decisions that are unpopular with management she runs the risk of losing her job.
Claire wants to find a way to save Kathy’s job. She asked me to “mentor” her in order to help her improve in areas in which Joe may consider her to be weak . I tried to do that, but it is not at all clear to me what areas Joe considers her to be weak in. Consequently, as I tried to “mentor” her, instead of aiming at improving her professional skills, I found myself trying to second guess what Joe wants to hear from her and trying to coach her to say what I think Joe wants to hear from her. Because deep down in my heart, I believe this is about politics rather than competence.
What we are dealing with here is the full scale politicization of federal agencies in the United States on a scale not seen in more than a century, since the enactment of the Pendleton Act in 1883. Politicization of these agencies means that they function for the political benefit of those in power, rather than for the benefit of the American citizens who pay their salaries. It means that if the President of the United States wants the CIA to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction, that’s what they’ll find. If he wants federal scientists to fail to find evidence of global warming, they will fail to find that. In short, the demise of our Civil Service system means the widespread impairment of all the federal programs that are supposed to serve the American people.
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