Yet another example of why you learn nothing reading US media:
The WP is normally the best source on USG affairs. However, they have this minor tendency to avoid little things like the political context.
The core of the US Democratic party [and most modern left parties in Europe] are government employee unions. The intersection of civil service, unions, politics, individual rights laws and tort law combine to make the permanent government almost beyond the control of elected officials. The reason the Congressional Democrats took the heat they did on the Homeland Security Bill [which cost a Senate seat in Georgia and helped the GOP nationwide] is the same reason they walk the plank on school choice and tort reform: they are protecting the interests of a core part of their coalition. The reason Bush is attacking is to damage that coalition. Yes there is a good government aspect. However in truth no President could really control the bureaucracy even if the reforms go through. The added powers will all be marginal. Not to say unimportant but marginal. What is not marginal is forcing the Democrats to defend an interest group at odds with the public’s wishes. That is why the attack is being made solely on national security grounds – Rove is aware that he does not have a mandate to attack unions in general. However, asking for a sacrifice in the name of defense, especially asking for a return of powers that JFK and Truman had is good politics. The road to victory in our system isn’t radical reform. It is salami slices such as this. Take a piece. Come back in a year or two for another piece. The public unions built their power this way. They can be broken the same way in reverse.
Note that Ashcroft did the same with the Patriot Act. He rushed in with a set of old Clinton Era proposals that were hard to fight precisely because they had been kicking around in policy wonk land for the better part of a decade. Many of these were powers Clinton and Reno wanted to chase the militias. Having gotten the camel’s nose under the door, he now is floating Patriot II. It includes a few extreme provisions that Congress can shoot down to show they are protecting civil liberties. The rest then sails through as a compromise.
Pity he hasn’t people with this level of intelligence in his economic team. I don’t think that bunch has made it to primate level much less bonobo.
Scott
The Bush administration, citing national security concerns, is pressing Congress to enact the biggest overhaul of the federal civil service system in a quarter-century.
In the name of reshaping the federal bureaucracy to better counter global terrorism, administration officials are seeking the authority to rewrite long-standing pay and personnel rules governing 746,000 civilian employees at the Department of Defense. The powers would be similar to those won by the administration last year in a contentious battle over the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, which has about 180,000 employees.
Administration officials say the current personnel system is too restrictive, giving managers little flexibility to create a modern workforce. They want to tie pay to performance, discipline bad workers without lengthy appeals, hire employees more quickly and limit union bargaining rights over workplace conditions. Confined to these agencies alone, the changes would affect more than 45 percent of the government's 2 million civilian employees. But few analysts expect the changes to stop with defense-related agencies.
"The lineup of agencies for these kinds of authorities is going to be equal to that of a summer blockbuster movie," said Paul C. Light, a government scholar at New York University and the Brookings Institution. "Everyone wants out. Once Defense goes, it's everybody for the gates."
The rush has begun already.
The Department of Education said last week it wants to revamp many of its personnel systems by moving all 5,000 employees into a demonstration project. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission are also seeking some freedom from civil service rules in recruiting and hiring practices.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said the prospective overhaul at Defense could usher in major changes in a civil service system with origins in the 19th century.
"That's why I feel so strongly about making sure that we do this right," said Collins, the chief sponsor of a bill that would grant Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld much, but not all, of the authority he seeks. "[T]his is likely to become the template for either government-wide civil service reform or other departments' and agencies' [efforts]."
The civil service system dates to the Pendleton Act of 1883, which replaced the "spoils system" of doling out jobs through political patronage with a merit-based system. More changes followed, with the biggest overhaul in recent decades coming under President Jimmy Carter. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 did away with the Civil Service Commission and divided its responsibilities chiefly among three agencies: The Merit Systems Protection Board hears employee appeals; the Federal Labor Relations Authority deals with labor-management relations; and the Office of Personnel Management sets policies to create a level playing field in hiring and pay for all federal civilian workers.
Although some government officials and scholars have called for further changes to make it easier to reward good workers and get rid of poor performers, presidents and most lawmakers over the past 25 years have shown little interest in spending political capital on such arcane and complicated issues. In eight years of promoting "reinventing government," the Clinton administration never found a way to sell major civil service legislation on Capitol Hill, particularly with federal employee unions resistant to major proposals.
Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Pressured by Democrats to create a Department of Homeland Security, Bush eventually embraced the idea. But the president insisted on freedom from many civil service constraints to effectively merge 22 disparate agencies. In April, Rumsfeld asked for similar authority, arguing that Defense needed a more "flexible" workforce to fight terrorism.
"In an age when terrorists move information at the speed of an e-mail and money at the speed of a wire transfer, and fly around in commercial jetliners, we still do have bureaucratic processes of the industrial age as opposed to the information age," Rumsfeld told Collins's committee last week.
House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), whose district includes many government workers, said some changes may be needed. But he and other Democrats are skeptical of the administration's motives and speed. He said officials should wait to see how the new freedoms work at Homeland Security, which is still crafting its personnel system.
"It's trying to take advantage, on this and so many other issues, of the national security argument being the rationale for moving everything quickly without careful consideration," Hoyer said.
Last month, the House agreed to grant Rumsfeld much of what he wants. Collins and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) have introduced more restrictive legislation in the Senate. With Republicans in control of Congress, analysts say Defense probably will get the authority to implement substantial personnel changes, although the final package remains unclear.
In the biggest change likely to be approved, Defense employees could no longer count on the guaranteed annual pay raise that many federal workers hold sacred. Officials would implement pay-for-performance systems in which compensation would be tied to annual job evaluations, with poor performers getting little or no raise, or perhaps even a pay cut. The General Schedule, the current 15-grade pay system, would be replaced by more general pay ranges in a system known as pay banding.
Another major change would make it easier to fire or discipline workers by allowing agencies to streamline the employee appeals process. Rather than take their claims to the Merit Systems Protection Board, workers would have to go through a faster internal appeals process devised by their agency. Some lawmakers, however, want to require that the board be the final arbiter.
The prospective changes at Defense would also restrict employees' collective bargaining rights, allowing management to bargain with national union leadership, rather than union locals, on issues that have an impact on more than one bargaining unit. Labor-management disputes could still go before the Federal Labor Relations Authority, but would have to be resolved within 180 days.
Also mentioned as significant possible changes at Defense and other agencies are more latitude in offering bonuses and other incentives in recruiting top talent, and the ability to hire job applicants "on the spot" -- or at least more quickly than the five months or so the current process requires.
Proponents say that, besides national security issues, such changes are needed to promote general government efficiency. They say the current system is outdated and protects mediocre workers without rewarding good ones.
"We have an opportunity, the likes of which [has] not existed for many decades, to make a real and constructive change in the way the civil service is managed," said Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman who twice has led commissions that called for overhauling the civil service.
Critics, including unions and many Democrats, agree that change may be necessary. But the rapid, far-reaching revisions sought by Bush could erode protections against patronage and discrimination, demoralize the workforce and make government less efficient by concentrating power in the hands of incompetent or politically motivated managers, they say.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, has opposed the Defense plan as a threat to workers' rights. And Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said administration officials have offered few specifics about what they intend to erect in place of the current system, while sending a message that they have a low opinion of federal employees.
"Most federal employees would say that they are accountable every day, and they want to be," Kelley said. "But they want to know that there is a credible system in place that they will be measured against, and that it won't be a system of favoritism or of nepotism."
A few other agencies have already broken out of the traditional civil service system. In 1996, Congress agreed to allow the Federal Aviation Administration to implement faster hiring practices and an alternative employee appeals process. The Internal Revenue Service has been permitted to create a personnel system that includes a pay-for-performance program that, so far, covers about 2,000 managers.
"I think we're moving from a one-size-fits-all to agency-centered [personnel] plans," Dan Blair, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management, said in a recent congressional hearing. "We operate under 100-year-old rules. Agencies chafe and find ways of going around and find ways of operating in a system that was not designed for the 21st century."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
posted by scott 9:59 PM