Instapundit proprietor Glenn Reynolds also writes an occasional column for the New York Post. His topic for the Post yesterday was the abolition of the institutional monument to sloth, greed, and inertia called the Federal civil service.
The theory of the Federal civil service and the reality of that service are two quite different things. Under our “professional” civil service, though, no one is really in charge. Presidents can’t fire the government’s many middle, and even fairly senior, managers without a lot of hassle.
The thought was that this would give us an efficient, well-run government staffed by politically neutral, expert bureaucrats. We don’t have those.
They’re not neutral, for one thing; they’re Democratic apparatchiks who can’t be fired by a Republican president — or a Democratic one, for that matter. Federal workers donate overwhelmingly to Democrats.
Not only that, they’re not experts, either: I defy anyone to examine the record of the federal bureaucracy over the past decade and suggest that it reeks of expertise. It just plain reeks.
The built-in inefficiency and inertia of the Federal civil service is legendary. I spent nearly two years as a visitor (temp. employee) therein and could bore you to tears with examples of its dysfunction I either experienced personally or heard described by bureaucrats who’d lived through egregious examples thereof.
Reynolds’ solution to the problem posed by the civil service is simple but draconian, remove and replace it with the former “spoils system.” This, he argues, would make it responsive to the President’s wishes, something it is not at present.
