The invincibility of the federal bureaucrat is legendary, but some states have been successfully transitioning to at-will employment.
In the latest example of state governments solving problems that the federal government seems incapable of solving, Judge Glock and Renu Mukherjee of the Manhattan Institute have a new paper out about civil service reform. The invincibility of the federal bureaucrat is legendary, but states have been successfully transitioning to at-will employment in the public sector for the past few decades.
They trace this trend to Zell Miller’s tenure as governor of Georgia. In 1996, Miller, one of the last conservative Democrats, signed legislation making all new hires by Georgia’s government at-will and limiting appeals of personnel decisions to the head of the relevant agency. That replaced a system of independent review boards that considered whether a firing was legitimate, which in practice made it basically impossible to fire anyone for poor performance.
In 2001, Florida made many workers at-will and ended seniority-based layoffs. Utah also made more workers at-will, and, just this year, it has prohibited collective bargaining for public employees.
The Tea Party wave in 2010 also led to many civil service reforms in the states. Indiana, Arizona, Tennessee, and Kansas all abolished civil service protections for most new hires. “The percentage of the Arizona state workforce that was at-will went from 21% to 67% in two years,” Glock and Mukherjee write.
The following example from the report is illustrative:
When Utah’s state auditor looked at annual dismissal for cause rates in 2010, it found that typical civil service employees had a rate of 0.3% but that personnel outside of the typical service system had a rate of 1.93%, close to the private-sector involuntary separation rate of around 2% at that time. The auditor partially attributed this to the fact that grievances in the non-civil service systems were limited to inside particular departments and could not be appealed to an outside board.
The difference between 0.3 percent and 1.93 percent might not seem like a lot, but another way of describing the policy change is that it increased the proportion of public employees who were fired for cause by a factor of six. That’s a major change, and the fact that it was basically the same as the private-sector rate suggests that the policy worked to remove special privileges from government workers while also not creating any undue level of disruption that an organization can’t handle.
Texas, Florida, and Georgia, in particular, are seen as having very favorable practices for finding and retaining talented people in state employment, the Manhattan Institute report says. Those states have especially decentralized hiring practices, allowing managers in particular agencies to hire as they would in the private sector rather than be subject to a state-centralized system of rules.
Were post-reform firings politicized, and did the reforms create bad work environments in state government? Glock and Mukherjee find scant evidence for either claim. Retrospective reports on the reforms suggest that they were politically neutral and had no effect on working conditions.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, the federal government should copy what has worked at the state level, to make its bureaucracy more performance-based. Or, if the federal government simply returned more power to the states, more government services would be provided by people who can be held accountable for poor performance, unlike federal workers who are insulated from the consequences of their actions (or inactions).