Uncle Sam doesn't want you; government agencies are a haven for the mediocre because they don't try to get anybody better - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1990 by John Heilemann

"Why go through the hassle of taking this test when, number one, the only job you might get offered is with some agency you have no interest in, and number two, you might not hear for almost a year?" wonders Phil Kehoe, a senior at Berkeley. Kehoe thought about taking the writing and public information test, but then reconsidered. "I'm not going to put my other career options on hold and then end up with the Agriculture Department calling."

Syracuse's Anne Stewart suspects that Kehoe is not unusual. "Again, the comparison with the private sector is instructive," she says. "There it's very cut and dried. You send a resume, you get an interview or you don't, you get an offer or you don't. Here you take a test and then God knows what happens.... I can't tell you the number of students who simply aren't willing to wait until May to find out whether they have a job or not.... I think [ACWA] is going to deter a lot of kids. The tests are not a solution; they just add to the problem."

ACWA's defenders argue that without it, the merit principle that supposedly guides federal hiring would be thrown out the window--that the premium placed on "knowing someone" would become astronomical. But the idea of a pure "merit principle" determining government hiring policy has always been a naive dream, albeit an attractive one. The reality? More than 30 percent of the civil service hirees in any given year go through "excepted authorities," meaning noncompetitive channels arranged by agencies to bring in particular people.

Custom tailoring

Still more common are mid-level positions filled competitively in theory but far from it in practice. A GS-14 at the Department of Education explains: "If an agency has a lower-level employee in mind for some spot that's opening up but that has to be posted and 'competitive,' they just tailor the job description so only that person's [application] fits it. It's all coordinated. You don't know this until you've been in government awhile, but there's this modus operandi that's usually unspoken but very clear."

Such shenanigans are inevitable under any recruiting and hiring system. The goal, therefore, should not be--cannot be--the elimination of "knowing someone" but rather its democratization. A fair policy would give college students of all classes and backgrounds the chance to "know someone," especially through summer internships and cooperative programs. It would also feature deferrals for government student loan payments so long as the fledgling civil servant's salary fell below some limit, says $18,000 per year. It might even, as Rep. Pat Schroeder has suggested, include a ROTC-style scholarship program offering full or partial tuition to students willing to commit to a stint in a federal agency. The military shells out more than $385 million a year for ROTC; the bureaucracy, at least as vital to the national security, should do the same.

The ideal policy would not, however, include ACWA. OPM should follow the logic that led it to give direct-hire authority to the agencies for certain jobs to its natural conclusion. A decentralized system in which agencies are responsible for their own recruiting makes infinite sense. Without ACWA and OPM as a central and ineffective employee clearinghouse, the agencies would be forced to develop their own recruiting strategies. And students might be spared some of the dispiriting chaos they now encounter.