Create a civil service that is accountable and skilled

Washington Monthly, April, 1994 by James Bennet

After 20 years in office, Coleman Young announced last year that he would not run again for mayor of Detroit, where almost one in three people lives in poverty and the true unemployment rate is anybody's guess. The voters pointedly did not replace him with his anointed successor.

Instead, they elected Dennis Archer, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice who promised to revive the city's bureaucracy. "I represent the people who can't get their garbage picked up on time, their streetlights to stay on all night, their phone calls answered at City Hall," he said.

Archer spent the weeks before his inauguration painstakingly picking a new team interested in "opening the windows and letting fresh air into City Hall." After all, if he hoped to energize the city government, he couldn't waste a single appointment.

You see, out of the city's 16,023 employees, Archer was permitted to replace exactly 150.

Archer's predicament is hardly unique. In New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, taking over a government not known for its nimbleness, was allowed to appoint 1,200 people. Out of more than 216,000 city employees.

This is nuts. Mayors with good ideas need to be able to hire people committed to and accountable for enacting them. Mayors--and James Bennet, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1989 to 1991, is the Detroit bureau chief of The New York Times. governors and presidents--with bad ideas need to be deprived of the excuse that unappointed civil servants are undercutting their efforts.

Turning a large portion of civil service positions into appointed ones remains perhaps the only lunatic-fringe Monthly reform, one that policy types still nervously edge away from. This is in part because the abuses of the old patronage systems were so spectacular. Among my personal favorites were the lifeguards of Coney Island in the thirties, documented by Robert Caro: Some were grossly overweight, some spent their days fishing from the lifesaving dories, and some were afraid to go near the water because they couldn't swim.

Reformers could prevent such abuses without dumping patronage altogether, however. Insist that latter-day patronage appointees pass civil service tests: The lifeguards should know how to swim and the accountants to add.

There is probably a deeper reason that people start fidgeting when you praise patronage. At about the same time revulsion was rising against Tammany Hall, reformers were pushing for the creation of certified professions in the private sector. A licensing process was created for doctors, for example, to ensure competence and honesty. That same desire to create a neutral class of expert servants spilled over into government reform, encouraged by the growing conviction-particularly among the educated elite that captained the government reform movemerit--that anything associated with "politics" was dirty.

Unfortunately, the analogy was flawed. Unlike most civil servants, doctors in private practice do not have monopolies on the services they provide and need, for the most part, to supply good care to attract and retain patients (and avoid lawsuits). In other words, while certification helped weed out incompetent doctors, it did not entirely insulate the suitable ones from public influence. Nevertheless, the impulse to create and insulate civil service solons has persisted, fanned by journalists and academics with a bias for neutrality and tenure.

Isolating public workers from public influence has turned out to be a colossal mistake. But the irony of the system--candidates forever running against unaccountable bureaucrats---is that it only deepens respectable repugnance for politics, making the possibility of real change more remote.

Ask yourself: If the size of the public workforce is limited and competence required, why is there anything corrupt or dishonorable about trading a vote for decent services, or even a vote or campaign work for a job? Further, in an era of computerized payrolls, scandal-hungry local TV news reporters, and tightening disclosure rules, it would be no easier for political machines to buy votes with dollars or to stuff ballot boxes in a spoils system than it is now.

Civil services have not eliminated, but merely revised, many of the old abuses. In New York--as in other cities, states, and the federal system--you still have to know someone to get a government job, because figuring out what jobs are available and how to apply is so hard without the guidance of an insider.

While many bureaucrats are hard-working, well-meaning people, the system seems inevitably to encourage them to focus on procedures rather than results. When I was covering city government in New York, shelter workers would call to rage, using jargon it took quite a while to penetrate, about the manipulation of civil service rules by the social services' administrator. None called about her homeless policies.

And many bureaucrats are not so well-meaning. One of the first signs in Detroit that Young would not run again was the whispering last spring among city employees that his appointees were seeking to burrow into tenured civil service positions.