Job security versus homeland security

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 19, 2002 | by Sean Paige

The greatest tests of U.S. resolve in bolstering homeland security may not be recruiting better secret agents, plugging porous borders or employing the most cutting-edge technologies to detect diabolical terrorist plots being hatched against us. It instead will be demonstrated in Washington's willingness to address a less glamorous, yet even more fundamental, question: Can we build a new federal bureaucracy--the Department of Homeland Security --that will be leaner and meaner, more effective and efficient, than the old federal bureaucracies from which it will be constituted. That won't be possible without civil-service reform, which includes changing the way the government hires, fires, evaluates, promotes, motivates and manages its employees.

Recognizing that building a better bureaucracy will require a better blueprint, President George W. Bush wisely is asking that civil-service rules that currently apply to federal workers be modified or waived in the case of the new department. "The new secretary of homeland security must have the freedom and the flexibility to be able to get the right people in the right jobs at the right time so we can hold people accountable," Bush recently said during a visit to the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Yet the forces of inertia and stasis--and the interest groups and politicians sympathetic to federal-employee labor unions--are opposing any effort to deprive government workers of the "right" to unlimited job security irrespective of actual job performance. It says a lot about Washington that the greatest impediments to the new department are two relatively parochial issues: congressional resistance to civil-service reform and the unwillingness of appropriators to grant the department flexibility in allocating funding. Many of these appropriators were the ones pushing hardest for a Cabinet-level department, obviously for self-serving reasons.

Democrats who oppose civil-service changes but support creation of the department hope to negotiate or amend away the objectionable elements. But Bush will be shooting himself in the foot if he yields on civil-service reform. There really is no point--and, more importantly, no real benefit to homeland security--in building a new bureaucracy without doing so according to a better blueprint.