ENGLISH FOR SENATE POSITION PAPER ON:
Civil Service Reform
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1976 abolished the GS-16, GS-17, and
GS-18 supergrades and replaced them with five levels of Senior
Executive Service (SES) political appointees that could be replaced at
will because they were considered to be professional managers, not
subject to the job protections and restrictions of the civil service.
The rationale for establishing the SES program was to make Federal
agency managers more responsive to the direction and mandates of their
political overseers. In that respect, the SES has far
exceeded the expectations of the framers of the program, but only at
the hidden cost of truncating the promotion opportunities for career
civil servants with the attendant loss of institutional memory and
management competence which maintains coherence and internal stability
in the day-to-day operation of Federal agencies and conduct of their
programs.
The history of the Federal civil service since the establishment of
the SES has been characterized by continuing failures of government to
protect the public safety. The airline crash in Florida a nunmber
of years ago was directly attributable to the FAA's management failure
to implement the National Transportation Safety Board's
recommendation to install fire suppression systems in the cargo
compartments of passenger aircraft. The ongoing current
failure to fully inspect all commercial cargo carried today aboard
passenger aircraft makes the elaborate passenger screening and baggage
inspection program an extraordinarily expensive and ineffective public
relations fraud because of the vulnerability of all aboard passenger
aircraft to the hazard of uninspected commercial cargo being
transported below in the cargo compartment. The continuing
Katrina disaster fiasco on the Gulf coast revealed to the entire world
the collective incompetence of all agencies involved, but most
seriously those of the Federal government. The current turmoil in
the CIA from the political hatchet job done recently on its management
at the behest of the Bush Administration is now bearing its disastrous
result with unforseeable long-term consequences for our national
security.
The Congress should establish an independent commission of unbiased
experienced professional managers and management experts to fully
investigate and evaluate the history and efficacy of the Senior
Executive
Service. It must prepare a comprehensive report of its findings
and recommendations
for future Congressional attention. Specifically, the
Commision should investigate whether the the current practice of
bringing in outside management with little or no management experience
at the highest levels of Federal agencies is advisable given the
history of the past 30 years of political appointments to senior
management levels of Federal agencies.
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Designed by Imad-ad-Dean,
Inc.