Chapter 12
The Federal Government Bureaucracy: From Patronage to Civil Service How We Went from Patronage to an Insulated Civil Service System and Why it Matters for the Performance of Government
Gary D. Libecap
I. Introduction: An Autonomous Federal Bureaucracy.
Some of the sharpest political debates in current American politics revolve around the size, role, and performance of government.[1] The “government” at issue is the federal government. Since 1933, the expenditures of the federal government in the economy have far exceeded those of state and local.[2] Through the myriad of social programs, regulations, taxes and payments, the federal government permeates virtually every aspect of life in the United States. The size of government has grown in the 20th and 21st centuries, often following a ratchet-like pattern, following major crises, including World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.[3] Accordingly, the debate about the performance and accountability of government necessarily focuses on the federal government, and in turn on the structure of its labor force, the federal bureaucracy.
As argued in this chapter, Tthe current federal government professional bureaucracy is a largely autonomous one. It generally is insulated from political control by politicians through civil service rules, and there are few institutional provisions within the civil service system to encourage efficiency in delivery or responsiveness to citizens. This is not to say that the bureaucracy is uncaring or indifferent to the provision of goods and services, but rather that the motivation for effective service delivery largely is due to internal personal factors or agency agendas and cultures, and not due to bureaucratic rules regarding hiring, salary, and promotion or due to direct political management of the government labor force by elected officials. As such, the current government bureaucracy in the 21st century is a far cry from what existed in the 19th century when the government was run by patronage. Under patronage there was no question of political control. Each government worker owed his or her job to an elected politician and the local political machine, and was careful to follow the benefactor’s wishes. Politicians, in turn, had to be responsive to key voting constituencies within the electorate and hence, directed patronage workers to meet the needs of those constituencies as well. Only when the federal labor force became too large to effectively manage in the latter part of the 19th century were federal politicians willing to give up some patronage positions. By that time, the patronage workforce had become too cumbersome for politicians to control and direct and it began to inflict growing costs on politicians. Gradually, patronage faded from the federal government labor force, replaced by the civil service system.
Table 1 shows federal civilian employment within the Executive Branch for 1949, 1969, 1989, and 2002. The General Schedule (GS 1-15) employees make up the bulk of federal civilian employment in the Executive Branch, and it is the major component of the civil service system. Higher-level officials, GS 16-18, (both career and appointed) are in the Senior Executive Service, also part of the civil service system and it in 2002, numbered approximately 6,946 individuals. Additionally, in 2002, there were 446 very senior officials in the Executive Schedule for the management of Executive Departments.[4] The Federal Wage System covers blue collar employees. Of the total civil service, the President has the authority to appoint only a small number of top-level officers, approximately 5,800 individuals.[5] The remaining federal civilian employees are covered by one of the federal employment systems described in the table. Other than senior Presidential appointees, there is no patronage left in the federal government in the 21st century.
Table 1
Federal Civilian Employees, Executive Branch
Year / General Schedule(000) / Federal Wage System (000) / Postal
(000)
1949 / 830 / 502 / 361
1969 / 1,274 / 592 / 654
1989 / 1,494 / 374 / 827
2002 / 1,238 / 193 / 812
Source: Johnson and Libecap (1994a, 98) and U.S. Office of Personnel Management (2002, 12; 2003, 28)
Patronage has few adherents today, but it may have had some useful aspects as we will see for aligning the interests of voters, politicians, and government workers. Instead, it is often argued that part of the infrastructure necessary for successful economic development is a politically-neutral, professional bureaucracy. The notion is that a civil service protected from competing political pressures can administer programs for citizens more effectively than can one, like patronage, that is subject to direct political interference. Political intervention in bureaucratic decisions would corrupt the bureaucracy and channel government services and transfers toward favored constituencies, rather than to those who were the original intended targets. Despite the logic of these arguments, there is, however, a problem with a completely protected, ostensibly politically-neutral bureaucracy.
An autonomous bureaucracy has the potential to operate in a self-directed manner with bureaucratic advancement as the objective. This objective is unlikely to coincide with effective delivery of government services. With limited political oversight and direction, an insulated bureaucracy has less incentive to be responsive to citizen demands. There may be few options for citizens who complain about arbitrary bureaucratic decisions or the poor provision of government services. Policies may be implemented and administered in a manner that advances bureaucratic budgets, staffing, and political influence, but that meet few citizen needs. With bureaucracies writing the rules for implementing the legislation passed by Congress, remedies to the problems of excessive autonomy may be very costly to enact for citizens and politicians alike.
This chapter is not an attack on the federal bureaucracy. But rather it cautions against overly sanguine conclusions about the effectiveness and desirability of an autonomous, politically-neutral bureaucracy. The chapter describes how the current civil service system, which covers career government employees, emerged from patronage in the late 19th century and how government employee unions have played a direct role in molding the development of today’s civil service. Today, the career civil service occupies a privileged position in the American labor force.
Controlling for individual characteristics and job attributes, career federal employees generally earn more than do their counterparts in the private sector.[6] Advancement is more-or-less automatic, with pay increases granted through the passage of time, rather than on merit. Salary growth is not tied to the growth or decline of agency budgets, with individuals receiving salary adjustments as part of a national civil service system and not as the direct result of the expansion or contraction of their agency. Further, there is comparatively little use of incentive or performance pay by government managers to reward productivity by their subordinates. Federal employees also have tenure in their positions. It is extremely costly f or government employees to be fired or otherwise removed from their offices for poor performance.
Federal employee unions have become among the most influential lobby groups in American politics, and are among the largest political campaign contributors. Federal politicians who have large government employee constituencies in their districts pay particular attention to the concerns of federal employee unions. Although Congress has enacted a variety of mechanisms to control bureaucratic drift, which is the manipulation of policy by administrative agencies from what had been envisioned when it was enacted, career officials still have considerable discretion in the actual implantation of government programs. And there is concern that they use this discretion to promote personal and agency agendas, rather than the desires of voters and their elected representatives.
Career government employees are not necessarily “politicallyneutral,” guided solely by scientific, technical management principles. Highly protected employees with strong ideological or professional attachments to political causes or policies are in a position to influence the administrative actions of their agencies. A number of scholars, such as Gordon Tullock, William Niskanen, Frederick Mosher, Hugh Heclo, and James Wilson have voiced concern about bureaucrats as being both opportunistic in pursuit of their self interests and influential in shaping policy away from what was desired by the President and the Congress.[7] Indeed, there often is conflict between the President and agency heads, who are his political appointees, and the career agency officials who administer government policy.
The incentives of bureaucrats to resist or, alternatively, to promote policy change are increased because of the very nature of many government services. Federal agencies administer policies regarding the environment, welfare, health care, transportation, and defense, and people hold intense preferences about what the government's role in these areas should be. Professionals seeking employment with the government often are attracted to a particular agency because of its stated mission or for the opportunity to help change the way in which it operates.
Although it is difficult empirically to determine how far bureaucratic manipulation of policy occurs, anecdotal evidence is suggestive of the possibilities. For example, at the FTC and in the Department of Justice, lawyers and economists, who are not political appointees, but career civil servants, decide whether a case is worth pursuing and whether a particular piece of evidence is relevant. Similarly at the Environmental Protection Agency, field investigators have considerable leeway in the enforcement of the clean air and other environmental regulations authorized by Congress. These officials may use their discretion to direct policy in ways that they personally prefer and not as strictly desired by Congress.
Another example is provided by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). Throughout much of its history, the Forest Service's mission largely centered on providing services and commodities to the timber and grazing industry. In the 1960s and 1970s, the professional staff of the agency was composed largely of people trained in timber management and harvesting, foresters and engineers who supervised timber sales and road construction to access sites. The political success of the environmental movement, however, greatly changed the mission of the agency, and pitted new interest groups against old ones. These conflicts resulted in a change in the types of professionals employed by the Forest Service. Individuals trained in wildlife management, biologists, and specialists in recreation became much more common. With the change in professional orientation within the Forest Service, there has been a growth in the number of employees who actively challenge past agency policy. These individuals want the Forest Service to move more completely toward environmental goals, such as wilderness preservation, and away from previous policies in support of the timber industry.
Politicians bear the political costs of such policy adjustments, and hence, must act more judiciously and more slowly. Agency employees, on the other hand, with professional ties to new policies and strongly-held beliefs about their implementation have latitude within the civil service system to act as advocates. In the private sector, such advocacy actions would likely bring dismissal, but with the job protection rules available to career federal employees, dismissal is not an easy option. As a result, the civil service system has evolved into an institution that neither provides strong incentives for performance nor a policy-neutral work force.
II. Origins of a Professional Federal Bureaucracy.
A. Patronage.
Until the early part of the 20th century, most federal government employees in the United States were hired on the basis of political patronage. Patronage was viewed as a necessary and useful method for staffing federal offices. Indeed, patronage was the currency of political exchange when political parties were loose national coalitions of local organizations or machines held together by national politicians like the President. In his study of the Jacksonian era, Leonard White emphasized that the connection between national politicians and the local party was patronage: “The success of …local organizations seemed to depend much more on securing office, contracts, and favors for their members than on campaigning over disputed issues of statesmanship.”[8]
The right to place the local party faithful into relatively high-paying federal jobs (generally postmasters, customhouse employees, land office clerks and surveyors) was coveted by members of the House of Representatives, Senators, cabinet members, and local political bosses. The President, who had the constitutional power to staff executive branch positions, traded these positions to members of Congress, local bosses, and other politicians in exchange for their support on legislation and in re-election. The awarding of patronage positions was a means by which politicians could motivate and reward their supporters, and because these political appointees could be fired at will, patronage was a means by which politicians could insure that government employees did their bidding. As political currents shifted among the electorate, politicians could respond, knowing that their appointees would follow their directives. There was no sense of a “politically-independent” bureaucracy. To obtain the party’s nomination and support in the campaign, candidates for federal political offices were required to permit the local party machine to play a role in the dispensation of the jobs and favors they acquired on election and to be responsive to the demands of local party leaders.
Support of the local party machine for congressional candidates depended on the latter’s ability to obtain patronage positions from the President. The President in turn used the distribution of patronage to build and enforce political coalitions. As Theodore Roosevelt noted regarding his upcoming bargaining with members of Congress, “If they’ll vote for my measures I’ll appoint their nominees to Federal jobs. And I’m going to tell them so.”[9] Although senior office selections required Senate approval, appointments to the more numerous lower-level positions could be made without the consent of the Senate, and there were few restrictions on who could be hired. The positions could then be used to promote the President, members of Congress, and local politicians. So long as the interests of federal politicians and the local party machine coincided, the spoils system was mutually beneficial.
Although patronage positions were known to be temporary, they were highly sought after both as a means of employment and as a means of establishing political and social positions and contacts within the political party structure and local community. Because government employment depended upon the political fortunes of each worker’s benefactor and political party, appointees were motivated to deliver services and other government benefits as effectively as possible to key constituents. As such, patronage workers were expected to be politically active on behalf of their mentors, to engage in campaign work, and to contribute part of their salaries in the form of political assessments. These assessments were a legal means of transferring federal tax revenues to political parties. The payments ranged from 2 to 20 percent of an individual patronage worker’s salary, depending on the position held. Solicitation letters were sent by the party to each worker, return envelopes were provided to ensure that payments were made, and compliance was carefully monitored. Those who did not contribute lost their jobs.[10] Federal patronage positions appear to have paid more than the market wage for comparable private jobs in order to compensate for the assessments.[11] Patronage payments from federal workers were an important source of campaign financing, and their control rested with the local party apparatus.[12]
Those who held patronage positions were well aware that they did not have job tenure and would be removed routinely after elections whenever their political benefactors were defeated. For example, after 25 years of Republican domination of the Presidency, when Grover Cleveland first took office in 1885, 43,087 fourth-class postmasters were either removed, suspended, or asked to resign to make room for Democratic party stalwarts.[13] These were the rules of the game, the “spoils,” and they provided for a partisan federal bureaucracy. When the government was small, patronage provided for close allegiance between appointees and politicians, and employee behavior could be monitored at relatively low cost.
The number of federal government positions initially was relatively minor, reflecting the limited role of the federal government in the economy and society. There were perhaps 5,000 federal jobs in 1816, with 500 of them in Washington D.C. Throughout the 19th century, most federal positions were in the postal service—postmasters, postal clerks, and mail carriers. In 1881, for example, 59 percent of all federal employees were in the postal service.[14] The allocation of these positions among the various competing claimants involved considerable negotiation among the relevant members of Congress, the President, and the Postmaster General. The Postmaster General was one of the President’s chief strategists and advisors in allocating positions, and the decisions often were delicate ones. In 1890, there was an average of 250 postal workers per congressional district and some 1,700 applications for those positions.[15]