Listen, I know it's tempting to judge, but don't. I'll admit that I enjoy firing people. Truth be told I love it. Anyone steps out of line at the Report and their entire desk gets dumped into the parking lot along with a swift kick in the ars.
I may conduct an exit interview on the way out (in the elevator).
Make the U.S. Civil Service Effective Again
State deregulatory reforms have enhanced agencies’ efficiency and flexibility. Congress should take note.
By Judge Glock, WSJ
March 13, 2025 3:59 pm ET
President Trump’s sweeping dismissals of federal employees have revived the debate around the American civil service. Many of Mr. Trump’s critics argue that extensively regulating the hiring and firing of the government’s civilian workforce is necessary to ensure the country doesn’t return to the bad old days of political patronage.
But several states have experience with deregulating the civil service, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive. In the past few decades states such as Georgia, Kansas and Arizona have moved most or almost all of their public employees to at-will employment and given individual agencies discretion to hire in the manner they think best. These reforms have been bipartisan and effective, and there’s little evidence they’ve led to political favoritism. It’s time for the federal government to learn from these successful state experiments.
In 1996 Georgia’s Democratic Gov. Zell Miller declared that the state’s civil-service system, which promised to hire and manage employees based on merit rather than political affiliation, instead “provides cover for bad workers.” A comprehensive state bill that year made all new public workers at-will employees. Other states, such as Florida, soon followed with reforms giving hiring authority to individual agency managers and loosening employee job protections. Another wave of at-will employment and decentralized hiring reforms began after a sweep of Republican victories in the 2010 state-level elections.
In at-will employment states, public employees can be dismissed for almost any reason other than political allegiance or unlawful discrimination. Many of these states have limited the ability of fired public employees to appeal to quasijudicial state boards, instead requiring them to defer to internal agency processes. Managers in civil-service-reform states can hire whom they want by the method they think best. This is the norm in private-sector employment outside union shops.
Although it’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of government workers, the results of such reform have been promising. A 2013 study surveying human-resource directors at state agencies in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri and South Carolina found that directors “are more likely to register agreement with positive assessments of at-will employment than negative assessments.” A 2024 survey of human-resource professionals across state and local governments revealed that respondents ranked the effectiveness of at-will systems in recruitment, hiring, promotion and retention higher than that of traditional civil-service systems.
Changes to employee discipline can ensure more accountability for poor performance. When Utah’s legislative auditor general examined public employee dismissals in 2010, it found that an average 0.3% of career-service employees were dismissed for cause each year between fiscal 2007 and 2009. For non-career-service employees, who can be fired more easily, the rate was 1.9%.
In Texas, the authority to hire public employees lies with each agency rather than a centralized human-resources office. A 2006 survey found that more than 90% of Texas human-resource officials thought the decentralized system allowed them to create hiring policies tailored to their departments’ specific needs. More than 75% believed a central personnel office would make agencies less flexible and effective.
Reform states haven’t become cesspools of corruption and patronage. The lack of national or local coverage of negative effects of these changes is one indication of success. Others include a 2002 study from the IBM Endowment for the Business of Government, which examined Texas’, Georgia’s and Florida’s civil-service reforms and found “no convincing evidence presented of widespread, systemic abuse in any of the three states.” In 2012 Indiana’s state personnel director found that after the state passed deregulatory civil-service reforms in 2011, the number of formal complaints by employees decreased, and agency performance declined “in almost every category, including customer service and teamwork.”
Congress should learn from these states. The bipartisan Chance to Compete Act of 2024 gave managers at federal agencies more authority to evaluate potential hires on their technical expertise. But reforms can go much further. Like private-sector workers, federal employees shouldn’t be able to appeal dismissal decisions to an external, quasijudicial board, as they can under existing policy.
The Office of Personnel Management, which currently determines federal hiring practices, should instead assume an advisory role. Firing and hiring employees based solely on political allegiance should still be prohibited, but agency managers should have as much discretion as possible to govern their own departments.
States have performed their duty as laboratories of democracy when it comes to civil-service reforms. The federal government can learn from these states and make the civil-service system effective again.
Mr. Glock is director of research at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913-1939.”
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Appeared in the March 14, 2025, print edition as 'Make the U.S. Civil Service Effective Again'.
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