Reiventing the Federal Civil Service: Drivers of Change

ABSTRACT The term "reinvention" has been applied primarily to the formal effort, spearheaded by Vice President Gore and known as the National Performance Review (NPR). This article will look at the recommendations of the NPR and the status of their implementation. But reinvention can also be seen as a much broader process, a process that was already underway before the NPR and that reflects sweeping changes in the environment, structure, and culture of human resources in the federal government. Focusing solely on the formal NPR effort would lead one to conclude that little formal change had taken place. Looking at reinvention from a broader perspective yields a very different picture of a system responding to a range of pressures and changing dramatically as a result. This article focuses on those multiple drivers of reform and examines their combined effects on the federal civil service system. INTRODUCTION As others have noted, the formal NPR process had two major streams. It encompassed both an attempt to improve the management of government and a focus of cutting the size of government, frequently an uneasy juxtaposition. Increasingly, the NPR effort has shown what Kettl (1994) termed as a preoccupation with savings over improvement of performance. While the good government strand of the NPR included explicit attempts to revamp the civil service system, the NPR effort to cut government focusing heavily upon the staff functions, including personnel, may have had an even greater effect than the efforts directed specifically at civil service reform. The response to drastic cuts was mediated by two other factors: the availability of sophisticated new technology and ongoing efforts to change the culture of human resources. Finally, the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), currently being implemented, will have an increasing effect on the civil service system. Let us look at each of these drivers of reform in turn and then examine their cumulative effects. THE NPR RECOMMENDATIONS The NPR overall report, Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less, and the specific report on Reinventing Human Resources Management provide an extensive laundry-list of recommended reforms in the civil service system. But, taken as a whole, they focus on three key themes: deregulation, decentralization, and delegation. First, the NPR calls for elimination of the Federal Personnel Manual (FPM), the 10,000-page guideline to personnelists on how to implement Title 5 (the law governing the civil Service system) and the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) (the official regulations implementing that law). Describing the current system as "complex and rule-bound" (NPR,.1993a:22), the NPR called not only for eliminating the FPM but also for scrapping all agency implementing directives. A second focus of the NPR recommendations was decentralization. In particular, the NPR recommended that OPM abandon its traditional role of gatekeeper of the civil service system. OPM would no longer conduct exams centrally and maintain central registers. Instead, it would delegate authority to agencies to do all their own examining, expanding a movement begun as a result of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (Ban and Marzotto, 1984). In addition, job candidates would no longer be required to complete the Standard Form (SF) 178; they could simply submit a resume. Third, the NPR called for delegating more responsibility for managing the human resources function to line managers themselves. Giving managers more authority in hiring, classifying, and assessing the performance of their employees was seen as an integral part of breaking through the traditional culture of control that characterized the civil service system. The NPR's call for reform of the classification system (1993b:19-27) was consonant with this goal; adopting broadbanding, which has been tested by the Navy and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) through demonstration projects, would both simplify one of the more convoluted aspects of the civil service system and provide managers more authority to set pay to assist in recruiting and rewarding top performance. …