Jimmy Carter as public manager

Why the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 remains relevant today

The passing of Jimmy Carter will lead to an outpouring of reassessments of his extraordinary life. I won’t attempt to cover all of that, but do want to focus on Jimmy Carter as a manager of the federal government, especially his role in ushering in the last major reform of the civil service system. These aspects of his Presidency tend to be overlooked, but have become more and more salient as they clash with Trump’s vision of a politicized administrative state.

Carter was the last President to use reorganization authority

Congress gave Carter authority to reorganize the structure of the federal government, allowing him to create FEMA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Education (which Republicans have been seeking to abolish since it was created). In return, Carter agreed to more Congressional oversight, in the form of Inspectors General. This basic trade — more power in exchange for more oversight — has broken down. Congress stopped providing reorganization authority to Presidents. In the year 2024, we have a chief Presidential advisor, Vivek Ramaswamy, claiming that the now-expired Reorganization Act allows Trump to fire 75% of employees and shutter agencies (it doesn’t). Trump has signaled his disdain of oversight by firing Inspectors General.

Carter took executive branch ethics seriously

In 2019, Carter advisor Stu Eizenstat noted Carter’s impressive record on adopting ethics laws designed to hold the executive branch, and the President, free of corruption:

The 1978 Ethics Act, which for the first time required disclosure of assets and potential conflicts of interest by incoming senior officials, imposed strict limits on gifts in office, and restricted lobbying the agencies in which officials served. This was designed to elevate the level of public trust in government officials in the wake of Watergate. The Inspector General Act of 1978 appointed independent inspectors general to root-out fraud, waste and abuse in federal agencies, and has saved American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, while holding federal officials accountable. The Office of Special Counsel (the precursor of the Robert Mueller position) provided a mechanism to investigate potential wrongdoing by high government officials, including the president. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 helped curb FBI and CIA excesses by creating special FISA courts to oversee requests for surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) to this day prohibits and penalizes the extension of bribes by private U.S. corporations to foreign government officials; as does the Civil Service Act of 1978.

Again, this all seems strikingly at odds with the current moment.

Carter brought Zero-Based Budgeting to the federal government. It didn’t work.

As Governor of Georgia, Carter adopted what was called zero-based budgeting and proposed bringing the same to the federal government. The idea is simple, which is that every program has to justify its pleas for spending afresh every year. This is intended to guard against prior budget decisions being sheltered from re-examination. Vivek Ramaswamy, who I guess is a closet Carterite, proposed bringing ZBB back to the federal government in a Republican debate. Here is what I wrote then about the idea:

ZBB might work in private industry. But doesn’t work in government because it is inconsistent with how the US political system works. First of all, Congress, not the President, decides the budget. There is no single actor who can prioritize spending priorities, which ZBB requires. Thus, budgets are a function of coalition agreements, built up over time. This might look inefficient, but it brings us to the second reason why ZBB can’t work. The political system can manage only so much conflict. Starting the budget afresh each year massively increases conflict. Incremental budgeting focuses conflict around the change in the budget, not the base, reducing conflict. Our current Congress cannot even manage an incremental budget, routinely failing to pass appropriations bills on time. Do you really trust them to manage to start from zero, every year, and come up with sound outcomes? Third, there are some practical barriers. Many public spending projects run for multiple years, and need stability in funding if they are to be effective. Zeroing our regulatory agencies, for example, removes certainty that market actors need. And about half of federal spending is on automatic pilot as entitlements, meaning they legally cannot be cut without passing unpopular laws changing the entitlement programs.

If ZBB appealed to Carter’s logic-driven engineering background, it simply did not fit with how Congress worked. Tip O’ Neill told Carter “you have proposed so much legislation, we can’t handle it all” reflecting the gap between the canny Speaker and the new President’s assessment of what the system could manage. Throwing the budgeting into flux every year simply added to the sense of overload. That said, the logic of ZBB is sound, and engaging in frequent program evaluations and audits is a better way to achieve its goals of periodically revisiting prior spending commitments.

Carter was the last President to reform the civil service

Carter’s most significant public management achievement was to be the last President to pass significant governmentwide legislation to modernize the civil service system. His diagnosis of the public sector sounds strikingly modern: “too often a bureaucratic maze which stifles the initiative of our dedicated government employees while inadequately protecting their rights.”

Carter was personally involved in pushing the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, including persuading his presidential primary rival, Mo Udall, to be the legislative champion of the bill. He took time away from Middle East peace negotiations at Camp David to cut deals to move the legislation along. Other Presidents since then have been supportive of civil service change, but none put the work in to make it a reality. Presidential involvement was crucial because civil service reform is a classic example of distributed benefits — the public does better with a more effective bureaucracy, but few make this their top issue — and potentially concentrated costs — public sector unions and military veterans groups in particular had a lot at stake. (Carter slightly limited the use of veteran’s preferences in hiring and layoffs, arguing that its effect was to reduce representation of women and minority groups).

As a graduate student at Syracuse University, I worked at the Campbell Institute, named for Alan “Scotty” Campbell, who offered a blueprint for civil service reform for Carter. While there, I worked through the archive of Campbell’s papers to construct an analysis of the CSRA. The key point was that the CSRA represented an end of a post-war era of relative faith in the civil service system. It sought to modernize the bureaucracy, but struggled between the pursuit of two potentially competing values: the protection of civil servants from politicization and a desire for greater flexibility and change.

Management experts battled with each other to establish a dominant model for the civil service. On one side, traditionalists defended the protection doctrine, arguing that neutral competence could only be maintained by a civil service system that protected employees from undue political influence. On the other side, reformers established the new flexibility doctrine, arguing to create incentives for performance and responsiveness to political leaders. The flexibility doctrine drew on private-sector models of management, which was far from unusual in public management debate. What was unusual was that the flexibility doctrine, by emphasizing managerial discretion and control as desirable management practices, offered the first serious and direct challenge to the protection doctrine and the idea that protection of employees was necessary to good management and competent performance. Further, and most troubling for protection advocates, flexibility advocates simultaneously relied on performance and political responsiveness as equally valid and closely connected justifications for reform. Protection advocates feared increased politicization of the bureaucracy as the inevitable result.

These battle lines remain. Today, we remain in disagreement about how much to balance political responsiveness versus protections from political interference. With the return of the Trump administration, we are on the eve of a massive new era of politicization. This arises in part from another unanticipated consequence of the CSRA, which was that in the face of a failure to make meaningful change in the following decades, President’s relied more and more on delegated power. It is this type of delegation that Trump proposes to take advantage of to reinstate Schedule F, which would increase the number of political appointees in government by tens of thousands. A while back a reporter asked me the legality of this power, and I pointed to the debate around the CSRA:

It was clear that members of Congress wanted the federal bureaucracy to be more flexible, but they were also deeply concerned about politicization. The memories of Nixon's abuses of federal civil servants were fresh in their mind still. The idea that they were deliberately laying out a template where a President could strip tens of thousands of employees of their protections against politically-driven removal simply is not reflected in the record. It was not that it was debated and rejected - it was so far away from where the negotiations were that it simply was not considered. Advocates for a more flexible system focused, instead, on the creation of a new Senior Executive Service, 10% of whom were political appointees. To offer some perspective, the SES as a whole is about 7,000-8,000 managers. This was a major aspect of the CSRA, the subject of intense debate for how these new managers would be used, and how many of them would be political appointees. The idea Congress also wanted to hand the President to convert 50,000 career officials into political appointees, but failed to explicitly debate the pros and cons of this option, is simply not credible.

The protections against politicization in the CSRA were not strong enough because Congress never envisioned the scale of the politicization that Trump now seeks. Years later, Dwight Ink, out of the designers of the law noted that abuses of employees during the Reagan era (which were, by Trump’s standards, incredibly mild) “indicates my assurance to Congress that the CSRA safeguards would be effective were overly optimistic.” These concerns echo today. For example the Merit Systems Protection Board, created by the CSRA to monitor accusations of unfair practices, can be effectively nullified by simply not having a quorum, as it has been for much of its recent history. Much like allowing the ability of Presidents to fire Inspectors General, these loopholes to political abuses reflect the fact that the Congress of the 1970s assumed a set of political norms that simply no longer exist.

In short, Carter went through the hard work of building a bipartisan coalition for legislative change for civil service reform. Trump has asserted that unitary executive theory of government gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president” and is seeking even more fundamental change to the civil service system by bypassing Congress.

Why the merit principles matter more than ever

Carter criticized the “Washington marshmallow” but took care not to attack federal employees. In a state of the union address he declared it to be “absolutely vital” that civil service reform be used to enable a “government that that is efficient, open and truly worthy… of understanding and support.”

He put a good deal of faith in the idea of merit, and the CSRA specified what the merit principles to guide government should be:

Federal personnel management should be implemented consistent with the following merit system principles:

(1) Recruitment should be from qualified individuals from appropriate sources in an endeavor to achieve a work force from all segments of society, and selection and advancement should be determined solely on the basis of relative ability, knowledge, and skills, after fair and open competition which assures that all receive equal opportunity.

(2) All employees and applicants for employment should receive fair and equitable treatment in all aspects of personnel management without regard to political affiliation, race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, or handicapping condition, and with proper regard for their privacy and constitutional rights.

(3) Equal pay should be provided for work of equal value, with appropriate consideration of both national and local rates paid by employers in the private sector, and appropriate incentives and recognition should be provided for excellence in performance.

(4) All employees should maintain high standards of integrity, conduct, and concern for the public interest.

(5) The Federal work force should be used efficiently and effectively.

(6) Employees should be retained on the basis of the adequacy of their performance, inadequate performance should be corrected, and employees should be separated who cannot or will not improve their performance to meet required standards.

(7) Employees should be provided effective education and training in cases in which such education and training would result in better organizational and individual performance.

(8)Employees should be—

(A) protected against arbitrary action, personal favoritism, or coercion for partisan political purposes, and

(B) prohibited from using their official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election or a nomination for election.

(9)Employees should be protected against reprisal for the lawful disclosure of information which the employees reasonably believe evidences—

(A) a violation of any law, rule, or regulation, or

(B) mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.

These are very good principles, and perhaps the part of the CSRA that looks the least battered by the intervening decades. They provide a sound basis for an effective nonpartisan public sector, one that is protected against abuse for “partisan political purposes” in a way that seems clearly at odds with Trump’s promise to remove federal employees for purposes of retribution, or because he believes they are Democrats.

Some aspects of the CSRA did not work. The Senior Executive Service did not create a cadre of super-managers who could nimbly jump from one part of the government to the other. Pay-for-performance systems mostly failed, partly because it is hard to isolate the contribution of a single individual, and partly because the performance bonuses were so small that supervisors had little reason to create conflict among their underlings by separating out performance differences among employees.

Such failures reflected the lack of a good research evidence for government reform. Carter and his team wanted good ideas, but had little to draw on beyond what seemed to work in the private sector. Scotty Campbell said:

I was always a bit bothered by this, that we were drawing on a body of knowledge that did not have the kind of research roots with which I am comfortable when I’m dealing with policy issues, and I had occasional doubts myself as to whether we really had the kind of knowledge and depth that we needed to do this job.

Today we have the opposite problem. We have more knowledge about what works, or doesn’t, in the public sector today, but less appetite among policymakers to put that knowledge to work. Policymakers like Trump and his advisors at best still insist that that the public sector should operate like the private sector, or at worst, rely on an evidence-free set of biases about government to guide their actions.

There are, obviously, many other aspects to the Carter Presidency. He also achieved the most extraordinary post-Presidency of any American President, one dedicated to practical engagement to public service rather than enveloping himself in riches. His personal integrity stands as a rebuke to a successor who used his office to further enrich himself.

Within the public policy space, Carter also stands out for his focus on deregulation which, depending on your perspective, either ushered in neo-liberalism or provided a badly-need reshaping of American industrial sectors like airlines.

From a purely personal perspective, I am deeply grateful to Carter for deregulating home brewing, which gave a generation of American beer makers the opening to make American craft brewing the best in the world. Here’s to you, sir.