at Capitol. June 19.1996
with Sen. JohnMc Cain
with General John K Singlaub
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https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/08/19/1384992/much-azov-about-nothing-how-the-ukrainian-neo-nazis-canard-fooled-the-world
with General Micheal Ryan
OVERVIEW
From
the
very
first
Mandate for
Leadership,
the
“personnel is
policy” theme
has
been
the
fundamental
principle guiding
the
government’s
personnel management. As
the U.S.
Constitution
makes clear,
the
President’s
appointment, direction,
and
removal
author-
ities
are
the
central elements
of
his
executive power.1 In
implementing
that power,
the
people and
the President
deserve the
most talented
and
responsible workforce possible.
Who
the
President
assigns to
design and
implement his
political policy
agenda will
determine whether he
can carry
out the
responsibility given to
him by
the American
people.
The
President
must
recognize
that
whoever
holds
a
government position
sets
its
policy.
To fulfill
an
electoral
mandate,
he
must
therefore
give
per-
sonnel
management
his
highest
priority, including
Cabinet-level
precedence.
The
federal government’s
immense bureaucracy
spreads into
hundreds of
agen-
cies
and
thousands
of
units
and
is
centered and
overseen at
the
top
by
key
central personnel
agencies
and
their
governing laws
and
regulations.
The
major
separate personnel
agencies in
the national government
today are:
•
The
Office of Personnel Management (OPM);
•
The
Merit
Systems Protection
Board
(MSPB);
•
The
Federal
Labor Relations
Authority
(FLRA); and
•
The
Office
of Special
Counsel
(OSC).
Mandate for
Leadership: The Conservative
Promise
Title
5 of
the U.S.
Code charges
the OPM
with executing,
administering, and enforcing
the
rules,
regulations,
and
laws
governing
the
civil
service.2 It
grants
the OPM
direct responsibility
for
activities
like retirement,
pay, health,
training, federal
unionization,
suitability, and
classification
functions
not
specifically
granted to
other
agencies
by
statute.
The
agency’s
Director is
charged with
aiding the
President, as
the
President
may request,
in
preparing
such
civil service
rules
as
the
President
pre-
scribes
and
otherwise
advising
the
President
on
actions
that
may
be
taken
to
promote
an efficient civil service
and a systematic application of the merit system principles,
including
recommending
policies
relating
to
the
selection,
promotion,
transfer,
per-
formance,
pay, conditions
of
service,
tenure,
and
separation
of
employees.
The
MSPB is
the
lead
adjudicator for
hearing and
resolving cases
and
contro-
versies
for
2.2
million federal
employees.3 It
is
required to
conduct fair
and
neutral
case
adjudications,
regulatory reviews, and
actions and
studies to
improve the
workforce.
Its
court-like
adjudications
investigate
and
hear
appeals
from
agency actions
such as furloughs, suspensions, demotions, and terminations and
are appealable to
the U.S.
Court of
Appeals.
The
FLRA hears
appeals of
agency personnel
cases involving
federal labor
griev-
ance
procedures
to
provide
judicial review
with binding
decisions appealable
to
appeals
courts.4 It
interprets
the
rights
and
duties
of
agencies
and
employee
labor organizations—on
management
rights, OPM
interpretations,
recognition
of
labor
organizations,
and
unfair
labor practices—under
the
general
principle of
bargain- ing
in good
faith and
compelling need.
The
OSC
serves
as
the
investigator,
mediator,
publisher, and
prosecutor before
the
MSPB with
respect to
agency and
employees
regarding prohibited person-
nel practices, Hatch Act5
politicization, Uniformed Services
Employment and Reemployment
Rights Act6
issues,
and
whistleblower complaints.7
The
Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission
(EEOC) has
general respon-
sibility
for reviewing charges of
employee
discrimination
against all
civil rights
breaches.
However,
it also
administers
a government
employee
section
that
investi- gates and adjudicates
federal employee complaints concerning equal employment
violations
as with
the
private
sector.8
This
makes
the
agency
an
additional
de
facto
factor in government
personnel management.
While
not
a
personnel agency
per
se,
the
General
Services Administration
(GSA)
is
charged
with general
supervision of
contracting.9 Today,
there
are
many more
contractors in
government than there are civil service employees. The GSA must
therefore
be a
part of
any personnel
management discussion.
ANALYSIS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
OPM: Managing
the Federal Bureaucracy.
At the very pinnacle of the modern
progressive
program to
make
government competent stands
the ideal of
professionalized,
career civil
service. Since
the turn
of the
20th century,
2025 Presidential
Transition Project
progressives have sought a system
that could effectively select, train, reward,
and
guard
from
partisan
influence
the
neutral
scientific
experts
they
believe
are required
to
staff
the
national
government
and
run
the
administrative
state.
Their
U.S.
system was
initiated by
the
Pendleton
Act
of
188310 and
institutionalized
by
the
1930s New
Deal to
set
principles
and
practices
that were
meant to
ensure that
expert
merit rather
than partisan
favors or
personal
favoritism ruled within
the federal bureaucracy. Yet,
as public
frustration with the
civil service
has grown,
generating calls
to “drain
the swamp,”
it has
become clear
that their
project has
had serious unintended consequences.
The
civil service
was
devised
to
replace
the
amateurism
and
presumed
corrup-
tion
of
the
old
spoils
system, wherein
government jobs
rewarded loyal
partisans who
might or
might not
have
professional backgrounds. Although
the system
appeared to be sufficient
for the
nation’s first
century,
progressive intellectuals and
activists
demanded
a
more
professionalized,
scientific,
and
politically
neutral
Administration.
Progressives
designed
a
merit
system
to
promote
expertise
and shield
bureaucrats
from
partisan
political
pressure,
but
it
soon
began
to
insulate
civil servants from
accountability. The modern merit system increasingly made it
almost
impossible
to fire
all
but
the
most
incompetent
civil
servants.
Complying with
arcane
rules
regarding
recruiting,
rating,
hiring,
and
firing
simply
replaced the
goal of
cultivating
competence and expertise.
In the 1970s, Georgia Democratic
Governor Jimmy Carter, then a political
unknown,
ran
for
President
supporting
New
Deal
programs
and
their
Great
Soci-
ety
expansion
but opposing
the
way
they
were
being
administered.
The
policies
were not
actually
reducing
poverty,
increasing
prosperity,
or
improving
the
envi-
ronment,
he argued,
and
to
make
them
work
required
fundamental
bureaucratic
reform. He
correctly charged that
almost all
government
employees were rated
as
“successful,” all
received
the
same
pay
regardless
of
performance,
and
even
the
worst
were
impossible
to fire—and
he
won
the
presidency.
President
Carter fulfilled his campaign promise by hiring Syracuse
University Dean
Alan Campbell,
who
served
first as
Chairman of
the
U.S.
Civil Service
Com-
mission and then as Director of the OPM and helped him devise and pass
the Civil
Service
Reform Act
of
1978
(CSRA)11 to
reset
the
basic
structure of
today’s bureau-
cracy.
A new
performance
appraisal system was
devised with
a five rather
than three
distribution
of
rating
categories
and
individual
goals
more
related
to
agency
missions
and
more
related
to
employee
promotion
for
all.
Pay
and
benefits
were
based
directly
on improved
performance
appraisals
(including
sizable
bonuses)
for mid-level
managers and
senior
executives. But time
ran out
on President
Carter before the act
could be
fully
executed, so it
was left
to President
Ronald Reagan
and his
new OPM
and agency
leadership to implement.
Overall,
the new
law seemed
to work
for a
few years
under Reagan,
but the
Carter–
Reagan
reforms were
dissipated within
a
decade.
Today, employee
evaluation is
back
Mandate for
Leadership: The Conservative
Promise
to
pre-reform levels
with almost
all
rated
successful or
above, frustrating
any
rela-
tion
between
pay
and
performance. An
“outstanding”
rating
should be
required for
Senior
Executive
Service
(SES) chiefs
to
win
big
bonuses,
but
a
few
years
ago, when it was
disclosed that the Veterans Administration executives who
encouraged false reporting of waiting lists for hospital
admission were rated outstanding, the Senior
Executive
Association
justified
it,
telling
Congress that
only
outstanding
performers would
be
promoted
to
the
SES
in
the
first
place
and
that
precise
ratings
were
unnec-
essary.12 The
Government
Accountability
Office
(GAO), however,
has
reported
that pay raises, within-grade pay increases, and locality
pay for regular employees and
executives
have
become
automatic rather
than based
on
performance—as
a
result
of
most
employees being
rated at
similar appraisal
levels.13
OPM:
Merit Hiring
in a
Merit System.
It should not
be impossible
even for
a
large
national
government
to
hire
good
people
through
merit
selection.
The government
did so
for years,
but it
has proven
difficult in recent
times to
select personnel
based on
their
knowledge,
skills,
and
abilities
(KSA)
as
the
law
dictates.
Yet for
the
past
34
years,
the
U.S.
civil
service
has
been
unable
to
distinguish
con- sistently
between strong
and unqualified applicants for
employment.
As the Carter
presidency was winding
down, the
U.S. Department
of Justice
and
top lawyers
at
the
OPM
contrived
with
plaintiffs
to
end
civil
service
IQ
exam-
inations
because of
concern
about
their
possible
impact
on
minorities.
The
OPM had
used
the
Professional and
Administrative
Career
Examination
(PACE)
gen-
eral intelligence exam to
select college graduates for top agency employment, but Carter
Administration officials—probably without the President’s
informed con- currence—abolished
the
PACE
through
a
legal
consent
court
decree
capitulating to
demands
by
civil
rights
petitioners who
contended
that
it
was
discriminatory. The
judicial
decree
was
to
last
only
five
years
but
still
controls
federal hiring
and is
applied to
all KSA tests
even today.
General
ability
tests
like
the
PACE
have
been used
successfully
to assess
the
use-
fulness and
cost-effectiveness of broad intellectual qualities across many
separate occupations.
Courts have
ruled that
even without
evidence of
overt,
intentional discrimination,
such results might suggest discrimination. This doctrine of
dispa- rate
impact
could
be
ended
legislatively or
at
least
narrowed
through
the
regulatory
process by a future
Administration. In any event, the federal government has been
denied
the
use
of
a
rigorous
entry examination
for
three
decades,
relying
instead on
self-evaluations that have forced managers to resort to
subterfuge such as
preselecting
friends
or
associates
that
they
believe
are
competent
to
obtain
qual- ified
employees.
In
2015, President
Barack Obama’s
OPM
began
to
introduce
an
improved
merit examination called USAHire, which it had been
testing quietly since 2012 in a few agencies
for
a
dozen
job
descriptions.
The
tests
had
multiple-choice
questions with
only
one
correct answer.
Some questions
even required
essay replies:
questions
2025 Presidential
Transition Project
that would
change regularly to depress cheating. President Donald Trump’s
OPM planned
to implement such changes
but was
delayed
because of
legal concerns
over possible disparate impact.
Courts
have agreed
to review
the consent
decree if
the Uniform Guidelines
on
Employee
Selection
Procedures
setting
the
technical
requirements
for
sound exams
are reformed.
A government
that is
unable to
select
employees based on
KSA-like
test
qualifications
cannot
work,
and
the
OPM
must
move
forward on
this very basic
personnel management obligation.
The Centrality
of Performance Appraisal.
In the meantime, the OPM must
manage
the
workforce
it
has.
Before
they
can
reward
or
discipline
federal
employees,
managers
must
first
identify
who
their
top
performers
are
and
who
is
performing
less than
adequately.
In
fact,
as
Ludwig
von
Mises
proved
in
his
classic
Bureaucracy,14 unlike
the
profit-and-loss
evaluation tool
used in
the
private
sector, government
performance
measurement
depends totally
on
a
functioning appraisal
system. If
they
cannot
be
identified
in
the
first place
within a
functioning appraisal
system, it
is impossible
to
reward good
performance or
correct poor
performance. The
problem is that
the
collegial
atmosphere of
a
bureaucracy
in
a
multifaceted appraisal
system
that
is
open
to
appeals
makes this
a
very
challenging ideal
to
implement
successfully. The
GAO reported
more recently
that overly
high and
widely spread
perfor- mance
ratings
were
again
plaguing
the government,
with
more
than
99
percent
of employees
rated fully
successful or above
by their
managers, a mere
0.3 percent
rated as
minimally
successful,
and
0.1
percent
actually
rated
unacceptable.15 Why? It is human
nature that
no one
appreciates
being told
that he
or she
is less
than outstanding in
every
way.
Informing
subordinates
in
a
closely
knit
bureaucracy
that they
are not
performing well is
difficult. Rating compatriots
is even
consid- ered
rude
and
unprofessional.
Moreover,
managers
can
be
and
often
are
accused
of
racial or
sexual discrimination
for
a
poor rating,
and
this
discourages honesty.
In
2018, President
Trump issued
Executive Order
1383916 requiring
agen-
cies to reduce
the time
for employees
to improve
performance before corrective
action could be taken;
to initiate
disciplinary actions against
poorly
performing employees
more expeditiously; to reiterate
that agencies
are obligated
to make
employees improve;
to reduce
the time
for employees
to respond
to allegations
of poor performance; to
mandate that
agencies
remind supervisors
of expiring
employee probationary periods; to prohibit agencies from entering into
settlement agreements
that
modify
an
employee’s
personnel
record;
and
to
reevaluate
proce- dures for
agencies to discipline supervisors who retaliate against
whistleblowers. Unfortunately, the order was overturned by the
Biden Administration,17 so
it will need to be
reintroduced in 2025.
The fact remains
that
meaningfully
evaluating employees’
performance is
a critical part
of
a
manager’s
job.
In
the
Reagan
appraisal
process,
managers
were evaluated
on how
they themselves
rated their
subordinates. This is
critical
to
Mandate
for Leadership:
The
Conservative
Promise
responsibility
and
improved
management. It
is
essential
that political
executives
build policy goals directly into employee appraisals both for mission
success and
for
employees to
know what
is
expected.
Indistinguishable
from
their coworkers on
paper, hard-working
federal employees
often go
unrewarded for
their efforts
and
are often
the system’s
greatest
critics. Federal
workers who
are performing
inadequately get
neither
the
benefit
of
an
honest
appraisal
nor
clear
guidance
on
how
to
improve.
Political
executives
should
take
an
active
role
in
supervising
per-
formance
appraisals
of
career
staff,
not
unduly
delegate
this
responsibility
to
senior
career managers,
and
be
willing
to
reward
and
support
good
performers.
Merit
Pay.
Performance
appraisal means little to daily operations if it is not tied
directly
to
real
consequences
for success
as
well
as
failure.
According
to a
survey
of
major U.S. private
companies—which, unlike the federal government, also have a
profit-and-loss
evaluation—90 percent
use
a
system
of
merit
pay
for
performance
based on
some
type
of
appraisal
system.
Despite
early
efforts
to
institute
merit
pay
throughout
the federal
government,
however,
compensation
is
still
based
primarily on
seniority rather than merit.
Merit
pay
for
executives and
managers was
part of
the
Carter
reforms and
was implemented
early in
the Reagan
presidency. Beginning in
the summer
of 1982,
the
Reagan OPM
entered
18
months
of
negotiations
with
House
and
Senate
staff on
extending
merit
pay
to
the
entire
workforce.
Long and
detailed
talks
between the
OPM and
both Democrats and Republicans
in Congress
ensued, and
a final agreement was reached
in 1983 that supposedly ensured the passage of legislation
creating
a new
Performance
Management
and
Recognition
System
(PMRS)
for
all, (not
just
management) GS-13
through GS-15
employees.
Meanwhile, the OPM issued
regulations to expand the role of performance related to pay
throughout the entire workforce, but congressional allies of the
employee
unions,
led
by
Representative Steny
Hoyer
(D)
of
government
employee– rich
Maryland,
stoutly resisted
this extension of
pay-for-performance
and, with
strong union
support,
used
the
congressional
appropriations
process
to
block
OPM
administrative pay reforms.
Bonuses for SES career employees survived, but per-
formance
appraisals
became
so
high
and
widely
distributed
that
there
was
little
relationship between performance and remuneration.
Ever
since the
original merit
pay
system
for
federal
managers (GM-13
through GM-15
grade
levels, just
below the
SES) was
allowed to
expire in
September 1993,
little to
nothing has been done either to reinstate the federal merit pay
program for managers or to distribute performance rating
evaluations for the SES, much less to extend
the
program
to
the
remainder of
the
workforce.
A
reform-friendly
President
and
Congress
might just
provide the
opportunity to
create a
more comprehensive
performance plan; in the meantime, however, political executives
should use exist-
ing
pay
and
especially
fiscal awards
strategically
to
reward good
performance to
the
degree allowed
by law.
2025
Presidential Transition
Project
Making the
Appeals Process Work. The
nonmilitary government dismissal
rate is
well
below
1
percent,
and
no
private-sector
industry
employee
enjoys
the job
security that
a federal employee
enjoys. Both
safety and
justice demand
that managers
learn
to
act
strategically
to
hire
good
and
fire
poor
performers
legally.
The initial paperwork
required to separate poor or abusive performers (when they
are
infrequently identified)
is
not
overwhelming,
and
managers
might
be
motivated
to act
if
it
were
not
for
the
appeals
and
enforcement
processes.
Formal
appeal
in
the
private sector is mostly a
rather simple two-step process, but government unions and
associations have been able to convince politicians to support a
multiple and extensive appeals and enforcement process.
As noted, there
are multiple
administrative appeals bodies.
The FLRA,
OSC, and
EEOC
have
relatively
narrow
jurisdictions.
Claims
that
an
employee’s
removal or
disciplinary actions violate the terms of a collective
bargaining agreement between
an
agency
and
a
union
are
handled
by
the
FLRA,
employees
who
claim
their
removal
was the
result
of
discrimination
can
appeal
to
the
EEOC,
and
employ-
ees who believe their firing
was retribution for being a whistleblower can go to the
OSC. While
the MSPB
specializes in abuses
of direct
merit system
issues, it
can and
does hear
and
review
almost
any
of
the
matters
heard
by
the
other
agencies.
Cases
involving
race, gender,
religion, age,
pregnancy, disability,
or
national
origin
can
be
appealed
to
the
EEOC or
the
MSPB—and
in
some
cases to
both—and to the
OSC. This
gives employees
multiple opportunities
to
prove
their cases,
and while the
EEOC, MSPB,
FLRA, and
OSC
may
all
apply
essentially the
same burden
of
proof,
the
odds
of
success
may
be
substantially
different
in
each
forum. In
fact,
forum
shopping
among them
for
a
friendlier venue
is
a
common practice,
but
fre-
quent
filers face
no
consequences
for
frivolous
complaints. As
a
result,
meritorious
cases
are
frequently
delayed, denying
relief and
justice to
truly aggrieved
individuals. The MSPB
can and does handle all such matters, but it faces a backlog of
an estimated 3,000
cases of
people who
were
potentially wrongfully terminated
or disciplined as far back as 2013. From 2017–2022 the
MSPB lacked the quorum
required
to
decide
appeals.
On
the
other
hand,
as
of
January
2023,
the
EEOC
had
a
backlog of
42,000
cases.
While
federal employees
win
appeals
relatively
infrequently—MSPB
adminis-
trative
judges
have
upheld
agency
decisions
as
much
as
80
percent of
the
time—the
real
problem is
the time
and paperwork
involved in
the elaborate
process that
managers
must
undergo
during
appeals.
This
keeps
even
the
best
managers
from bringing
cases in
all but
the most
egregious cases
of poor
performance or
mis- conduct. As
a
result,
the
MSPB,
EEOC,
FLRA,
and
OSC
likely
see
very
few
cases compared
to
the
number
of
occurrences, and
nonperformers
continue
to
be
paid and
often are
placed in
nonwork
positions.
Having a choice
of appeals is especially unique to the government. If lower-pri-
ority
issues
were addressed
in-house, serious
adverse actions
would be
less subject
Mandate for
Leadership: The Conservative
Promise
to delay. With the proper limitation
of labor union actions, the FLRA should
have
limited
reason for
appeals.
The
EEOC’s
federal
employee
section
should
be
transferred to
the
MSPB,
and
many
of
the
OCS’s
investigatory
functions
should
be returned to the
OPM. The MSPB could then become the main reviewer of adverse
actions,
greatly simplifying
the burdensome appeal process.
Making
Civil Service
Benefits
Economically and
Administratively Ratio- nal. In recent
years, the combined wages and benefits of the executive branch
civilian workforce totaled $300 billion according to official
data. But even that amount
does
not
properly
account for
billions
in
unfunded
liability
for
retirement and
other
government
reporting
distortions.
Official
data
also
report
employment as
approximately 2 million, but this ignores approximately 20
million contractors
who,
while
not
eligible
for
government
pay
and
benefits,
do
receive
them
indirectly
through contracting
(even
if
they
are
less
generous).
Official
data
also
claim
that national
government
employees
are
paid
less
than
private-sector
employees
are paid
for similar
work, but
several more
neutral sources
demonstrate
that pub-
lic-sector
workers
make
more
on
average
than
their
private-sector
counterparts.
All of this extravagance
deserves close
scrutiny.
Market-Based
Pay and Benefits.
According to current law, federal workers
are
to
be
paid
wages
comparable
to
equivalent
private-sector
workers
rather
than compared
to all
private-sector employees. While
the official
studies claim
that federal
employees are underpaid
relative to
the private sector
by 20
percent or
more,
a
2016
Heritage
Foundation
study
found
that
federal
employees
received
wages that
were
22
percent
higher
than
wages
for
similar
private-sector
workers; if the value
of employee benefits was included, the total compensation
premium for federal employees over their private-sector
equivalents increased to between 30
percent
and 40
percent.18 The
American
Enterprise Institute
found a
14
percent
pay
premium and
a 61
percent total
compensation
premium.19
Base
salary is
only one
component of
a
federal
employee’s total
compensation. In
addition
to
high
starting wages,
federal employees
normally receive
an
annual
cost-of-living
adjustment
(available to all
employees) and generous
scheduled raises known as
step
increases. Moreover, a large
proportion of federal
employ- ees are stationed in the Washington, D.C., area
and other large cities and are entitled
to steep
locality pay
enhancement to
account for
the high
cost of
living in these areas.
A federal
employee with five years’ experience receives 20 vacation days,
13 paid
sick
days, and
all
10
federal holidays
compared to
an
employee
at
a
large private
company
who
receives
13
days
of
vacation
and eight
paid
sick
days.
Federal
health
benefits
are
more
comparable
to those
provided
by
Fortune
500 employers
with
the
government
paying 72
percent
of
the
weighted
average
premiums,
but
this
is
much higher than for most
private plans. Almost half of private firms do not offer
any employer contributions at all.
2025
Presidential Transition
Project
The obvious
solution to these discrepancies is to move closer to a market
model for federal pay and benefits. One need is for a neutral
agency to oversee pay hiring
decisions,
especially for
high-demand occupations.
The
OPM
is
independent
of
agency
operations, so it can assess requirements more neutrally. For
many years,
with
its
Special Pay
Rates program,
the
OPM
evaluated claims
that federal
rates in an
area were
too
low
to
attract
competent employees
and
allowed
agencies to
offer
higher
pay
when
needed rather
than increased
rates for
all. Ideally,
the
OPM
should
establish an
initial pay
schedule for
every occupation
and
region,
monitor turnover
rates and
applicant-to-position
ratios, and
adjust pay
and recruitment
on that basis. Most of this requires legislation, but the OPM should be
an advocate for
a true
equality of
benefits
between the
public and
private
sectors.
Reforming Federal Retirement Benefits.
Career civil servants enjoy retire-
ment
benefits
that are
nearly
unheard
of
in
the
private
sector.
Federal
employees
retire earlier
(normally at age
55 after
30 years),
enjoy richer
pension
annuities, and
receive
automatic
cost-of-living
adjustments
based
on
the
areas
in
which
they retire.
Defined-benefit federal pensions are fully indexed for
inflation—a practice that
is extremely
rare in the private
sector. A
federal
employee with
a preretire- ment income
of $25,000
under the
older of
the two
federal
retirement plans
will receive
at
least
$200,000
more
over
a
20-year
period
than
will
private-sector
work- ers
with the
same
preretirement salary
under historic
inflation levels.
During
the
early
Reagan years,
the
OPM
reformed many
specific provisions
of
the
federal pension
program to
save billions
administratively.
Under
OPM
pres-
sure, Reagan and Congress
ultimately ended the old Civil Service Retirement System
(CSRS)
entirely for
new employees, which (counting
disbursements for the unfunded liability) accounted for 51.3 percent of the
federal government's total payroll. The retirement system that
replaced it—the Federal Employees
Retirement System
(FERS)—reduced the cost of federal employee retirement dis-
bursements
to 28.5
percent
of
payroll
(including
contributions
to
Social
Security
and the
employer
match
to
the
Thrift
Savings
Plan).
More
of
the
pension
cost
was
shifted
to the
employee,
but
the
new
system
was
much
more
equitable
for
the
40 percent
who received
few or
no benefits
under the
old system.
By
1999, more
than half
of
the
federal workforce
was
covered
by
the
new
system,
and
the
government’s per
capita share
of
the
cost (as
the
employer)
was
less
than half
the cost
of the
old system:
20.2 percent
of FERS
payroll vs.
44.3 percent
of CSRS
payroll, representing one of
the largest
examples of
government
savings anywhere.
Although
the government
pension
system
has
become
more
like private
pension systems, it still
remains much more generous, and other means might be
considered in the
future to
move it
even closer
to private
plans.
GSA: Landlord and Contractor Management.
The General Services
Administration
is
best
known
as
the
federal
government’s
landlord—designing,
constructing, managing, and preserving government buildings and
leasing and
Mandate
for Leadership:
The
Conservative
Promise
managing
outside commercial
real estate
contracting with
376.9 million
square feet
of
space.
Obviously, as
its
prime
function, real
estate expertise
is
key
to
the
GSA’s
success. However, the GSA is also the government’s purchasing agent,
connecting federal purchasers with
commercial products and
services in
the private sector
and their personnel
management functions. With contractors performing so many
functions
today,
the
GSA
therefore
becomes
a
de
facto
part
of
governmentwide
personnel management.
The GSA
also manages
the
Presidential
Transition Act (PTA) process,
which also
directly
involves the
OPM. A
recent
proposal would
have
incorporated
the
OPM
and
GSA
(and
OMB).
Fortunately,
this
did
not
take
place
in
that
form,
but
it
would
make
sense
for
GSA
and
OPM
leadership
and staff to
hold regular
meetings to
work through
matters of
common
interest such
as moderating PTA personnel
restrictions and the
relationships between contract and
civil service employees.
Reductions-in-Force.
Reducing the number of federal employees seems an obvious
way to
reduce the
overall expense
of the
civil service,
and many
prior Administrations have attempted to do just this.
Presidents Bill Clinton and
Barack
Obama
began
their
terms,
as
did
Ronald
Reagan
and
Donald
Trump,
by mandating
a
freeze
on
the
hiring
of
new
federal
employees,
but
these
efforts
did not
lead
to
permanent
and substantive
reductions
in
the
number
of
nondefense
federal employees.
First,
it
is
a
challenge
even to
know which
workers to
cut. As
mentioned, there
are 2 million federal employees, but
since budgets have exploded, so has the total number of
personnel with nearly 10 times more federal contractors than
federal employees.
Contractors are less
expensive because they
are not
entitled to
high
government
pensions
or
benefits
and
are
easier
to
fire
and
discipline.
In addition,
millions
of state
government
employees
work
under
federal
grants,
in
effect
administering federal
programs;
these
cannot
be
cut
directly.
Cutting
federal employment
can
be
helpful
and can
provide
a
simple
story
to
average
citizens,
but
cutting
functions,
levels,
funds,
and
grants
is
much
more
important
than
setting simple
employment size.
Simply
reducing
numbers can
actually
increase costs.
OMB
instructions fol-
lowing President Trump’s
employment freeze told
agencies to
consider buyout
programs, encouraging early
retirements in order to shift costs from current bud-
gets
in
agencies
to the
retirement
system
and
minimize
the
number
of
personnel
fired. The
Environmental Protection Agency
immediately implemented such
a program, and OMB
urged the passage of legislation to increase payout maximums
from
$25,000
to
$40,000
to
further
increase
spending
under
the
“cuts.”
President
Clinton’s OMB had introduced
a similar buyout that cost the Treasury $2.8 billion,
mostly
for
those
who were
going
to
retire
anyway. Moreover,
when
a
new
employee
is hired
to
fill
a
job
recently
vacated
in
a
buyout,
the
government
for
a
time
is
paying two
people to fill one job.
2025 Presidential
Transition Project
What is needed
at the
beginning is
a freeze on
all top
career-position hiring to
prevent
“burrowing-in”
by
outgoing
political
appointees.
Moreover,
four
fac-
tors
determine
the order
in
which
employees
are
protected
during
layoffs:
tenure,
veterans’ preference, seniority, and performance in that order
of importance. Despite
several
attempts
in
the
House
of
Representatives
during
the
Trump
years to
enact
legislation that
would
modestly
increase
the
weight
given
to
performance
over time-of-service,
the
fierce
opposition
by
federal
managers
associations
and
unions representing
long-serving but not necessarily well-performing constituents
explains why the bills failed to advance. A determined President
should insist that performance
be first
and be
wary of
costly types
of
reductions-in-force.
Impenetrable
Bureaucracy.
The
GAO
has
identified almost
a
hundred
actions that the
executive branch
or
Congress
could take
to
improve
efficiency and
effec- tiveness across
37 areas that span a broad range of government missions and
functions.
It identified
33
actions
to
address
mission
fragmentation,
overlap,
and duplication
in
the
12
areas
of
defense,
economic
development,
health,
homeland
security, and information
technology. It also identified 59 other opportunities for
executive agencies
or Congress
to reduce
the cost
of government
operations or enhance revenue collection across 25 areas of government.20
A
logical place
to
begin
would be
to
identify
and
eliminate
functions and
pro- grams that
are
duplicated
across Cabinet
departments or
spread across
multiple agencies.
Congress hoped
to help
this effort
by passing
the Government
Perfor- mance and Results Act of 1993,21 which required all federal
agencies to define their
missions,
establish
goals
and
objectives,
and
measure
and
report
their
per- formance
to Congress.
Three decades
of endless
time-consuming
reports later, the government continues
to grow
but with
more paper
and little
change either
in performance
or in
the number
of levels
between
government and
the people.
The Brookings Institution’s Paul
Light emphasizes the importance of the
increasing
number of
levels
between
the
top
heads
of
departments
and
the
people at
the
bottom
who
receive
the products
of
government
decision-making.
He
esti-
mates
that
there
are
perhaps
50
or
more
levels
of
impenetrable bureaucracy
and
no way
other
than
imperfect
performance
appraisals
to
communicate
between
them.22 The
Trump
Administration
proposed some
possible
consolidations, but these
were
not
received
favorably
in
Congress,
whose
approval
is
necessary
for
most
such
proposals.
The best
solution
is
to
cut
functions
and
budgets
and
devolve
respon-
sibilities. That
is a
challenge
primarily for
Presidents, Congress, and
the entire
government, but
the
OPM
still
needs
to
lead
the
way
governmentwide
in
managing
personnel
properly
even in
any
future
smaller government.
Creating a Responsible Career Management Service.
The people elect a
President
who
is
charged
by
Article
2,
Section
3
of
the
Constitution23 with
seeing
that the laws
are “faithfully executed” with his political appointees
democratically
linked
to
that
legitimizing
responsibility.
An
autonomous bureaucracy
has
neither
Mandate for
Leadership: The Conservative
Promise
independent
constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore,
career
civil
servants
by
themselves
should not
lead major
policy changes
and
reforms.
The creation of
the Senior
Executive
Service was
the top
career change
intro- duced by the 1978 Carter–Campbell Civil Service
Reform Act. Its aim was to
professionalize
the
career
service
and
make
it
more
responsible
to
the
democrat-
ically elected commander in
chief and his political appointees while respecting the rights
due
to
career
employees,
very
much
including
those
in
the
top
positions.
The
new
SES
would
allow
management
to be
more
flexible
in
filling
and
reassigning
executive positions
and locations
beyond narrow
specialties
for more
efficient mission
accomplishment and
would
provide
pay
and
large
bonuses
to
motivate career
performance.
The desire to infiltrate political
appointees improperly into the high career
civil
service
has been
widespread
in
every
Administration,
whether
Democrat
or Republican.
Democratic
Administrations,
however,
are
typically
more
successful
because they
require
the
cooperation
of
careerists,
who
generally
lean
heavily
to
the Left. Such burrowing-in
requires career job descriptions for new positions that
closely
mirror
the
functions
of
a
political
appointee;
a
special
hiring
authority
that
allows the bypassing of
veterans’ preference as well as other preference categories;
and the ability
to frustrate
career
candidates from
taking the
desired
position.
President
Reagan’s OPM
began by
limiting such
SES
burrowing-in, arguing that the
proper course
was to
create and
fill political
positions. This simultane-
ously
promotes
the CSRA
principle
of
political
leadership
of
the
bureaucracy
and respects
the
professional autonomy
of the career service.
But this
requires that
career SES
employees
should respect
political
rights too.
Actions such
as career staff
reserving
excessive
numbers
of
key
policy
positions
as
“career
reserved”
to deny
them to
noncareer SES employees
frustrate CSRA intent.
Another
evasion is the general
domination by career staff on SES personnel evaluation boards,
the opposite
of noncareer
executives dominating these
critical
meeting discussions
as
expected
in the
SES.
Career
training
also
often
underplays
the
political
role
in leadership
and inculcates
career-first policy and
value
viewpoints.
Frustrated
with these
activities by
top
career
executives, the
Trump Adminis-
tration
issued
Executive Order 1395724 to make career
professionals in positions
that
are
not
normally
subject to
change
as
a
result
of
a
presidential
transition
but
who
discharge
significant
duties
and
exercise
significant
discretion
in
formulating
and implementing executive
branch policy and programs an exception to the com-
petitive
hiring
rules
and
examinations for
career
positions
under
a
new
Schedule
F.
It
ordered
the
Director
of
OPM
and
agency
heads to
set
procedures
to
prepare
lists of
such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or
policy-advocating
positions
and
prepare
procedures to
create exceptions
from civil
service rules
when careerists
hold such
positions, from which
they can
relocate back
to the
regular civil service
after
such
service.
The
order
was
subsequently
reversed
by
President
2025 Presidential
Transition Project
Biden25 at the demand
of the
civil service
associations and unions.
It should
be reinstated, but SES responsibility should come first.
Managing
Personnel in a Union Environment.
Historically, unions were
thought to
be
incompatible
with
government
management.
There
is
a
natural
limit
to the bargaining power of
private-sector unions, but the financial bottom line of
public-sector unions is
not similarly
constrained. If private-sector
unions push
too
hard
a
bargain,
they
can
so
harm
a
company
or
so
reduce
efficiency
that
their
employer
is forced
to
go
out
of
business
and
eliminate
union
jobs
altogether.
There
is
no
such
limit
in
government, which
cannot
go
out
of
business,
so
demands
can
be
excessive
without negatively
affecting
employee
and
union
bottom
lines.
Even
Democratic President
Franklin Roosevelt
considered union
representa- tion
in
the
federal
government to
be
incompatible
with democracy.
Striking and
even
threats
of
bargaining
and
delay
were considered
acts against
the
people
and thus improper.
It
was
not
until
President John
Kennedy that
union representation
in
the
federal government
was
recognized—and
then merely
by
executive
order.
Labor bargaining was not set in statute until the Carter Administration
was forced
by
Congress to
do
so
in
order
to
pass
the
CSRA,
although all
bargaining was
placed under OPM
review.
The CSRA was
able to
maintain strong
management
rights for
the OPM
and agencies and
forbade collective bargaining on pay and benefits as well as
manage- ment
prerogatives. Over
time,
OPM,
FLRA,
and
agencies’
personnel
offices
and courts,
especially
in Democratic
Administrations,
narrowed
management
rights
so that labor bargaining
expanded as management rights contracted. But the man-
agement
rights
are
still
in
statute,
have
been
enforced
by
some
Administrations,
and should
be
enforced
again
by
any
future
OPM
and
agency
managements,
which should
not be
intimidated by union
power.
Rather than
being
daunted,
President Trump issued
three executive
orders:
•
Executive Order 13836,
encouraging agencies to
renegotiate all union
collective
bargaining
agreements
to
ensure
consistency
with
the
law
and respect for
management rights;26
•
Executive Order 13837,
encouraging agencies to
prevent union
representatives
from
using
official
time
preparing
or
pursuing
grievances
or from
engaging in
other union
activity on
government
time;27
and
•
Executive
Order
13839,
encouraging
agencies
both
to
limit
labor
grievances
on removals
from service
or on
challenging performance appraisals
and to
prioritize performance
over
seniority
when
deciding
who
should
be
retained
following
reductions-in-force.28
Mandate for
Leadership: The Conservative
Promise
All
were revoked
by
the
Biden Administration29 and
should
be
reinstated
by
the
next
Administration,
to
include
the
immediate
appointment of
the
FLRA
General Counsel and
reactivation of the Impasses Panel.
Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are
appropriate in the first
place. The
bipartisan
consensus up until
the middle
of the
20th cen-
tury
held that
these
unions
were
not
compatible
with
constitutional
government.30 After
more
than
half a
century of
experience with
public-sector
union
frustrations
of
good
government management,
it
is
hard to
avoid reaching
the
same
conclusion.
Fully
Staffing the
Ranks of
Political
Appointees. The President
must rely legally
on
his
top
department
and
agency
officials
to
run
the
government
and
on
top White
House
staff
employees
to coordinate
operations
through
regular
Cabinet
and
other
meetings
and communications.
Without
this
political
leadership,
the
career
civil
service
becomes
empowered
to lead
the
executive
branch
without
democratic
legitimacy.
While
many
obstacles
stand
in
his
way,
a
President
is
constitutionally and
statutorily
required
to fill
the
top
political
positions
in
the
executive
branch
both
to
assist
him
and
to
provide
overall legitimacy.
Most Presidents
have had some difficulty obtaining congressional approval of
their
appointees, but
this has
worsened recently.
After the
2016 election,
President
Trump
faced
special
hostility from
the
opposition
party and
the
media
in
getting
his
appointees
confirmed or even
considered by the
Senate. His
early Office
of Presidential
Personnel
(PPO)
did
not
generally
remove
political
appointees
from the
previous
Administration but
instead
relied
mostly
on
prior
political
appoin-
tees and
career
civil
servants
to
run
the
government.
Such
a
reliance
on
holdovers and
bureaucrats led to a lack of agency control and the absolute
refusal of the Acting Attorney
General
from
the
Obama
Administration
to
obey
a
direct
order from the
President.
Under the early PPO, the Trump
Administration appointed fewer political
appointees
in
its
first
few
months
in
office
than
had
been
appointed
in any
recent
presidency,
partly
because
of
historically
high
partisan
congressional
obstructions
but also
because several
officials
announced that
they preferred
fewer political
appointees in the agencies as a
way to cut federal spending. Whatever the reasoning, this
had the effect of
permanently hampering the
rollout of
the new President’s
agenda.
Thus,
in
those
critical
early years,
much
of
the
government
relied
on
senior
careerists and holdover Obama
appointees to carry out the sensitive responsibili- ties
that would
otherwise belong to
the new
President’s appointees.
Fortunately,
the later PPO, OPM, and Senate leadership began to cooperate to
build
a
strong
team to
implement the
President’s personnel
appointment agenda.
Any
new
Administration would be
wise to
learn that
it will
need a
full cadre
of sound
political
appointees
from
the
beginning
if
it
expects
to
direct
this
enormous
federal bureaucracy.
A close
relationship between the
PPO at
the White
House and the
OPM,
coordinating with agency
assistant secretaries of
administration
2025 Presidential
Transition Project
and PPO’s
chosen White House Liaisons and their staff at each agency, is
essential
to
the
management of
this large,
multilevel, resistant,
and
bureaucratic
challenge. If
“personnel
is
policy”
is
to
be
our
general guide,
it
would
make sense
to
give
the
President
direct
supervision
of
the
bureaucracy with
the
OPM
Director available
in his Cabinet.
A
REFORMED
BUREAUCRACY
Today,
the federal
government’s bureaucracy cannot
even meet
its own
civil service
ideals.
The
merit
criteria
of
ability,
knowledge,
and
skills
are
no
longer
the
basis
for
recruitment, selection,
or
advancement,
while
pay
and
benefits
for
com- parable
work
are
substantially above
those
in
the
private
sector.
Retention
is
not based
primarily
on
performance, and
for
the
most
part,
inadequate
performance is
not appraised, corrected, or punished.
The authors have made many
suggestions here that, if implemented, could
bring
that
bureaucracy
more
under
control
and
enable
it
to
work
more
efficiently and
responsibly,
which
is
especially
required
for
the
half
of
civilian
government that
administers its
undeniable
responsibilities for defense
and foreign
affairs. While a better administered central bureaucracy
is crucial for both those and
domestic
responsibilities, the
problem
of
properly
running
the
government
goes beyond
simple
bureaucratic
administration. The
specific
deficiencies of the
fed- eral
bureaucracy—size, levels of organization, inefficiency, expense,
and lack of
responsiveness to political leadership—are rooted in the
progressive ideology that
unelected
experts
can
and
should
be
trusted
to
promote
the
general
welfare
in
just about
every area of social life.
The
Constitution,
however,
reserved a
few
enumerated
powers to
the
federal
government
while leaving
the
great
majority of
domestic activities
to
state,
local, and private
governance. As
James Madison
explained: “The
powers reserved
to the
several States
will extend
to all the objects,
which, in
the ordinary course
of affairs, concern the
lives,
liberties and
properties of
the people;
and the internal order,
improvement and
prosperity of
the state.”31
Modern
progressive
politics has simply given
the national
government more to
do than
the complex
separa- tion-of-powers Constitution allows.
That
progressive system
has
broken
down in
our
time,
and
the
only real
solution
is
for
the
national government
to
do
less: to
decentralize and
privatize as
much as
possible
and
then
ensure that
the
remaining
bureaucracy is
managed effectively
along
the lines
of the
enduring
principles set out
in detail
here.
AUTHORS’ NOTE:
The
authors are
grateful for
the
collaborative work of
the
individuals listed
as
contributors to
this
chapter
for
the
2025
Presidential
Transition
Project.
The
authors
alone
assume
responsibility
for
the
content
of this
chapter, and no
views
expressed herein
should be
attributed to
any other
individual.
Mandate for
Leadership: The Conservative
Promise
ENDNOTES
1.
U.S.
Constitution, Article II, Section 2,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii#section1 (accessed February 1, 2023).
2.
5 U.S. Code §§ 1101
et seq. and 1103(a)(5),
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/part-II/chapter-11 (accessed February
1,
2023).
3.
5
U.S.
Code
§
1201,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/1201
(accessed
February
1,
2023).
4.
5
U.S.
Code
§
7101,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7101
(accessed
February
1,
2023),
and
§
7117,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7117
(accessed
February
1,
2023).
5.
S. 1871, An
Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, Public Law No.
76-252, August 2, 1939,
https://
govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/53/STATUTE-53-Pg1147.pdf (accessed February 1, 2023).
6.
H.R.
995,
Uniformed
Services
Employment
and
Reemployment
Rights
Act
of
1994,
Public
Law
No.
103-353,
101st
Congress,
October 13,
1994,
https://www.congress.gov/103/statute/STATUTE-108/STATUTE-108-Pg3149.
pdf
(accessed
February
1,
2023).
7.
5
U.S.
Code
§
1206,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/1206
(accessed
February
1,
2023).
8.
42
U.S.
Code
§
2000e,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000e
(accessed
February
1,
2023).
9.
40
U.S.
Code
§
581,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/40/581
(accessed
February
1,
2023).
10.
U.S.
National
Archives,
“Milestone
Documents:
Pendleton
Act
(1883),”
last
reviewed
February
8,
2022,
https://
www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/pendleton-act
(accessed February 2, 2023).
11.
S.
2640,
Civil
Service
Reform
Act
of
1978,
Public Law
No.
95-454,
95th
Congress,
October 13,
1978,
https://
www.congress.gov/95/statute/STATUTE-92/STATUTE-92-Pg1111.pdf
(accessed
February
2,
2023).
12.
Donovan Sack and Bill Theobald, “Veterans Affairs Pays $140
Million in Bonuses Amid Scandals,”
USA
Today, November 11, 2015,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/11/11/veterans-affairs-pays-142-
million-bonuses-amid-scandals/75537586/
(accessed
March
15,
2023).
13.
U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Federal Workforce:
Distribution of Performance Ratings Across
the Federal Government,
2013,” GAO-16-520R,
May 9, 2016,
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-16-520r.pdf
(accessed March 15, 2023); U.S. Government Accountability
Office,
Results-Oriented
Management: OPM Needs
to Do More
to Ensure
Meaningful Distinctions Are
Made in
SES Ratings
and
Performance Awards,
GAO-15-
189,
January
2015,
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-15-189.pdf
(accessed
March
15,
2023);
U.S.
Government
Accountability Office,
“Measuring Federal Employee Performance,” WatchBlog, posted
October 18, 2016,
https://www.gao.gov/blog/2016/10/18/measuring-federal-employee-performance
(accessed March 15, 2023);
Lisa
Rein, “The
Federal
Workforce, Where Everyone’s
Performance Gets Rave
Reviews,”
The
Washington Post,
June
13,
2016,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/06/13/heres-the-news-from-the-
federal-government-where-everyone-is-above-average-way-above/
(accessed
March
15,
2023).
14.
Ludwig von
Mises,
Bureaucracy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944),
https://ia902300.us.archive.
org/17/items/mises-pdfs/1944-01-01_LudwigVonMises_Bureaucracy.pdf
(accessed
February
2,
2023).
15.
Figure
1,
“Permanent,
Non-Senior
Executive
Service
Employee
Performance
Rating
Outcomes
(All
Rating Systems, Calendar Year
2013),” in
U.S. Government
Accountability Office, “Federal Workforce: Distribution of
Performance
Ratings
Across
the
Federal
Government,
2013,”
p.
6.
16.
President
Donald
J.
Trump,
Executive
Order
13839,
“Promoting
Accountability
and
Streamlining
Removal Procedures
Consistent with Merit
System
Principles,” May
25, 2018,
in
Federal Register,
Vol. 83,
No. 106
(June 1, 2018), pp. 25343–25347,
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2018-06-01/pdf/2018-11939.pdf
(accessed
February
2,
2023).
17.
President
Joseph
R.
Biden
Jr.,
Executive
Order
14003,
“Protecting
the
Federal
Workforce,”
January
22,
2021,
in
Federal
Register,
Vol.
86,
No.
16
(January
27,
2021),
pp.
7231–7233,
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-
2021-01-27/pdf/2021-01924.pdf
(accessed
February
2,
2023).
18.
Rachel
Greszler
and
James
Sherk,
“Why
It
Is
Time
to
Reform
Compensation
for
Federal
Employees,”
The Heritage Foundation, July 27,
2016,
https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/why-it-time-reform-
compensation-federal-employees.
19.
Andrew
G.
Biggs
and
Jason
Richwine,
“Comparing
Federal
and
Private
Sector
Compensation,”
American Enterprise
Institute
Working
Paper
No.
2011-02,
revised
June
2011,
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/
uploads/2011/10/AEI-Working-Paper-on-Federal-Pay-May-2011.pdf?x91208
(accessed
February
2, 2023).
2025 Presidential
Transition Project
20.
See
Gene
L.
Dodaro,
Comptroller
General
of
the
United
States,
“Government
Efficiency
and
Effectiveness:
Opportunities to Reduce
Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Billions in
Financial Benefits,”
testimony before the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and
Spending Oversight, Committee on Homeland
Security and Governmental
Affairs, U.S.
Senate, GAO-21-544T, May 12,
2021,
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-
21-544t.pdf
(accessed February 2,
2023).
21.
S. 20,
Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, Public Law No.
103-62, 103rd Congress, August
3, 1993,
https://www.congress.gov/103/statute/STATUTE-107/STATUTE-107-Pg285.pdf (accessed
February
2,
2023).
22.
Paul Light,
“The Real
Crisis in
Government,”
The Capital
Times
(Madison,
Wisconsin), January 22,
2010,
https://
captimes.com/news/opinion/column/paul-c-light-the-real-crisis-in-government/article_9e139318-3d00-
5898-908d-4c7aee1e105d.html
(accessed
March
15,
2023).
23.
U.S.
Constitution, Article II, Section 3,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii#section3 (accessed February 2, 2023).
24.
President Donald J. Trump, Executive Order 13957, “Creating
Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” October 21, 2020, in
Federal
Register, Vol. 85, No. 207 (October 26,
2020), pp. 67631–67635,
https://www.govinfo.gov/
content/pkg/FR-2020-10-26/pdf/2020-23780.pdf
(accessed
February
2,
2023).
25.
See
note
17,
supra.
26.
President Donald J. Trump,
Executive Order 13836, “Developing Efficient, Effective, and
Cost-Reducing Approaches
to Federal
Sector
Collective
Bargaining,” May 25,
2018, in
Federal Register,
Vol. 83,
No. 106
(June 1, 2018), pp. 25329–25334,
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2018-06-01/pdf/2018-11913.pdf
(accessed
February
2,
2023).
27.
President Donald J. Trump,
Executive
Order 13837, “Ensuring Transparency,
Accountability, and Efficiency
in
Taxpayer-Funded
Union Time
Use,” May
25, 2018,
in
Federal Register,
Vol. 83,
No. 106
(June 1,
2018),
pp.
25335–25340,
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2018-06-01/pdf/2018-11916.pdf
(accessed February 2, 2023).
28.
See
note
16,
supra.
29.
See
note
17,
supra.
30.
Philip
K.
Howard,
Not Accountable:
Rethinking the Constitutionality
of Public
Employee Unions
(Garden
City,
NY: Rodin Books, 2023).
31.
James
Madison,
The
Federalist Papers
No.
45,
January
26,
1788,
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/
Madison/01-10-02-0254
(accessed
February
1,
2023).
W
hile the lives of
Americans are affected in noteworthy ways, for better or
worse,
by
each
part
of
the
executive branch,
the
inherent
importance of national
defense and foreign
affairs makes the
Departments of Defense
and State first
among equals. Originating in the George Washington Administra-
tion,
the War
Department (as
it was
then known)
was headed
by Henry
Knox, America’s chief
artillery
officer
in
the
Revolutionary
War;
Thomas
Jefferson,
the
primary author of the
Declaration of Independence, was the first Secretary of State.
Despite
such
long
and
storied
histories,
neither
department
is
currently
living
up
to its standards, and the
success of the next presidency will be determined in part
by whether they
can be
significantly improved in
short order.
“Ever
since
our
Founding,”
former
acting secretary
of
defense
Christopher
Miller writes in Chapter 4,
“Americans have understood that the surest way to avoid war is
to
be
prepared
for it
in
peace.”
Yet
the
Department
of
Defense
“is
a
deeply
troubled
institution.” It has
emphasized leftist politics over military readiness, “Recruiting
was
the
worst
in
2022
that
it
has
been
in
two
generations,”
and
“the
Biden
Admin-
istration’s
profoundly
unserious
equity
agenda
and
vaccine
mandates
have
taken
a serious toll.”
Additionally, Miller writes that “the atrophy of our defense
industrial base,
the
impact
of
sequestration,
and
effective
disarmament
by
many
U.S.
allies
have exacted
a
high
toll
on
America’s
military.”
Moreover,
our
military
has
adopted
a risk-averse culture—think
of masked soldiers, sailors, and airmen—rather than
instilling and
rewarding
courage in
thought and
action.
The good news
is that
most enlisted
personnel, and most
officers,
especially below
the
rank
of
general
or
admiral,
continue
to
be
patriotic
defenders
of
liberty.
Mandate
for Leadership:
The
Conservative
Promise
But this is
now Barack
Obama’s general
officer corps.
That is
why Russ
Vought argues in
Chapter
2
that
the
National
Security
Council
“should
rigorously
review all
general and
flag officer
promotions to
prioritize the core
roles and
responsi- bilities
of the
military over
social
engineering and non-defense
related
matters, including climate
change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other
polarizing
policies that
weaken
our
armed
forces and
discourage
our nation’s
finest men
and women
from
enlisting.”
Ensuring
that many
of
America’s
best
and bright- est continue
to choose military service is essential.
“By
far
the
most significant
danger” to
America from
abroad, Miller
writes, “is
China.”
That
communist
regime
“is
undertaking
a
historic
military
buildup,” which “could
result in
a nuclear
force that
matches or
exceeds
America’s own
nuclear arsenal.”
Resisting Chinese expansionist aims “requires a denial defense”
whereby we
make “the
subordination of Taiwan
or other
U.S. allies
in Asia
prohibitively difficult.”
However,
Miller adds
that
“[c]ritically,
the
United
States
must
be
able to
do this
at a
level of
cost and
risk that
Americans are
willing to
bear.”
The best gauge
of such willingness is congressional approval. Accordingly, we
must
rediscover
and
adhere
to
the
Founders’ wise
division of
war
powers,
whereby Congress,
the most
representative and deliberative
branch,
decides whether
to go to war; and the
executive, the most energetic and decisive branch, decides how
to
carry
it
out
once
begun.
As
the
past
75
years
have
repeatedly
demonstrated
in
different ways—from Korea, to
Vietnam, to Iraq, to Afghanistan—we depart from our
constitutional design at our peril.
Miller
writes that
we
“must
treat missile
defense as
a
top
priority,” ensure
that more
of our
weapons are
made in
America, reform
the budgeting
process, and
sustain
“an efficient
and
effective
counterterrorism
enterprise.”
Across
all
of
our
efforts,
we must
keep
in
mind
that
part
of
peace
through
strength
is
knowing
when
to
fight.
As
George
Washington
warned nearly
two
centuries
ago,
we
must
con- tinue
to be
on guard
against being
drawn into
conflicts that
do not
justify great
loss
of
American
treasure
or
significant
shedding
of
American
blood.
At
the
same time,
we
must
be
prepared
to defend
our
interests
and
meet
challenges
where
and when they
arise.
An effective diplomatic
corps is
central to
defending our
interests and
influ- encing world
events.
Whereas
most
military
personnel
have
had
leftist
priorities
imposed from above, the problem at State comes largely from
within. Former State Department director of policy planning
Kiron Skinner writes in Chapter
6, “[L]arge
swaths
of
the
State
Department’s
workforce
are
left-wing
and
predis- posed
to
disagree
with a
conservative
President’s
policy
agenda
and
vision.”
She adds
that
the
department
possesses
a
“belief
that
it
is
an
independent
institution
that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own
foreign policy, and does
not need
direction from
an elected
President”—a
view that
does not
align with the Constitution.
2025
Presidential Transition
Project
The
solution to
this problem
is
strong
political leadership.
Skinner writes,
“The next Administration
must take
swift and
decisive steps
to
reforge
the
department
into a
lean and
functional diplomatic
machine that
serves the
President and,
thereby,
the American people.” Because the Senate has been extraordinarily lax in
fulfilling
its
constitutional
obligation
to
confirm
presidential appointees,
she
recommends putting
appointees into
acting roles
until such
time as
the
Senate
confirms them.
Skinner writes that State should
also stop skirting the Constitution’s trea- ty-making
requirements and stop
enforcing “agreements” as
treaties. It should encourage
more trade
with allies,
particularly with Great
Britain, and
less with
adversaries.
And
it
should
implement
a
“sovereign
Mexico”
policy,
as
our
neighbor
“has functionally
lost
its
sovereignty
to
muscular
criminal
cartels
that
effectively
run the
country.”
In
Africa,
Skinner
writes,
the
U.S.
“should
focus
on
core
security,
economic,
and
human
rights”
rather
than
impose
radical
abortion
and
pro-LGBT
initiatives.
Divisive
symbols
such
as
the
rainbow
flag
or
the
Black
Lives
Matter
flag have
no place
next to
the Stars
and Stripes
at our
embassies.
When
it comes
to China,
Skinner writes
that “a
policy of
‘compete where
we must,
but cooperate
where
we
can’…has
demonstrably failed.”
The
People’s
Repub-
lic of China’s (PRC) “aggressive behavior,” she writes, “can only be
curbed through external pressure.” Efforts to protect or
excuse China must stop. She observes, “[M]any
were quick
to dismiss
even the
possibility that COVID
escaped from
a Chinese
research
laboratory.”
Meanwhile,
Skinner
writes,
“[g]lobal
leaders
includ- ing President
Joe Biden…have tried to normalize or even laud Chinese
behavior.” She adds, “In some cases, these voices, like global
corporate giants BlackRock and Disney”—or
the National
Basketball
Association
(NBA)—“directly benefit from doing
business with Beijing.”
Former
vice president
of
the
U.S. Agency
for
Global
Media Mora
Namdar writes in
Chapter 8
that we
need to
have people
working for
USAGM who
actually believe
in
America,
rather than
allowing the
agencies to
function as
anti-American,
tax- payer-funded
entities
that
parrot
our
adversaries’
propaganda
and
talking
points.
Former acting deputy
secretary of homeland security Ken Cuccinelli says in Chap-
ter 5
that the
Department of
Homeland
Security (DHS),
a creation
of the George
W.
Bush era,
should be
closed, as
it
has
added needless
additional bureaucracy
and
expense
without
corresponding
benefit.
He
recommends
that it
be
replaced
with
a new “stand-alone border and immigration agency at the Cabinet level”
and that the remaining parts
of DHS
be distributed
among other
departments.
Former
chief of
staff for
the
director
of
National
Intelligence Dustin
Carmack writes
in Chapter
7 that
the U.S.
Intelligence Community is
too inclined
to look
in
the rearview
mirror,
engage
in
“groupthink,”
and
employ
an
“overly
cautious”
approach aimed
at personal
approval rather
than at
offering the
most accurate,
unvarnished
intelligence for
the
benefit
of
the
country.
And
in
Chapter
9,
former
acting deputy
administrator
of
the
U.S.
Agency
for
International
Development
Max
Mandate
for Leadership:
The
Conservative
Promise
Primorac
asserts that
the United
States Agency
for
International
Development (USAID) must be reformed, writing, “The Biden Administration has deformed
the agency
by
treating
it as
a
global
platform
to
pursue
overseas
a
divisive
political
and cultural
agenda that
promotes
abortion, climate
extremism, gender radicalism, and
interventions against perceived
systematic racism.”
If the recommendations
in the
following chapters are
adopted, what
Skinner says
about the
State
Department could
be true
for other
parts of
the federal gov-
ernment’s
national
security
and
foreign
policy
apparatus:
The
next
conservative
President has the opportunity to restructure the making and
execution of U.S. defense
and foreign
policy and
reset the
nation’s role
in the world.
The recom-
mendations outlined
in
this
section
provide
guidance
on
how
the
next
President
should use
the federal
government’s vast resources
to do
just that.
T
he
Constitution requires the federal government to “provide for the
common defence.”1 It assigns to Congress the
authority to “raise and support
Armies” and
to “provide
and maintain
a Navy”2 and speci-
fies that the President is
“commander in Chief” of America’s armed forces.3
Ever since our Founding,
Americans have understood that the surest way to avoid
war is
to be
prepared for
it in
peace—but when
deterrence
fails, we
must fight and win.
The
Department of
Defense (DOD)
is
the
largest part
of
our
federal government.
It
has
almost 3
million people
serving in
uniform or
a
civilian
capacity throughout the
world and
consumes approximately
$850 billion
annually—more
than
50
per-
cent
of our
government’s
discretionary spending.
The DOD is
also a
deeply troubled
institution. Historically, the
military has
been
one
of
America’s
most
trusted
institutions,
but
years
of
sustained
misuse,
a
two-tiered
culture of
accountability
that
shields
senior
officers
and
officials
while
exposing
junior officers
and
soldiers
in
the
field,
wasteful
spending,
wildly
shifting
security policies,
exceedingly poor discipline
in program
execution, and (most recently)
the Biden
Administration’s profoundly unserious
equity agenda
and vaccine mandates have
taken a
serious toll.
Our
disastrous withdrawal
from Afghanistan,
our
impossibly
muddled China strategy,
the
growing
involvement of
senior military
officers in
the
political
arena,
and deep confusion about the purpose of our military are clear signals of
a disturb-
ing
decay and
markers of
a
dangerous
decline in
our
nation’s
capabilities and
will. Additionally,
more
than 100,000
Americans die
annually in
large measure
because
Mandate
for Leadership:
The
Conservative
Promise
of
illicit narcotics
flows—more than
four times
as
many
people in
one
year
as
we
lost in our 20-year war
against al-Qaeda.
We also are
witnessing a transformation
in the
character of war.
The democ-
ratization of technology and the collapse of time and space
require dramatic, thoughtful
changes in
how
we
defend,
deter,
and
fight.
As
with
any
huge
bureau-
cracy—and
the
DOD
is
one
of
the
world’s
largest—breaking
the
status
quo
requires
leadership
and
endurance.
Technology
is
critical
to
maintaining
our
warfighting
primacy,
but
we
must
be
leery
of
the
siren
song
that
technology
alone
can
protect us.
More
important
is how
new
technologies
are
developed,
tested,
procured,
and used,
and
that
relies
on
the
true
competitive advantages
of
our
people:
ingenuity,
common sense,
and
thoughtfulness
grounded
in
a
free
society.
Because
war
will continue
to be
the most
stressful and consequential
human
endeavor, the
most powerful
weapon
systems
will
remain
the
six
inches
between
the
ears
of
our
citi- zens
and the
strength of
their hearts
and content
of their
souls.
Military
service is
the
most
difficult task
we
ask
of
our
citizens, and
our
nation
is
enormously
blessed that so many young, patriotic Americans eagerly
volunteer to
carry
such
a
heavy
burden. We
owe
them
everything, and
we
must
do
better.
To
do
better,
however, means
recognizing and
implementing four
overriding priorities:
•
Priority No.
1:
Reestablish
a culture
of command
accountability, nonpoliticization,
and warfighting
focus.
•
Priority No.
2:
Transform
our armed
forces for
maximum
effectiveness in an
era of great-power competition.
•
Priority No.
3:
Provide
necessary
support to
Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) border
protection
operations. Border protection
is a
national security
issue
that
requires
sustained
attention
and
effort
by
all elements of
the executive branch.
•
Priority
No. 4:
Demand financial transparency
and
accountability.
This
chapter offers
recommendations
for
improving our
armed forces
and
the
civilian
organizations
that support
and oversee
them.
DOD
POLICY
By far the most
significant danger to Americans’ security, freedoms, and pros-
perity
is
China.
China
is
by
any
measure
the
most
powerful state
in
the
world other than the
United States itself. It apparently aspires to dominate Asia and
then, from that
position,
become globally
preeminent. If
Beijing could
achieve this
goal, it
could
dramatically
undermine
America’s
core
interests,
including
by
restricting
2025
Presidential Transition
Project
U.S. access to
the world’s most important market. Preventing this from
happening must
be the
top priority
for American
foreign and
defense
policy.
Beijing presents a challenge to
American interests across the domains of
national
power,
but
the
military
threat that
it
poses
is
especially
acute
and
signif- icant.
China is
undertaking a
historic
military buildup
that includes
increasing capability
for
power
projection
not
only
in
its
own
region,
but
also
far
beyond
as well
as a
dramatic
expansion of
its nuclear
forces that
could result
in a nuclear force that
matches or
exceeds
America’s own
nuclear
arsenal.
The
most severe
immediate threat
that Beijing’s
military poses,
however, is
to Taiwan
and other
U.S. allies
along the
first island
chain in
the Western
Pacific. If
China could
subordinate Taiwan or
allies like
the
Philippines, South Korea,
and Japan,
it
could
break
apart
any
balancing
coalition
that
is
designed
to
prevent
Bei-
jing’s hegemony over Asia.
Accordingly, the United States must ensure that China
does
not
succeed.
This
requires
a
denial
defense:
the
ability
to
make
the
subordi- nation
of
Taiwan
or
other
U.S.
allies
in
Asia
prohibitively difficult.
Critically,
the United
States
must
be
able
to
do
this
at
a
level
of
cost
and
risk
that
Americans
are willing
to bear
given the
relative
importance of
Taiwan to
China and
to the
U.S.
The
United States
and
its
allies also
face real
threats from
Russia, as
evidenced by Vladimir
Putin’s brutal
war
in
Ukraine, as
well as
from Iran,
North Korea,
and transnational terrorism at a time when decades of
ill-advised military operations in the
Greater Middle
East, the
atrophy of
our
defense
industrial base,
the
impact
of
sequestration,
and effective
disarmament by many
U.S. allies
have exacted
a high toll
on America’s military.
This is a
grim landscape.
The United
States needs
to deal
with these
threats forthrightly
and with strength, but it also needs to be realistic. It cannot
wish away these problems. Rather, it must confront them with a
clear-eyed recognition of the need
for choice,
discipline, and adequate
resources for
defense.
In this light,
U.S. defense
strategy must
identify China
unequivocally
as the top
priority for U.S.
defense planning
while
modernizing and
expanding
the
U.S. nuclear arsenal and sustaining
an efficient and effective counterterrorism enterprise. U.S. allies
must also
step up,
with some
joining the
United States
in taking on
China in
Asia while
others take
more of
a lead
in dealing
with threats
from Russia in Europe, Iran, the Middle East, and North Korea.
The reality is that achieving these goals will require more
spending on defense, both by the United States and by its
allies, as well as active support for reindustrialization and
more support for allies’ productive capacity so that we can
scale our free- world efforts together.
Needed
Reforms
•
Prioritize a
denial defense
against China.
U.S. defense
planning
should
focus
on China
and, in
particular, the
effective
denial defense
of Taiwan.
Mandate
for Leadership:
The
Conservative
Promise
This
focus and
priority for
U.S. defense
activities will
deny China
the
first
island
chain.
1.
Require
that
all
U.S.
defense
efforts,
from
force
planning
to
employment
and
posture,
focus
on
ensuring
the
ability
of
American
forces
to
prevail
in
the pacing
scenario and
deny China
a
fait
accompli
against Taiwan.
2.
Prioritize
the
U.S.
conventional
force
planning
construct
to
defeat a
Chinese
invasion
of
Taiwan
before
allocating
resources
to
other
missions, such
as
simultaneously fighting another
conflict.
•
Increase allied
conventional
defense
burden-sharing.
U.S. allies
must take
far greater
responsibility
for their
conventional
defense. U.S.
allies must
play their
part
not
only
in
dealing
with
China,
but
also
in
dealing
with threats
from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
1.
Make
burden-sharing
a central
part of
U.S. defense
strategy with
the United
States
not
just
helping
allies to
step
up,
but
strongly
encouraging
them to do so.
2.
Support
greater
spending
and
collaboration
by
Taiwan
and
allies
in
the
Asia–Pacific
like
Japan
and
Australia
to
create
a
collective
defense
model.
3.
Transform NATO so
that U.S.
allies are
capable of
fielding the
great majority
of the conventional
forces required
to deter
Russia while
relying on the
United States
primarily for
our nuclear
deterrent, and
select
other
capabilities while
reducing
the
U.S.
force
posture
in
Europe.
4.
Sustain support for
Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take
responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses
both
individually
and working
collectively.
5.
Enable
South
Korea
to
take
the
lead
in
its
conventional
defense
against
North Korea.
•
Implement nuclear
modernization
and expansion.
The
United States
manifestly
needs to
modernize,
adapt, and
expand its
nuclear
arsenal. Russia
maintains
and is
actively
brandishing
a
very
large
nuclear
arsenal, but
China is
also
undertaking a historic
nuclear
breakout.
2025
Presidential Transition
Project
1.
Expand
and modernize
the U.S.
nuclear force
so that
it has
the size,
sophistication,
and
tailoring
to
deter
Russia
and
China
simultaneously.
2.
Develop
a
nuclear
arsenal
with
the
size,
sophistication,
and
tailoring—
including new capabilities at the theater level—to ensure that
there
is no
circumstance
in which
America is
exposed to
serious nuclear
coercion.
•
Increase allied counterterrorist burden-sharing.
Transnational
terrorism
remains
a
threat
to
Americans
even
as
we
pivot
toward
Asia.
1.
Sustain
the military
forces needed
to deter,
prevent, and
combat terrorism,
but
at
a
sustainable
cost
in
concert
with
other
elements
of national
power and partner efforts.
2. Prioritize