February 06, 2007

Return of the spoils system

Paul Krugman has taken note of the latest Executive Order dictating that all Federal agencies must be led by political appointees (see here) and dug a little deeper. He's learned, among other things, that this has been a goal since the beginning of the Bush Administration back in 2001, and that it was based on a Heritage Foundation policy paper (read it here).

The blueprint for Bush-era governance was laid out in a January 2001 manifesto from the Heritage Foundation, titled “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The manifesto’s message, in brief, was that the professional civil service should be regarded as the enemy of the new administration’s conservative agenda. And there’s no question that Heritage’s thinking reflected that of many people on the Bush team.

How should the civil service be defeated? First and foremost, Heritage demanded that politics take precedence over know-how: the new administration “must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Second, Heritage called for a big increase in outsourcing — “contracting out as a management strategy.” This would supposedly reduce costs, but it would also have the desirable effect of reducing the total number of civil servants.

Well, we've seen how well that turned out. Contractors run amok in Iraq, no competitive bidding for those contracts, political hacks at the top of FEMA...need I go on?

Krugman concludes this way:

The modern civil service system dates back more than a century; in just six years the Bush administration has managed to undo many of that system’s achievements. And the administration still has two years to go.

These clowns have done more damage to our form of government in six years than I'd have imagined possible.

Posted by Linkmeister at February 6, 2007 08:02 PM | TrackBack
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