CIVIL SERVICE
What is the Civil Service?
Since I had to know about civil servant, I was trying to know the meaning, the samples, the characteristic and all about civil servant. But before then we could understand, we should learn again the sources of it, at least must learn the wider meaning in term of Civil Service..here as follow:
CIVIL SERVICE, is the term applied to the appointed civilian employees of a state or governmental unit, as distinct from elected officials and military personnel. Increasingly, most civil service systems in the United States are characterized by a merit system of employment based on technical expertise, as determined by competitive examinations, and on permanent tenure and nonpartisanship. A few positions in the federal civil service and many more in state and local governments are filled by employees who owe their appointments primarily to political considerations. Such employees and the offices that they fill are known as the patronage, and the appointment mechanism is known as the spoils system. Much of the history of the U.S. civil service has had to do with its transformation from a spoils system to a predominantly merit system—a struggle spanning more than a hundred years and still going on in some state and local jurisdictions.
Under President George Washington and his successors through John Quincy Adams, the federal civil service was stable and characterized by relative competence and efficiency. However, the increasingly strong pressures of Jacksonian egalitarian democracy after 1829 rudely adjusted the civil service of the founding fathers, and for more than a half-century the federal, state, and local services were largely governed by a spoils system that gave little or no consideration to competence.
The unprecedented corruption and scandals of the post–Civil War era generated the beginnings of modern civil service reform. Anact of 1871 authorized the president to utilize examinations in the appointing process, and President Ulysses S. Grant appointed the first U.S. Civil Service Commission in that year. But Congress refused appropriations; full statutory support for reform waited until 1883 and the passage of the Pendleton Act, which is still the federal government's central civil service law. This act reestablished the Civil Service Commission, created a modern merit system for many offices, and authorized the president to expand this system. Behind the reforms of the late 19th century lay the efforts of the National Civil Service League, supported by public reaction against the corruption of the times. Successive presidents, requiring more and more professional expertise to carry out congressional mandates, continued and consolidated the reform—notably Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover. By 1900 the proportion of the federal civil service under the merit system reached nearly 60 percent; by 1930 it had exceeded 80 percent.
The depression period of the 1930s saw both a near doubling of the federal civil service and some renaissance of patronage politics, especially in the administration of work relief. With public and congressional support during his second term, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was empowered to, and did, expand the competitive system to most positions in the new agencies. Moreover, Congress extended a version of the merit system to first-, second-, and third-class postmasters; federal agencies were all required to have personnel offices; the Tennessee Valley Authority, under a special merit system statute, commenced to pioneer in government-employee labor relations; and pay-and position-classification systems were improved.
After World War II, federal personnel management, which had formerly consisted mainly of administering examinations and policing the patronage, further expanded its functions. The operation of personnel management was largely delegated to well-staffed personnel offices of agencies. Improved pay and fringe benefits, training and executive development, a positive search for first-rate talent, new approaches to performance rating, equal employment opportunity, improved ethical standards, loyalty and security procedures, incentive systems, and special programs for the handicapped were major developments. These developments and a full-scale labor relations system based on a precedent-shattering executive order by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 have characterized the transformation of nineteenth-century merit system notions into public personnel management as advanced as that anywhere in the world. In a federal civil service of 3 million, there are fewer than 15,000 patronage posts of any consequence.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, civil service reform came also to many state and local governments, although relatively more slowly and less completely. In 1883 New York State adopted the first state civil service act and was followed almost immediately by Massachusetts. By 1940 one-third of the states had comprehensive merit systems; by 1970 two-thirds had them. The reform spread, from the East, through cities as well, after several New York State and Massachusetts cities set up civil service commissions in the 1880s. Chicago followed in 1895. Most metropolitan centers and many of the smaller cities have modern merit systems. A few have systems for police and fire departments only. Most cities act under their own statutes, but in New York, Ohio, and New Jersey, there is general coverage of local jurisdictions by state constitutional or other state legal provision. In one-quarter of the states—notable among which is California—the state personnel agencies may perform technical services for localities on a reimbursement basis. Whereas a bipartisan civil service commission provides administrative leader-ship in most jurisdictions, the single personnel director is becoming more popular.
The most important twentieth-century developments in civil service have to do with federal-state cooperative personnel arrangements. In part, such arrangements stem from a 1939 amendment to the Social Security Act of 1935, which required the federal government to apply merit system procedures to certain state and local employees paid in whole or in part through grants-in-aid. A considerable number of similar statutes followed, so that by the 1970s perhaps a million state and local positions fell within personnel systems closely monitored by the federal government. Federal supervision was for many years managed by a bureau of the Social Security Administration and later by a division of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The Intergovernment Personnel Act of 1970, signed by President Richard M. Nixonon 5 January 1971, relocated the supervision of grant-in-aid employees within the U.S. Civil Service Commission. But, equally important, this act authorized federal grants-in-aid to state and local governments in support of modern personnel systems within these jurisdictions. The function of handling these grants-in-aid is also with the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Thus, it has become the central personnel agency not only of the federal government but also, in many respects, of the entire intergovernmental system.
In size, the federal civil service has grown from an institution of a few hundred employees in 1789 to nearly 3 million. During major wars the federal civil service has doubled and even quadrupled; its peak occurred in 1945 when civil service employees numbered nearly 4 million. There has been a similar growth instate and local services. The federal civil service saw its greatest continuing expansion between 1930 and 1950; progressive expansion of state and local civil service rosters began in the late 1940s, when state and local governments started on the road to becoming the fastest growing segment of American enterprise, public or private. By the 1970s federal civil employees functioned almost entirely under merit system procedures, as did some 75 percent of those in state and local governments. Civil service reform is therefore nearly an accomplished fact in the United States, but budget cuts in the 1980s and 1990s have created a serious strain on the civil service's efforts to fulfill its duties. Critics of the civil service have described its members as out of-touch "government bureaucrats" who put their own narrow interests ahead of those of the American people. In an effort to reduce the size of the government, such critics have proposed and implemented significant reductions in the civil service budget. In light of such policies, civil service officers at both the state and federal levels face the challenge of meeting growing obligations with declining resources.
Notwithstanding budget concerns, civil service re-form in the United States has produced a uniquely open system, in contrast to the closed career system common to other nations—which one enters only at a relatively early age and remains within for a lifetime, in the manner associated in the United States mainly with a military career. The Pendleton Act of 1883 established this original approach, providing that the federal service would be open to persons of any age who could pass job-oriented examinations. Persons may move in and out of public service, from government to private industry and back again, through a process known as lateral entry. It is this openness to anyone who can pass an examination, this constant availability of lateral entry, that has set the tone and character of public service in the United States at all levels. One consequence of U.S. civil service policy has been to provide a notable route for upward mobility, especially for women and blacks. Thus, the U.S. civil service has reflected the open, mobile nature of American society and, in turn, has done much to support it.
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