The Gutting of our Civil Service- A Prelude to Fascism (Dale Tavris MD, MPH)

One of the most striking hallmarks of the Bush/Cheney administration has been the privatization of as many formerly government jobs as it could get away with. This effort has sometimes been referred to as “competitive outsourcing”, and the implication of that term is that privatization creates competition which ultimately results in better or more efficient services at lower cost.

This kind of thinking gathered steam under the Reagan presidency, and reached new heights under Bush II. The prevailing philosophy behind it is, as Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”. The ultimate end of this movement is the complete dismantling of the Civil Service system in our country, and its replacement by privatization of all government functions formerly covered by our Civil Service system.

I have worked as a civil servant for more than 20 years, beginning in 1982. During that time I have developed a deep appreciation of our Civil Service system, and I have had a close view of the attacks on it by the radical right, which played such a prominent role in government during those years. In this post I discuss why a Civil Service system is so important to our functioning as a nation – in part through personal reflections on the role it has played in the type of work that I have been involved with. Although many of my examples apply to my own specific type of work, the general principles could just as well apply to any of several different types of government work.

I have performed all of my government work in the role of an epidemiologist. Epidemiology is the science that deals with the causes of human disease and injury and how to prevent and ameliorate them. In my role as an epidemiologist for public health departments in Florida and Pennsylvania, my job has been to conduct epidemiological research and to promulgate policies to protect the health of the citizens in my jurisdictions. In my current role as an epidemiologist for the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), my job has been to assess the safety and effectiveness of medical devices, and to play a role in federal policy decisions relating to those devices.

I’ll begin with some background on the Civil Service system in our country.

Some background on the need for a Civil Service System in the United States

Prior to the Pendleton Act in 1883, a political patronage system was used in the United States for handing out the great majority of federal (and state and local government) jobs. There were several serious problems with this system: Because hiring for federal positions was determined by political cronyism rather than by merit, federal employees were far from the most capable of potential employees to begin with; the constant turnover of positions meant that there was little institutional memory or opportunity for most employees to benefit from long experience; poor job security meant that employees generally built up little loyalty to their job; and the political control of federal employees by those in office meant that much time and effort was spent by federal employees on political activities, at the expense of serving the American people. Not specifically mentioned, but probably implied in the article, was the chilling effect of poor job security on the ability of professional federal employees to perform their job in accordance with the needs of the citizens that they were supposed to serve and the dictates of their conscience. For example, a federal employee who was concerned about a serious issue (for example, global warming) that was ideologically incompatible with the current federal administration could not speak of that issue without risking being fired.

The Pendleton Act of 1883 changed all that by creating a system whereby people were chosen for federal jobs based on merit rather than on political connections. And enhanced job security was provided by that Act by ensuring that federal employees could not be fired based upon political considerations alone. As a result of the Pendleton Act, eventually “nearly all federal jobs” came to be handled by the Civil Service system.

REASONS WHY GOVERNMENT CIVIL SERVICE IS NECESSARY

With that as background, let’s consider why a robust Civil Service system is necessary to the proper functioning of government:

Elimination of the profit motive

Our government is founded upon the principle that ALL government employees, even including the President of the United States, work in the service of the citizens of our country. Making a profit is never an issue. The purpose of all government work is to serve our fellow citizens – at least in theory.

Right wing ideologues hate that philosophy. They believe (or say they believe) that everything operates best according to the principles of the so-called “free market”, which means that the profit motive is the best means of ensuring that government work or any other work is of the highest quality, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Most epidemiologists in the United States work for government or for educational institutions. A few work for private institutions, such as the pharmaceutical industry. In my opinion, the principal of epidemiologists working for private institutions is very problematical.

Consider the fact, for example, that tobacco industry epidemiologists assisted the tobacco industry in their efforts to persuade the American people that cigarette smoking has no significant adverse effects on human health. Today, that seems shocking. And it would be easy to confine criticism to the specific epidemiologists involved. But consider what would have happened to those epidemiologists if they had concluded that cigarette smoking is dangerous to human health, and so had decided not to put their scientific expertise behind the assertions of the tobacco companies that they worked for. Let’s just say that the job security of such epidemiologists would have been very low.

That is why I would never consider working for a private institution as an epidemiologist – unless I was in a position such that losing my job on sudden notice would be no significant hardship for me. The major point is that the profit motive is not at all consistent with scientific objectivity. Not EVER. So how can an epidemiologist who works for a private institution expect to have credibility as an epidemiologist? Having epidemiologists-for-profit being responsible for government work is like having our elections run by private voting machine companies.

Having a dedicated, professional, and caring core of workers

Epidemiologists

Epidemiologists undergo extensive training and education in the principles of public health. Just as the training of physicians emphasizes that their patients should be their first concern and responsibility, the training of epidemiologists emphasizes that the public’s health should be their first concern and responsibility.

Long-term government service under a robust Civil Service system reinforces the values that epidemiologists imbibe during their training and education. The Civil Service system is meant to protect government workers against extraneous political pressures that attempt to move them away from their service to the public and towards the ideological inclinations of political leaders who are intent on pursuing their own private agenda.

An example of extraneous and inappropriate political pressure is the Bush administration promulgation of abstinence-only sex education, which has been proven in numerous epidemiological studies to be inferior to a broader approach to sex education, which in addition utilizes safe-sex approaches. Few if any decent epidemiologists would ever promote an abstinence-only approach to sex education. Yet, the Bush administration has managed to promulgate an abstinence-only approach to sex education, in part by having its political appointees instruct our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to measure the performance of abstinence-only sex education programs in ways that obscure their lack of effectiveness. Actions such as these constitute meddling with our Civil Service system in ways that are totally inconsistent with the principles on which it was founded.

Bush torture policy

Another good example is the way in which the Bush administration justified its use of torture. Long-time government lawyers who were experts in the applicable international and domestic laws were totally bypassed in the promulgation of Bush administration torture policies. Instead of using its experts for guidance on these matters, the Bush administration turned to political appointees who were appointed for the sole purpose of providing and justifying pre-ordained advice. Jane Mayer, in her book “The Dark Side – The Inside Story on How the War on Terror Turned into a War on Ideals”, describes this process:

John Yoo (political appointee in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel) wrote “Mistreatment of prisoners would not ‘shock the conscience’ of the court, or violate constitutional prohibitions against ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ unless malice or sadism could be proven.” Among the practices the memo discussed as arguably legal were gouging a prisoner’s eyes out, dousing him with scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substance, or slitting an ear, nose, or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb… Yoo wrote that the laws were trumped by the powers of the commander in chief…

When the professional lawyers eventually found out about this kind of stuff they were shocked:

The senior uniformed lawyers for Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, known as the TJAGs… all sent extraordinary memos of dissent… The Defense Department promptly classified them as secret… The memos from the uniformed lawyers to the politically appointed general counsel were brimming with barely concealed disbelief at the direction the Justice Department was proposing for soldiers to take… warned that the Justice Department’s radical and idiosyncratic interpretation of the law “puts the interrogators and the chain of command at risk of criminal accusations abroad”…

On April 28, 2004, ten months later, the first pictures from Abu Ghraib became public… Mora (former General Counsel of the U.S. Navy, and one of the chief adversaries of the Bush/Cheney torture program) said, “I felt saddened and dismayed. Everything we had warned against in Guantanamo had happened – but in a different setting. I was stunned.”

Efficiency

One of the main arguments put forth for “competitive outsourcing” is that the use of outsiders to perform government work is more efficient and “flexible” than having the work performed by Civil Service professionals. What a bunch of poppycock!

From time to time during my Civil Service career I have been told that we have to put more emphasis into hiring contract workers to perform epidemiological work that I and those who worked with or for me generally performed. I would respond with astonishment, “But why? Why should we spend all that time and effort to hire contract workers to perform work that we’re perfectly capable of doing ourselves? What am I here for, if not to do that kind of work?” The answer was always some version of “Well, upper management (i.e. the political appointees) has determined that it is more efficient and costs less to hire contract workers, and it gives us more flexibility.”

So we would have to drop the projects that we were working on to spend days of our time doing the multiplicity of tasks, the interviews, and the filling out of paperwork required of the contracting process. And then, when the contractors were hired, great amounts of time had to be devoted to getting them up to speed on how things worked, and otherwise training them to do the job.

What a colossal waste of time and effort!

Job security

One of the great advantages of working in the government Civil Service system to me personally (and most other Civil Service workers as well) has been the extraordinary degree of job security – even in times of economic downturn.

Some would argue that that is a personal benefit, rather than a benefit to our country. With the job security offered by the Civil Service system, Civil Service employees are free to perform the work for which the Civil Service was founded. They are not simply tools of autocratic and political bureaucrats, but are free to use their reasoning and consciences as guides in performing the important work that they are tasked to do.

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, had some things to say about this issue, even before the advent of the Civil Service system in our country. He compared what he called the “mud-sill” theory, which encompasses the attitude of our corporate elite towards labor, with what he referred to as “free labor”, in December 1859, in an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (Thanks to DUer twoamericas for posting this):

By the "mud-sill" theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be -- all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers is not only useless, but pernicious and dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a misfortune that laborers should have heads at all. Those same heads are regarded as explosive materials, only to be safely kept in damp places, as far as possible from that peculiar sort of fire which ignites them. A Yankee who could invent strong handed man without a head would receive the everlasting gratitude of the "mud-sill" advocates.

But Free Labor says "no!" Free Labor argues that, as the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; and that that particular head should direct and control that particular pair of hands…. And that being so, every head should be cultivated, and improved, by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its charge. In one word Free Labor insists on universal education.

THE GUTTING OF CIVIL SERVICE AS A PRELUDE TO FASCISM

A robust Civil Service system poses a great barrier to fascism because it is based upon laws that prohibit the use of government for private gain, and it is composed of hundreds of thousands of government workers who have been schooled throughout their careers in the need to separate government from the private interests of wealthy individuals who would use it for their own purposes.

Therefore, the gutting of the Civil Service system by the Bush administration has comprised some of its worst crimes. Here are some examples:

The reconstruction effort in Iraq following the U.S. invasion

I always feel frustrated whenever I read criticisms of the Bush administration for its incompetence in handling the invasion and occupation of Iraq. If you believe, as I do, that one of the main purposes of the invasion was to provide an excuse for funneling billions of dollars to Bush/Cheney cronies, then the Iraq War doesn’t seem incompetent at all – rather, it has been a resounding success. I have discussed in detail the evidence for that view in a post based on a book by Antonia Juhasz, titled “The BuSh Agenda – Invading the World One Economy at a Time”. Here is a brief description of the initial invasion of Iraq from an article by Michael Schwartz, titled The Prize of Iraqi Oil”, taken from “The World According to Tom Dispatch – America in the New Age of Empire”, edited by Tom Engelhardt. You decide – incompetence or fascism:

“While American troops simply stood by as unrestrained looting severely damaged the dawn-of-civilization treasures in the National Museum, compromised the ability of hospitals to deliver health care, and destroyed many government offices, large numbers of American soldiers were deployed to protect the Oil Ministry and its associated holdings. This effort was certainly emblematic of the newly established occupation's priorities."

Not long after President Bush declared "major combat operations in Iraq have ended"… Paul Bremer, the new head of the American occupation, promulgated a series of laws designed, among other things, to kick-start the development of Iraqi oil… He also set about creating an oil-policy framework, unique in the region, that would allow the major companies to develop the country's proven reserves and even to begin drilling new wells….

The growing insurgency, acting on a general Iraqi understanding that a major goal of the occupation was to "steal" Iraqi oil, systematically began to attack the oil pipelines that traveled through the Sunni areas of the country…

To resistance of various sorts must be added the "contribution" of the major American corporations involved in "reconstructing" Iraq, notably Halliburton and Bechtel. These crony corporations, with close ties to the Bush administration, accepted huge fees to rehabilitate dilapidated or damaged oil facilities. Almost without fail, they chose not to repair existing plants locally or to employ the raft of skilled Iraqi technicians who had used remarkable ingenuity in maintaining these facilities during a dozen years of UN sanctions. Working under cost-plus agreements that guaranteed a fixed profit rate no matter how much an operation ultimately cost, they preferred instead to install expensive new proprietary equipment. Then, in the absence of any outside oversight, they ran up huge expenses and frequently failed to complete their contracts, leaving the oil facilities they were servicing in states of disrepair or partial repair -- and equipped with technology that local technicians could not service.

Corruption at the FDA

In my nine years of epidemiological work at the Centers for (Medical) Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) at the FDA, I have encountered and heard of numerous instances of inappropriate (to say the least) interference by upper management in the work of the FDA’s scientists.

I have for the most part been spared this interference because the particular office that I work in has not been as affected as some other parts of CDRH (and FDA in general). My most dramatic exposure to this corruption came when I wrote a scientific article about deaths associated with the use of a medical device used to prevent ruptures of aneurysms of the largest artery in the human body, the aorta. The device sometimes slipped out of place, allowing blood to fill the aneurysm, causing it to expand and rupture, and that usually resulted in death.

I don’t claim that my article offered irrefutable proof that the device was responsible for those deaths. But I believe that the article presented strong evidence to make that case. Anyhow, my manuscript received FDA clearance for publication, and it was subsequently accepted for publication by the surgical journal, Vascular Surgery, where it was published online, prior to formal publication in the journal.

But the manufacturer of the device found out about it, complained to the FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford (who was later indicted for conflicts of interest), who demanded that the journal pull my article – which they did, but not without writing a scathing article about the FDA for its actions. I was not unhappy to learn that someone leaked this whole sordid affair to the Wall Street Journal, which published an account of it on their front page.

More recently, whistleblowers at FDA wrote to Congress about rampant corruption there:

Serious misconduct by managers of the FDA at CDRH is interfering with our responsibility to ensure the safety and effectiveness of medical devices for the American public and with FDA's mission to protect and promote the health of all Americans. Managers at CDRH have failed to follow the laws, rules, regulations and Agency Guidance… They have corrupted the scientific review of medical devices. This misconduct reaches the highest levels of CDRH management…

There is extensive documentary evidence that managers at CDRH have corrupted and interfered with the scientific review of medical devices…. While managers can disagree with FDA experts, they cannot (legally, that is) order, force or otherwise coerce FDA experts to change their scientific judgments, opinions, conclusions or recommendations. Managers at CDRH with no scientific or medical expertise in medical devices, or any clinical experience in the practice of medicine have ignored serious safety and effectiveness concerns of FDA experts…

To avoid accountability, these managers at CDRH have ordered, intimidated and coerced FDA experts to modify their scientific reviews, conclusions and recommendations in violation of the law…

The US attorneys scandal

In an effort to achieve permanent Republican rule in our country, in what is now known as the “US Attorneys Scandal”, the Bush administration’s Justice Department fired eight U.S. attorneys because of what they considered to be either too aggressive pursuance of crimes by high level Republicans or too lax pursuance of crimes committed by Democrats, especially regarding so-called “voter fraud”. The crime of “voter fraud” can usually be described as it was by one of the fired U.S. attorneys, John McKay, in testimony before the U.S. Congress:

I was aware that I was receiving criticism for not proceeding with a criminal investigation. And, frankly, it didn't matter to me what people thought. Like my colleagues, we work on evidence, and there was no evidence of voter fraud or election fraud. And, therefore, we took nothing to the grand jury.

George Bush’s Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, has, not surprisingly, refused to prosecute these flagrant violations of our Civil Service laws, saying “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime” – a statement that clearly contradicts the dictionary definition of “crime”. He has also excused his refusal to prosecute these crimes by saying “Two wrongs don’t make a right”.

Many others, including Kathy Gill, seriously disagree with this contempt for our Civil Service laws by our Attorney General:

The law that was broken dates to the 1870s. A reminder, Mr. Attorney General: the law broken – what you described as “only violations of the Civil Service laws” – was designed specifically to keep the “spoils system” out of the day-to-day running of the government.

Breaking this law is not a trivial matter, like jay walking. Civil servants are supposed to be judged on merit, not politics. What of their derailed careers?

THE GUTTING OF THE CIVIL SERVICE SYSTEM BY THE BUSH ADMINISRATION IN PERSPECTIVE

The purpose behind the massive efforts of the Bush administration to gut our Civil Service system has been to take government away from the American people, in order to use it in the service of their own ends, including the funneling of billions of dollars to their cronies and the establishment of permanent Republican rule in our country. In doing this, they have worked hand-in-glove with the corporations that benefit from their crimes. Those corporations involved in the phony reconstruction of Iraq, and those medical device manufacturing companies that benefit from friendly FDA decisions regarding their defective products, as described in this post, are just two examples. Such close incestuous relationships between government and corporations are a major component of fascism.

A 2006 article in The Nation, by Dan Zegart, titled “The Gutting of the Civil Service”, written prior to the documentation of many of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration, summarizes the issue:

While the embedding of politicals in career jobs did not originate with Bush, the scale and coordination with which it is being done under this Administration seem unprecedented, according to more than fifty current and former government officials interviewed during an eight-month-long Nation investigation….

Three things have happened. First, long-serving careers have been shunted aside, excluded not only from decision-making , but even from providing meaningful input…. Meetings at the FDA would nominally include career staff, but the decisions would be made afterward, at a post-meeting huddle for politicals only.

A second method of political control has been simply to redefine civil service jobs as political jobs, or to create new political slots…. Another report by Representative Waxman found that Bush has added 307 new political appointees to the federal payroll, a 12 percent spike that Paul Light of Brookings calls "stunning."… “They operate with a single-minded focus that makes them very present in the day-to-day operation of the agencies…"

The third and most disturbing way the Bush Administration has consolidated its hold over the bureaucracy is the embedding of "hidden politicals" in career slots in the executive branch. Candidates are interviewed and selected supposedly on the basis of merit according to civil service procedures, but the real "play" is to hire a politically reliable person…

The changes at the FDA are but one result of an unprecedented attempt by the Bush team to extend direct political control deep into operational areas throughout the executive bureaucracy, especially at agencies where the Administration has strong policy interests such as the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department and the Interior Department….

Impeachment and the gutting of our Civil Service

The gutting of our Civil Service constitutes extremely serious crimes. They subvert the main purposes of our government. If George Bush had committed no crimes in his eight years of office other than those pertaining to the subversion of our Civil Service system, he would still be more deserving of impeachment and removal from office than any President in U.S. history. Indeed, several of the 35 Article of Impeachment against George W. Bush introduced by Dennis Kucinich into the United States Congress on June 9th, 2008, dealt with issues covered in this post, including Article XII (Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of that Nation’s Natural Resources), Article XVI (Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection with Iraq and U.S. Contractors), Article XVIII (Torture: Secretly Authorizing and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy), Article XXVIII (Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice), Article XXIX (Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965), and Article XXXII (Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change).

If all of these crimes are allowed to stand without holding the Bush administration accountable, we will have set a dangerous precedent of accepting Attorney General Mukasey’s flippant opinion that blatant and repeated violations of our Civil Service laws do not pose a major threat to our democracy. We will then remain a nation progressing towards fascism.

Created
Saturday, November 29 2008
Last modified
Wednesday, November 06 2013