The Conservative Campaign to Gut the Federal Civil Service Has Been Decades in the Making

The Grinch has risen again.

This post recounts some political history that may be ancient – it goes back over 40 years – but it traces a direct line to the disembowelment of the federal Civil Service that is currently ongoing in Washington. The line goes from Donald Devine, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan Administration, to Russell Vought, the current Director of the Office of Management and Budget. The line passes through – guess what – Project 2025 – the conservative blueprint for bringing down the federal government.

Lived experience

Vought’s outspoken contempt for federal employees which is discussed in our last post is a longstanding conservative Republican theme. I learned this directly during my career as as a federal employee and manager with the OPM during the Reagan administration. At that time, OPM had responsibility for recruiting potential employees, determining their qualifications, and monitoring federal agency personnel programs.

I was working in the Atlanta Regional Office of OPM when Donald Devine was appointed in 1981. He came from a career as a political science professor and had no management experience. Our office hosted him in his first visit to our regional office; we held a dinner in his honor attended by several dozen of our mangers. I happened to be seated next to him, and attempted to engage him in conversation by asking him what his priorities were and how we could help him implement his plans for the agency.

It quickly became apparent that he was not interested in discussing his philosophy of personnel management, or anything else. He also made it very clear that he categorically did not trust federal employees. I tried to assure him that as professional civil servants we were not politically motivated and would do everything we could to implement whatever programs and priorities that OPM had under his leadership. He made no effort to engage in any give and take conversation and, within several minutes, he got up and walked out of the dinner and did not return.

Political apparatchiks are not just in the movies

Eventually, under Devine’s direction, five “minders” were hired to monitor the activities of the ten regions (two regions for each minder) that composed the OPM field structure. None of these monitors was highly qualified; one was a self-employed graphic artist. By this time, I was in the Denver Regional Office and the minder that oversaw the Dallas/Denver region pair had been a tire salesman in Montana. He would visit from time to time but would never stay for more than a day or two before returning to Montana. Nice gig!

As far as I know, whatever reports he made to the Director never resulted in any changes to the way we conducted our business throughout the ten regions of OPM. But just the fact that the head of our agency thought he needed spies to observe us and report back to him about anything we did, was not only unprecedented, but sent a message that we were not to be trusted as professional personnel managers and honest civil servants.

The woman who fired her boss

At that time, OPM had a Deputy Director who was the polar opposite of Devine. Deputy Director Loretta Cornelius made it a point to support the field structure of OPM and did everything she could to enhance our standing with agencies employing hundreds of thousands of federal workers outside of Washington, DC.

She was appointed sometime after her boss came on board. Devine’s reappointment hit heavy political winds in Congress (this was when there were still some Republicans who acted independently of politics). When Devine withdrew his nomination, she became the Acting Director of OPM. It was assumed that she would bring Devine back on board the OPM in some capacity, but she refused and, in effect, fired her boss! This made interesting reading in the June 19, 1985 Washington Post:

“Loretta Cornelius once wanted to be a nun, and even today speaks of “a peace and tranquility that I have inside.” Which may help explain the calm with which she fired Donald J. Devine, her former boss at the Office of Personnel Management.

Calm also prevailed during her recent testimony before a Senate committee when she said Devine had asked her to lie. Her statement was at least partially responsible for Devine’s decision to withdraw his nomination for reappointment as OPM director.”

My point in mentioning this is to demonstrate that certain conservative operatives are suspicious, and have been for a long time, of a merit-based personnel system administered by non-partisan federal executives, managers, and employees who adhere to rules and regulations. The system was designed and has been improved by both Democrat and Republican administrations over the decades since the Pendleton Act of 1883 established a merit-based, competitive system for federal employment to replace the “spoils system” that awarded jobs based on political connections. But while Republicans political operatives like Devine give lip service to the idea that federal employment should be merit-based1, they would not only prefer a return to the spoils system, they are demanding it.

Donald Devine left Washington, D.C. and returned whence he came, to his career as a professor, although he remained in the political realm in various appointed and advisory positions to Republican politicians and think tanks. When Russell Vought was ginning up Project 2025, he turned to Devine as one of the authors of the Project 2025 section on federal personnel agencies. So the the Grinch has risen again.

Obviously, the current Republican administration is not the first to have a problem with a non-partisan civil service, but this attack is the most ruthless and best organized. If Russell Vought is successful in his campaign, he will have destroyed more than 150 years of progress in building the best civil service system in the world. Few citizens will be aware of what they have lost until it’s gone and the nation is in decline, ruled by unelected politicians and their unqualified appointees.