State deregulatory reforms have enhanced agencies’ efficiency and flexibility. Congress should take note.
President Trump’s sweeping dismissals of federal employees have revived the debate around the American civil service. Many of Mr. Trump’s critics argue that extensively regulating the hiring and firing of the government’s civilian workforce is necessary to ensure the country doesn’t return to the bad old days of political patronage.
But several states have experience with deregulating the civil service, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive. In the past few decades states such as Georgia, Kansas and Arizona have moved most or almost all of their public employees to at-will employment and given individual agencies discretion to hire in the manner they think best. These reforms have been bipartisan and effective, and there’s little evidence they’ve led to political favoritism. It’s time for the federal government to learn from these successful state experiments.
In 1996 Georgia’s Democratic Gov. Zell Miller declared that the state’s civil-service system, which promised to hire and manage employees based on merit rather than political affiliation, instead “provides cover for bad workers.” A comprehensive state bill that year made all new public workers at-will employees. Other states, such as Florida, soon followed with reforms giving hiring authority to individual agency managers and loosening employee job protections. Another wave of at-will employment and decentralized hiring reforms began after a sweep of Republican victories in the 2010 state-level elections.
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