Obama Administration Introduces Litmus Test for Civil Servants

Government employees in the United States generally fall into one of two categories: political appointees and civil servants.  Political appointees are selected based upon their loyalty to the office holder and when the office holder is replaced they lose their jobs.  Hillary Clinton and the other members of the cabinet are examples of political appointees.  Civil servants are the bureaucrats who run the day-to-day operations of the government.  They are selected based upon non-political criteria, such as merit.  Their loyalty is to the government, not to any specific office holder.  They do not lose their jobs every time we elect a new leader.  IRS and FBI agents are examples of civil servants.

The system we have in place now is largely the result of the Pendleton Act of 1883 and the Hatch Act of 1939.  This system replaced the earlier “spoils” system which got it’s name from the phrase “to the victor belong the spoils.”  In the spoils system, civil service jobs are given as gifts to loyal supporters of winning candidates.

Barack Obama is destroying our current system and moving us back to the spoils system. He has directed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to purge Republicans from the civil service system.

The first technique that John Berry, Obama’s Director of the OPM, is using is to attack civil service employees who were once political appointees.  It is very common for people to start as political appointees and then later become civil servants — if they qualify for the positions under the merit criteria.

Here’s what John Berry has to say:

Beginning January 1, 2010, agencies must seek prior approval from OPM before they can appoint a current or recent political appointee to a competitive or non-political excepted service position at any level under the provisions of title 5, United States Code. OPM will review these proposed appointments to ensure they comply with merit system principles and applicable civil service laws. I have delegated decision-making authority over these matters to career Senior Executives at OPM to avoid any hint of political influence.

In other words, all of those civil servants will have to be approved by the Obama administration in order to keep their jobs.  The Obama administration is looking backwards five years to root out any civil servants who may have started as political appointees of the Bush administration.

This is one of the few times you will see me defending civil servants.  As a general rule, the process used to hire and retain civil servants tends to produce legions of authoritarian dullards.  Perhaps the best that can be said for them is how much better they are than political appointees.  John Berry, Obama’s Director of the Office of Personnel Management, was most recently the head of the Smithsonian National Zoo.  He obviously wasn’t chosen for his current position due to his qualifications.

The American government has always been somewhat incompetent — by design.  The founding fathers believed that a small and inoffensive government would be able to cause less trouble for the American people.  Unfortunately, what we have today is an exceedingly incompetent and extraordinarily powerful government — with grandiose plans for drawing more power into it’s clutches.  The American government is infected with a greed for power such as I have not seen in my lifetime.  It will take power from the American people and I am afraid that there is very little, short of all-out revolution, that can be done to stop this.  We voted for change and now we’re going to get it.