It was 1967, I had turned 16 years and one month, which made me eligible for a driving test and application for my first Indiana driver’s license. In order to do that, I needed to deal with the Bureau of Motor Vehicles of that time.
That was a time, under the existing Indiana law, when all employees of the Bureau were political appointees. Your main qualification for the job was your loyalty to the political party of the governor.
It just so happened Indiana had a Democratic Governor, Roger Branigan, at that time, but a Republican governor would have been under the same rules. You hired people recommended by their work for the party.
I recall going into a completely full room at the Indiana State Fairgrounds and waiting. The wait stretched for hours. It was clear the workers were doing the best they could with the limited training and experience they had. It was a miracle I ever obtained my license.
That is a small example of what life was like in old “spoils system” that rewarded election winners with a number of jobs to fill. Those employees were hired, and could be fired at any time, for no reason other than that was the whim of the political party in charge.
Dealing with most agencies in the Hoosier State was like that in 1967. It was setup to benefit political parties but not the citizens governments are supposed to serve.
I recall my grandfather Sam Lannan, heavily steeped in local politics where he lived in rural southwest Indiana, telling me the spoils system was just fine because it was transparent. Everyone was able to see what was going on and there were no hidden agendas.
I politely listened to my grandfather but never agreed with that argument. Government should serve the people, not the political system, in my view. My father was a nearly life-long federal civil servant with the Defense Department and taught me the value of the merit system, which allows qualified people to serve in government positions with civil service protections.
Court decisions and actions by the Indiana General Assembly slowly changed the BMV. It is now a model of how to run an agency. All my dealings with the Indiana BMV have been good and professional in recent years.
After nearly 17 years of toiling in the broadcast business, mostly in news and talk shows, I entered the federal civil service in 1983 for 28 years and retired. I learned a lot about bureaucracy and how it works.
People can be fired from the civil service and are fired. There are processes for appeal so the employee can make her/his case but that system prevents people from being dismissed from employment for no good reason.
Tom Friedman is a New York Times opinion columnist that has traveled the world writing for the Times. He has written often about how Americans do not know the value of a professional civil service. He would cite cases where you were expected to bribe a civil servant in another country just to complete what one could consider a routine government transaction.
I bring this up because the president has issued an executive order creating a new category of federal workers, technically called “Schedule F” workers. The details are very vague, but the president’s goal is to bring tens of thousands of federal civil servants into political appointees, hired and fired at any time by order of the president.
Presidents already appoint the top policy-making people at every federal agency. His people run those agencies.
The federal government decided in 1883 that the spoils system was not serving the public and passed the Pendleton Act, which created the federal civil service. Hiring and promotions were to be based on merit from then on.
The new executive order is an attack on the Pendleton Act and takes us on a road to another spoils system. Citizens of the United States are entitled to professional treatment, whether you are applying for Social Security benefits, dealing with the VA or trying to solve a problem with the IRS.
A Washington Post editorial described the presidential order as “insidious,” and an effort to put loyalty to the president above performance in evaluating these workers. The action is already being challenged in the courts. A presidential executive order must be consistent with the law.
I think about all this every time I interact with the Indiana BMV. I am thankful there are qualified professionals to handle my needs. It wasn’t always that way.
