Special hiring programs should be scrapped, MSPB says

Two hiring programs intended to help minority employees get federal jobs aren't working and should be ended, the Merit Systems Protection Board says.

In a new report, "Restoring Merit to Federal Hiring," the board criticizes the Outstanding Scholar and Bilingual/Bicultural hiring programs for allowing federal managers to bypass merit system protection rules.

MSPB noted that although the Outstanding Scholar program was designed to improve diversity in the federal government, only one of every 10 employees hired under the program in 1997 was African-American, and only one of every 14 was Hispanic.

In reviewing entry-level hiring practices for professional and administrative jobs in the federal government, the board found that standard merit-based hiring practices do a better job of providing diversity than the two special hiring vehicles.

"This report is good news for the merit system," said MSPB Chairman Ben L. Erdreich. "The study shows that merit-based hiring and workforce diversity are not mutually exclusive."

The Outstanding Scholar and the Bilingual/Bicultural hiring programs were created in 1981 as part of a consent decree in federal court settling a lawsuit that challenged the use of a written test, the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE), for federal hiring. PACE was found to hurt the chances of African-American and Hispanic job applicants.

The Office of Personnel Management was given five years to develop new, non-biased alternatives to PACE. In the meantime, the Outstanding Scholar and Bilingual/Bicultural programs were developed to increase competitive hiring for African Americans and Hispanics.

But the programs were never intended as permanent hiring vehicles, MSPB said, and today their eligibility criteria are inconsistent with the merit principle of fair employee selection.

The Outstanding Scholar program, for example, uses high grade point average or class rank as criteria for selection, but those criteria have not been valid predictors of future job performance, the board argued. And the Bilingual/Bicultural program's only standard is that the candidate meet minimum job requirements and either speak Spanish or have knowledge of Hispanic culture.

Both hiring programs can be replaced by merit-based competitive hiring that ensures fair competition for all job candidates, MSPB said.

Federal hiring has changed in the 18 years since PACE was thrown out. African-Americans and Hispanics have made major inroads in federal employment, and "the evidence suggests that representative African-American and Hispanic hiring now can be sustained without the non-merit based hiring authorities provided by the consent decree," the report said.

For example, agencies have been successful at hiring Spanish-speaking candidates without the Bilingual/Bicultural program, MSPB found. At the Border Patrol, 40 percent of the agency's 8,000 agents are Hispanic, and all of them were hired through a competitive written exam, not the Bilingual/Bicultural hiring program.

The Outstanding Scholar and Bilingual/Bicultural programs are still in wide use in the federal government, the report concluded. In fact, 40 percent of all GS-5 and GS-7 hires in the first three quarters of 1997 were made via the Outstanding Scholar program. Only 15 percent of 1997 hires in those grades relied on standard merit-based competitive hiring.

In 1997, several officials at the National Credit Union Administration were reprimanded for improperly using the Outstanding Scholar program. While agency officials claimed they used the hiring authority to improve diversity, only five of the 45 candidates hired through the program from July 1995 to March 1997 were minority applicants.

In July 1998, the Office of Personnel Management urged agencies to limit use of the program to its original purpose.

Now MSPB is calling for the programs' elimination. "It is time to restore merit to hiring as federal managers seek to ensure that a highly qualified and representative workforce serves the citizens of the United States," the board's report concluded.