Reagan remembered for hard-line approach on personnel issues

Immediately after he was sworn in as the 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan implemented a hiring freeze on federal civilian agencies.

Immediately, as in, before he even left the Capitol building.

This was the opening salvo in a presidency that aimed to fundamentally alter personnel management in the federal government, according to supporters, critics and Reagan himself.

"This action is necessary because the national budget is out of control," Reagan said in the Jan. 20, 1981, memorandum ordering the freeze. "I pledged that we would take this action as a first step towards controlling the growth and size of government and stopping the drain on the economy by the public sector. Imposing a freeze now can eventually lead to a significant reduction in the size of the Federal work force."

Reagan died Saturday at 93. His impact on the federal government is still being felt today, according to senior personnel officials who served in the 1980s.

"He expressed to me from day one that he was going to put a limit on domestic spending and domestic bureaucracy," said Don Devine, director of the Office of Personnel Management during Reagan's first term. "He told me from the beginning that he was a personnel officer in the Army during World War II, and he didn't like all the bureaucratic regulation and how hard it was to reward or discipline employees."

Devine hailed the hiring freeze and Reagan's dismissal, en masse, of Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization workers.

"These were tough moves, and I understand that federal employees, especially those directly affected by it, would not look favorably at it. But for the good of the country, something had to be done," Devine said. "He had to do something to show the country that he was serious."

Some of those moves, however, were not only difficult, but also counterproductive, according to James Pfiffner, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University in Virginia who served at OPM under President Jimmy Carter and Reagan.

"That was fairly disruptive," Pfiffner said of the hiring freeze. He said appointed officials also became more hostile to federal workers after Reagan assumed the presidency.

Though Reagan's policies drew resentment from federal workers unions, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, John Gage, said Monday: "Although the American labor community often found itself at odds with President Ronald Reagan, AFGE mourns the loss of a worthy opponent and a great American."

OPM Director Kay Coles James said Tuesday that Reagan's opposition to big government did not mean he was opposed to federal workers.

"I think a lot of people who covered Reagan did not make that distinction well," James said in an interview. Critics say that "because he didn't like expansive government, he didn't like federal workers. You can't make that leap, and you shouldn't."

Regardless of how Reagan felt about federal employees, Pfiffner said the president's efforts to depict the government as bloated and ineffective have tarred civil servants ever since.

"He did damage to the federal civil service, with his really negative attitude at them," Pfiffner said. "Reagan encouraged [Americans] to think that government administrators were bad or lazy."

Devine said Reagan's legacy runs strong in the federal government, but in a different way.

"His influence is still felt in terms of the reluctance to adopt major new program areas, the concern about … the size of government."