Who Needs a Public Service Academy?

Not everybody is excited about the idea of creating a U.S. Public Service Academy. Witness the following from an editorial yesterday in the Phoenix-based East Valley Tribune:

Move over, Air Force Academy. Make way, Annapolis. Watch out, West Point. If some in Congress get their way, there soon might be a National Public Service Academy, styled loosely (probably very loosely) on these older institutions, that will take America’s best and brightest and mold them into the federal uber-bureaucrats of the future. We shudder at the thought.

A better way to attract Americans to public service, the editorial argues, is to "overhaul the way the government operates, by clearing away red tape, reforming a civil service system that creates and protects deadwood, and instituting a pay structure that rewards real skills and real performance."