When Piecemeal Reform Is Okay

I was talking to Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service yesterday, about the creation of a hiring preference for some military spouses. One question I had for him was how this preference, which the administration decided to move forward with, was different from abolishing time-in-grade, which the administration backed away from citing the need for a more comprehensive reform process. Max said the following:

There is a very targeted need that [the hiring process] is addressing, which is the enormous stress placed on military families, and there is a public policy imperative to do something in the here and now. It's not dislocating. The problem with getting rid of the time-in-grade rule now [is that] t would require a wholesale review of existing personnel and training of managers, and all kinds of dislocation....[The hiring preference] doesn't have that broader dislocating effect....At the end of the day we do need a rationalization and a simplification of our system, but in the meanwhile, this is quite understandable.

I'm interested in this using-the-master's-tools-to-tear-down-the-master's-house approach. If the hiring system is a mess, create so many loopholes in it that it looks like Swiss cheese, thus making it easier to hire folks in the short term, and making the long-term case for reform, because hey, the system needed all these exemptions to be made to work! Time-in-grade becomes a philosophical issue, I think, rather than a procedural one. There's a consensus that the hiring process needs to be reformed. There isn't a consensus that promotion should be easier and based on a more subjective process. So it makes sense to move forward with changes to hiring rules, but not to promotion ones, if this is how you're approaching personnel reform, period.