Blast From the Past

The phrase "pay for performance" gets civil servants hot under the collar these days, as government leaders grapple with the perception that all members of the federal workforce receive the same treatment, regardless of their level of effort.

The 1883 Pendleton Act launched the current civil service system. That law's basic tenets of merit-based hiring and firing, free of partisan meddling, remain the foundation of the system 125 years later. Looking back at the debates raging in Washington in the early 1880s, one can understand why the system ended up putting so much emphasis on equal treatment.

At the time, Democratic President Grover Cleveland and Sen. George Pendleton of Ohio, were under major fire within their party for supporting the move from a spoils system to a civil service. Since Andrew Jackson's presidency, a governing rule of the party had been, "to the victor belongs the spoils," explained journalist Frank Carpenter of the Cleveland Leader -- that day's most insightful Washington correspondent -- to his readers in a column.

"The Washington hotels are crowded, and office seekers are as thick as shells on the beach," Carpenter wrote in a column preceding enactment of the Pendleton Act. "At Willard's Hotel the gang appears especially seedy and desperate; and among them guarded denunciations of Cleveland's civil service ideas are not infrequent. The city will be overrun by these office seekers until Cleveland has firmly established that Civil Service Reform is to prevail."

Carpenter went on to recount a conversation he had with a Democratic congressman, who was livid that civil service reform would apply not just in Washington, but to postmasters. For years, the postmaster role in towns across the country switched back and forth between Democrats and Republicans, depending on the administration. So, when Cleveland was elected, the Democrat in the congressman's district who had expected the post traveled to Washington to seek the job from the postmaster general. But under reformer Cleveland, the postmaster general asked the Democrat if there was anything wrong with the current postmaster. "[He's] a Republican," the Democrat replied. With no cause for dismissal, the postmaster general left the Republican in charge. Because the postmaster of a town commanded a lot of power, the move imperiled the Democratic party back home, the congressman fumed to Carpenter. "The civil service idea is the most ridiculous thing ever attempted in the domain of politics," he told Carpenter.

The vehemence of the resistance to reform helps explain why the civil service system developed the stiff job descriptions, rote -- almost meaningless -- performance evaluations and extensive firing procedures that have predominated ever since. The emphasis was on retaining employees unless there was clear cause for removal.

Carpenter himself was conflicted about the likely effect of civil service reform. "Under the Civil Service Reform scheme, the government clerk is becoming more and more of a machine, and less and less an active, thinking growing man," he lamented. But Carpenter also thought poorly of a clerk's fate under the spoils system. "If [civil service reform] fails, the government clerk's position will be none the better. He is bound to be dependent upon his superiors at best, and the lack of civil service rule makes him all the more of a sycophant and a toady," he wrote.

Pay-for-performance proponents seek to strike a balance between the two extremes of a spoils system and one that fails to differentiate between the weakest and strongest performers. Judging from history, it is a balance that government will continue to struggle with 125 years from now.