Jimmy Carter, architect of the last major civil service reform, dies at 100

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and arguably the most dedicated to reforming the operations of the government, died on Dec. 29 at his home in Plains, Georgia. He was 100.

Carter notched several signature policy achievements during his presidency, such as the Camp David Middle East peace accords and the Panama Canal treaty. But he was plagued by setbacks such as the Iran hostage crisis that limited him to a single term in office. Among the people who worked for the federal government during his administration, Carter is best remembered for his sweeping effort to reorganize agencies, update civil service rules and increase managerial accountability. 

Carter’s service to the nation began when he was commissioned as a Navy ensign after his graduation from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. He later worked for noted naval officer Hyman Rickover at the beginning of the service’s nuclear submarine program. The death of Carter’s father in 1953 cut short his naval career, and he returned to his hometown of Plains, Georgia, to manage the family peanut farm. 

In 1962, after service on the local school board, Carter won a seat in the Georgia senate. Eight years later, he was elected governor. Carter pledged to reduce the influence of lobbyists, improve the efficiency of state agencies and streamline government. He combined nearly 300 agencies, boards and commissions in Georgia into 22 entities, and introduced the concept of “zero-based budgeting”—in which agency funding is determined from scratch every year—to the state’s government.

Term-limited in the governorship, Carter turned his eye to national politics. In December 1974, he announced his candidacy for president. Running in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Carter’s positioning as an outsider who could fix government resonated with the public.

“I was his policy adviser for his long two-year race for president,” Stuart Eizenstat wrote in 2019, “and realized up close as we shaped the dimensions of his message and policies his deep commitment to government reform. Unlike his more liberal Democratic opponents for his party’s nomination, from his announcement speech…he focused less on promises for higher government spending after eight lean Republican years under presidents Nixon and Ford than on honesty in government, delivering government services more efficiently, and empowering government civil [servants] to do their jobs with less political interference.”

Carter made his efficiency and effectiveness crusade a centerpiece of his 1976 campaign, and rode his status as a fresh-faced reformer to an early lead in the Democratic primaries that he never relinquished. He went on to defeat Gerald Ford in the general election. 

It had been decades since a president had taken government management reform seriously, and it wouldn’t happen again until the Clinton administration in 1992. But Carter ended up having more to show for his efforts in the form of legislative and organizational changes than any president before or since. 

As soon as he took office, Carter began pushing for authority to reorganize agencies. He won it in 1977, partly by agreeing to lawmakers’ demand for a cadre of inspectors general to audit and investigate agency operations. The Reorganization Act was the vehicle for the creation of the Energy Department in 1977 and the Education Department in 1979.

Carter’s efforts sometimes put him at odds with federal workers and the labor unions who represented them. He pledged to “hold down the number of federal employees, reduce paperwork, and consolidate or eliminate as many of the small agencies and advisory groups as possible.” He also declared that the civil service system was “too often a bureaucratic maze which stifles the initiative of our dedicated government employees while inadequately protecting their rights.”

In 1978, Carter launched a push for congressional approval of the centerpiece of his government management agenda, civil service reform. In his State of the Union address in January, Carter said that “even the best organized government will only be as effective as the people who carry out its policies. For this reason, I consider civil service reform to be absolutely vital.” Vowing to “restore the merit principle” to government, he promised “better rewards for better performance without compromising job security.”

The Civil Service Reform Act was introduced in March 1978 and by October Carter had signed it into law. “I do not recall any other governmentwide management reforms so broad…being enacted at one time or in so short a time,” wrote Dwight Ink, a longtime high-ranking federal executive who helped lead the reform effort, in 2018.

In 1977, Carter had launched his Personnel Management Project, which came to involve 120 people, many of them experienced federal managers like Ink and experts in government management such as Alan “Scotty” Campbell, head of the Civil Service Commission. 

They came up with reform legislation whose provisions included:

• Creating the Senior Executive Service, a governmentwide corps of more than 8,000 top executives.
• Basing the compensation of career executives and managers on individual and organizational performance.
• Creating a new employee performance appraisal system.
• Giving managers more authority over hiring, rewarding and disciplining employees.
• Providing employees with what Carter called “fairer protection of their legitimate rights.”

After the law went into effect, Carter made it clear that its implementation was one of his top priorities. “As you know, I gave a great deal of personal attention to developing the reform legislation and supporting it in Congress,” he wrote in a memo to agency heads after it passed. “When I signed the bill at the White House, I publicly pledged ‘to implement the civil service reforms with efficiency and dispatch.’ I intend to give the same close personal attention to implementing the Reform Act as I did to its development and passage.”

The record of implementation of the Civil Service Reform Act by the Carter administration and subsequent administrations has been mixed. The SES hasn’t realized the vision of creating a cadre of expert managers who move freely among government’s siloed organizations. The attempt to strengthen the link between pay and performance also fell short, and agencies continue to struggle to establish fair and effective performance management systems. Now there’s a general consensus among public administration scholars that the civil service system is overdue for another overhaul. 

For a fuller exploration of Jimmy Carter’s government reform initiatives, see “After 40 Years, A Look Back at the Unlikely Passage of Civil Service Reform,” by Charles S. Clark, July 2018.