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Preserving the Ideal
Even as we move to radically reshape the American civil service system,
we must take great care to ensure that its modernization does not come
at the expense of its foundational values. The enduring legacy
of Theodore Roosevelt, these foundational values are set forth in the
merit principles that ground our nation’s civil service laws, regulations,
procedures, and practices…literally every aspect of the relationship
between our Federal Government and its career employees. Codified in statute
and regulated by OPM, these principles represent the core of our system,
and they guarantee a civil service that is free from any partisan political
activity or influence – without diminishing the responsiveness and
accountability of our civil servants to the public interest.
These core values cannot and will not be compromised. If there is a “prime
directive” that drives OPM in its modernization of the civil service,
this is it – our first principle of reform. Among other things,
those values, and the laws and rules that give them life, assure that
Federal employees are hired, promoted, paid, and discharged solely on
the basis of merit and conduct…their ability to do their job. They
provide special protections for veterans, victims of discrimination, and
those who expose Government waste or fraud. They also guarantee our public
employees due process in any action that threatens their employment, as
well as the right to join unions and bargain collectively. With these
enabling principles, our civil service system ensures that politics and
political party, as well as other non-merit factors, have no bearing on
the tenure of our civil servants, from the entry level clerk to the career
members of our Senior Executive Service who lead them. These values were
the genesis of the Federal civil service and have stood the test of time.
They must remain intact and sacrosanct as we move forward.
In so doing, we must also assure the efficacy of those who make those
core values and principles real, those who lead…and in so doing,
are called upon to live those values by example; they too are an essential
element of our civil service. Leadership matters; members of the Senior
Executive Service and its equivalents, as well as those in its developmental
“pipeline” (such as Presidential Management Fellows and new
Senior Fellows), are as vital to preserving the ideal as the values that
define it. If those values are our center of gravity, leaders serve as
their binding force, connecting increasingly divergent agencies with a
common, corporate culture of excellence and integrity, and they too must
be an essential component of the modernization process.
However, OPM is ultimately the steward of these ideals. It establishes
the policies that govern how Federal agencies manage their civil service
employees, and along with other central agencies that adjudicate employee
appeals, labor disputes, and discrimination complaints, it holds those
agencies accountable for complying with them. The successor to Theodore
Roosevelt’s Civil Service Commission, OPM celebrates its 25th anniversary
this year, and it is unique among Federal agencies – at once, accountable
to the President, our highest elected official, and to assuring the bedrock
principles of political neutrality and merit that ground our civil service.
Without OPM’s institutional stewardship, those values would be nothing
more than noble abstractions, and thus, it is perhaps the most critical
to our first principle: preserving the ideal.
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