State Capacity Roundup, March 13

Civil service reform, civil service reform, and civil service reform. Plus a hidden gem on program integrity.

Thanks to all of you who reached out with advice about how to start shipping real posts again. I appreciate it! In the meantime, here’s some more great stuff that’s going on in the ecosystem. This week is particularly civil service-themed — that’s likely to be common here at Eating Policy in the coming year!

An Opening Move on Civil Service Reform

A Civil Service for the Mission, Margaret Mullins, Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator

This is a truly comprehensive proposal for genuinely restructuring — not just tinkering with — the federal civil service, and it comes with actual draft legislation. Whether or not you agree with every element of Mullins’s specific prescription, she’s doing something important: making the case, rigorously and with receipts, that we have to do something, and that every other reform we can imagine depends on it. You cannot fix government delivery if you can’t hire people capable of delivering. You cannot modernize agencies if the people inside them are trapped in classification and compensation structures designed for a government that hasn’t existed since 1949.

The historical diagnosis is the strongest part of the paper, and worth reading even if you end up disagreeing with the proposed remedy. Mullins traces how nearly every reform effort since the Pendleton Act has consolidated power in the executive while leaving the actual machinery — hiring, classification, compensation — untouched. This is not an accident. Controlling who gets fired and who answers to whom is politically useful in a way that fixing job classification standards simply isn’t. The result is a civil service that is increasingly responsive to whoever holds executive power, but no more capable of actually doing the work of government. Worth noting that this dynamic cuts in a complicated direction: the civil service has become more responsive to executive power at the top — through the Senior Executive Service, Schedule P/C (see below), and related tools — while remaining famously resistant to it at the level of individual performance management, where removing an underperforming employee is still extraordinarily difficult. So we’ve managed to build a system that is both too politicized and too rigid at the same time, which is quite an achievement. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, often cited as the last serious attempt at comprehensive reform, was, as she shows, comprehensive in name only. The Reagan and Clinton administrations then made it worse by decentralizing responsibility without giving agencies the capacity or guidance to handle it.

There will be other proposals, and there will be productive dialogue among them. (My Niskanen colleague Gabe Menchaca is working on a massive, much-anticipated tome, which will agree with Margaret on the disorder but disagree on remedies.) Civil service reform is one of those rare areas where the dysfunction is so widely acknowledged — across party lines, across administrations, across ideological traditions — that a bipartisan path forward is possible. It will be harder to build the political will to do the boring, unglamorous work that actual reform requires than to diagnose where we went wrong. But there are a lot of us up for that task right now.

Image borrowed from Loren’s post on the FAS site (linked below). I have no idea what this image means or how it relates to the topic. I just liked it and I didn’t have anything else.

Three Takes on OPM’s New Schedule Policy/Career Role

• Loren DeJonge Schulman, Everything You Need to Know (and Ask!) About OPM’s New Schedule Policy/Career Role: Oversight Resource for OPM’s Schedule Policy/Career Rule, Federation of American Scientists

• Don Moynihan, Trump’s Schedule F Rule Finalized, Can We Still Govern?

• Ronald Sanders, The ‘new’ Policy/Career Schedule does NOT (necessarily) politicize the federal workforce, Government Executive

The newly finalized Schedule Policy/Career rule, the renamed and revised version of Schedule F, moves a broad category of “policy-influencing” career federal employees out of the competitive service, stripping them of Civil Service Reform Act due process protections and MSPB appeal rights — making them, in effect, at-will. As evidenced above, there’s a wide and somewhat surprising range of views here.

Schulman’s FAS piece is the overview you want if you’re trying to understand what the rule actually does — it’s a much-needed a practical resource for congressional staff and the rest of us, structured around what to watch, what to ask, and where agency discretion is likely to determine outcomes. She is clear-eyed that the rule’s real impact depends almost entirely on how agencies apply it.

Moynihan is considerably more alarmed, documenting the ways the rule misrepresents the evidence, dismisses the overwhelming opposition in public comments, and ignores the politicized firings and reprisals of the past year as if they simply hadn’t happened. As usual, Don has a point.

Sanders, a longtime SES member who actually resigned from a Trump 1.0 appointment over the original Schedule F, lands somewhere unexpected: he thinks this version is meaningfully different. OPM Director Scott Kupor’s implementing guidance — which provides that employees need only follow lawful orders “faithfully and to the best of their ability,” not pledge personal loyalty — is, in Sanders’s view, a real guardrail, and one that Sanders says would have been enough to keep him from resigning the first time around. Whether it holds is essentially a question of whether OPM polices its own guidance. Which brings us back to Schulman.

Where one might come out on this depends not just on your politics but also on whether you expect to trust future administrations that will be implementing these guidelines past the current moment. If you think you will, it’s easy to read them as written in good faith to make the civil service more responsive to political will — which benefit whichever party or faction is power, of course. If you think you won’t, then we’re trapped in the same cycle of hobbling government to constrain our opponents that got us here in the first place. I have no crystal ball. I wish I did.

Tech Force Now in Force

Speaking of cutting both ways, Tech Force has people now, and there’s been concern about an ethics rule that allows private sector technologists to serve while remaining vested at their current companies. This came up during the Obama years too. There was not a snowball’s chance in hell we could have gotten that ruling, or that anyone would have even tried, but it’s worth saying that any administration trying to recruit top tech talent thinks about how to make it easy for them. Back then, plenty of folks were happy to leave their companies, knowing they could easily go back, so I never wanted to pursue it, especially because, yes, there are real conflict of interest issues there. But when the shit hits the fan, any administration wants the people who can fix it, ASAP. Remember healthcare.gov? And AI is definitely hitting the fan.

While we’re on the topic, many people assume I am hostile to Tech Force because it (sort of) replaces USDS, which I helped found. In fact, I wish them great success. Abigail Haddad has a clear-eyed view on whether technologists should sign up, including why this work has always been hard, under any administration. She comes down as a maybe, which I think is fair, but I hope lots of people find opportunities they feel comfortable with to serve the American people and be a part of what should be a dramatic transformation of government tech in an era of AI. To quote a former 18Fer:

“Thinking people only deserve a better government during an administration you support is the height of cynicism in a truly golden age of cynicism.”

Technically compliant, practically failing

GovIntegrity / PIA, Necessary. Not Sufficient. (Note, I wish we’d get an actual author on these posts, and GovIntegrity needs a proper about page on their substack!)

Moving on from civil service, to the extent that one can in the sense that it underpins every other reform….

The Program Integrity Alliance has a substack, and it’s a hidden gem. I thought their explainer of what happened with fraud in Minnesota was the best I read (spoiler: it was not a failure to detect fraud, but rather the lack of “clear, court-defensible authority to temporarily pause payments when credible fraud risk is documented.”) But their piece on income verification is great (and rhymes with hometown hero Luke Farrell’s exceptional take on the same), their observations about reliance on paper is critical in the age of AI, which is excellent at generating documents, and there’s a lot more there. I used to have a bit of an allergic reaction to talk of program integrity, as it certainly can get weaponized in the service of denying legitimate claimants much-needed benefits, but I’ve come to believe that program integrity done right is absolutely critical to the reform agenda, and that the observations this community shares are deeply resonant with those of the state capacity community. They are constantly pointing out how systems can “technically comply with process while remaining structurally incapable of distinguishing paper compliance from real service delivery.” Yes, exactly.

Their most recent post is on OMB’s recently revised Circular A-123, which governs how agencies assess and manage operational and financial risks. The update explicitly adds fraud prevention to the list of things agencies must take seriously as a management responsibility — not just a law enforcement problem to be handled after the money is gone. That framing shift matters, and the author credits it as a meaningful step. But the piece is really about all the ways the step falls short: the circular runs through CFO offices that have limited authority over the program and IT systems where fraud actually happens; outdated federal privacy statutes prevent the cross-program data matching that would let agencies see organized fraud rings working multiple programs simultaneously; and nothing in the incentive structure changes. I would quibble with some of PIA’s solutions; to me, mandating real-time transaction screening tools that could catch fraud before payment is too prescriptive, in the sense that those tools will evolve and we want agencies to keep up, not comply with guidance that’s stuck in a moment in time. But the statutory constraints point hits close to home for me. We keep bumping into the same pattern: well-intentioned executive branch guidance that can’t actually solve the problem because the underlying legal framework hasn’t been touched. Fraud prevention joins a long list of things that require Congress to act, not just agencies to try harder.

PIA is clearly an important voice; I’ll be following what they write.

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That’s it for today. See you next week…maybe. Not making any promises!