Daniel Carpenter: recommendation

Transcript context

…The regular appointees — say the G-14s, just people in the agency. How should the standards for their hiring and firing be different? Or are we at some kind of actual optimum? Oh no, I don’t think we’re anywhere near an actual optimum. It’s worth pointing out, by the way, that the federal civil service, which we’re talking about here, is quite different from the state and local-level civil service. One of the things that merit reform did is, it got rid of one form of politics by reducing the link between partisanship, party organization, and appointment at the middle and lowest levels, but it introduced another. It accentuated and facilitated the growth of public employee labor unions, and I have a mixed judgment on those. I don’t think you can have a conversation about policing like we’re having in this country right now without calling into question the value of some of those unions and the degree to which they protect their members from egregious actions. Obviously, there’s a huge literature there as well on teachers’ unions and other public employees’ unions. At the federal level, I actually think the federal employee unions are pretty weak. Part of that is just basic political science. Just about nowhere other than a few western states — I guess you’d probably say parts of Virginia now — are federal employee unions politically strong enough to make a difference in the electoral calculations of a congressional majority. I don’t know that we’ve reached an optimum there. I do think termination at some level should be easier for basic nonperformance. I do think using career incentives among a whole bunch of positions in the civil service should be easier to do. But I would say, at the federal level, you’ve got a situation where, again, I’m not going to say optimum. If anything, I believe the last presidential administration showed us the value of having an independent civil service, one that cannot be used by a party or a leader who verges on authoritarian energies, while at the same time avoiding some of the problems that one sees in the worst case of public employee union abuses, such as we see in some police departments. If one studies the history of postal supply and regulation, as you have done, postal supply — what lessons can we learn about regulating the internet today?…

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