Current Events: Civil Servants: Who are the bureaucrats we rely on?

Every day, civil servants work to keep the country, state, county, city, and neighborhood you live in running. Most of these public workers are invisible to the rest of us until there is a problem. “The idea of a bureaucracy is to split up the complicated task of governing a large country into smaller jobs that can be handled by specialists,” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Bureaucracies have been around since the first scribes recorded information for the Sumerian government. The Ancient Romans were known for having a large and especially hierarchical bureaucratic system to manage their empire. The term bureaucracy comes from combining the French term for desk or office, bureau, with the Greek term for rule (-cracy): essentially meaning ‘rule from the desk.’ Our nation’s federal bureaucracy encompasses 15 Cabinet departments and approximately 2000 agencies with nearly 3 million employees, most of whom are in the Executive Branch. Over 19,000 of those US federal civil servants work in Oregon. Additionally, Oregon’s own state government is the biggest employer in our state with over 45,000 state workers.

One of the common complaints about our bureaucratic system of government is that it is overly complicated and difficult to navigate. The plethora of formal procedures is partially a result of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which replaced the spoils system with a merit-based system for hiring government officials. The Pendleton Civil Service reform act created: a requirement that most federal jobs be awarded based on merit, rather than political affiliation; a system for open selection of government employees; a bipartisan Civil Service Commission to administer the selection process; and a requirement that all job applicants pass a Civil Service Examination. The Act also prohibited mandatory campaign contributions, or “assessments”, and guaranteed that citizens could compete for federal jobs without regard to politics, religion, race, or national origin.

Before the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, presidents and political parties would fill government jobs with their loyal supporters – ‘to the victor go the spoils.’ Eventually, this patronage led to so much theft and corruption, the merit-based system was created to eliminate the spoils tradition, and to hire the best trained person for the job regardless of their political affiliation. Understanding the role of public servants and government bureaucracy gives students the background knowledge they need to process the transition of power from one president to another, and the effects this has on the function of government departments.

The resources below explore the critical tasks and procedural responsibilities of civil servants. Civics Learning Project provides a research scavenger hunt lesson plan to introduce students to the vast network of departments and public employees.

Essential Questions:

Essential Question #1 – Who performs the functions of government?
Essential Questions #2 – Why do you think it’s important to have merit-based hiring for government officials?
Essential Questions #3 – What are the inherent flaws in a bureaucracy?
Essential Question #4 – How could government be more responsive to the people it serves?
Essential Question #5 – Who are the civil servants whose work directly impacts your life?

Vocabulary:

civil service: the group of government officials who are employed in occupations that serve the citizens and work to benefit the general public. Civil servants work for central, state, and local governments.
bureaucracy: The system of government departments and non-elected officials that implement public policy. Bureaucrats are the employees who carry out the responsibilities of the government.
spoils system: a practice in which a political party, after winning an election, gives government jobs to its supporters
merit system: process of promoting and hiring government employees based on their ability to perform a job, rather than on their political connections.