The History of the United States Civil Service

From the Postwar Years to the Twenty-First Century

Lorenzo Castellani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000350531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The History of the United States Civil Service: From the Postwar Years to the Twenty-First Century provides a broad, comprehensive overview of the US civil service in the postwar period and examines the reforms and changes throughout that time.

The author situates the history of the civil service into a wider context, considering political, social and cultural changes that occurred and have been influential in the history of American government. The book analyzes the development of administrative reorganizations, administrative reforms, personnel policy and political thought on public administration. It also underlines continuity and changes in the structures, organization, and personnel management of the federal civil service, and the evolution of the role of presidential control over federal bureaucracy. Taking an essential, but often neglected organization as its focus, the text offers a rich, historical analysis of an important institution in American politics.

This book will be of interest to teachers and students of American political history and the history of government, as well as more specifically, the Presidency, Public Administration, and Administrative Law.

1
The American State and Its Administration

Which American State?

It would be a mistake to confront a portion of the administrative history of the United States without recognizing the development of the American government. The exceptional qualities of this history are reflected in the ways of conceptualizing, constructing, and organizing the country’s administration.

In traditional historiography, the United States is considered to be the emblem of a “low-intensity” state. To describe its characteristics, the term “stateless society” has been coined, to indicate a society without strong government, one characterized by a weakly centralized and penetrating state form.¹

According to this viewpoint, the structure of American democracy was placed above all on principles like those of the protection of private property, of free enterprise, and of the rule of law, of the constitutional checks and balances of federalism, rather than on bureaucratic organization or the centralization of public power and the penetration of government into society, all characteristics generally attributed more to modern European States than to the American republic.² This narrative, shaped by such major nineteenth-century thinkers as Tocqueville, Hegel, and Marx, proved to be very resistant over time. For example, as late as the mid-twentieth century, the distinguished German jurist Carl Schmitt underestimated the importance of the state and of its administrative structures for understanding the United States. Once he imprecisely stated, “Italians know what the state is, while the British don’t; and not to mention the Americans.”³

Nevertheless, during recent years, a part of American historical literature has underlined how there occurred a progressive reinforcement of central executive power, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. Governmental powers have notably increased, in terms of both regulation and control over citizens and their activities. The numbers of federal agencies, departments, and civil servants multiplied by the 1930s and programs and policies managed directly by the federal government increased substantially, in particular by the 1960s. As well as these factors, there need to be recognized governmental powers of surveillance, strengthened during the past two decades to prevent terrorist attacks, and the sizable amount of public money invested in financing expanded military interventionism.⁴

Despite these observations, the dominant perception of the American State has remained the above-cited one, with a classic formulation that strains under the influence of the past, in describing a weak, incomplete, decentralized government, limited in its functions and actions.⁵

This description is not void of historical foundation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the American institutional system was a mosaic which included all those elements that diverged from the European context: a federal structure that assured the holders of local power (states, cities, and counties) complete autonomy with respect to the central government, the principle of the separation of constitutional powers at both the federal and state levels, the system of checks and balances among the institutions expressing diverse powers, the adoption of the principles of self-government, and the rule of law and of judicial review, as fundamental concepts in the structuring of popular sovereignty. Thanks to these characteristics, the American political order showed itself as a system of separated institutions sharing power, in which the principle of popular sovereignty accompanied that of legal limitations on the actions of the government, and the absolute respect for specific areas of the various powers’ jurisdiction. In this scenario, administrative action and the means of intervention of public power followed criteria that, while they could be considered irrational from the viewpoint of Weberian logic, acquired sense if appraised in the light of the specific qualities of the U.S. system. In fact, until the third decade of the twentieth century, probably one could not truly speak of the presence of a consolidated bureaucratic system. Still, as we will see, this did not imply an absence of either administrative intervention, on the part of single political authorities, nor an administrative power.

In this vein, analyzing the first century of the American republic, Richard J. Stillman identified the origins of the peculiar development of public administration in a series of elements that have informed “American statelessness.”⁶ He argued that, precisely because of the lack of explicit constitutional guidelines for administrative systems, one must—in order to understand their characteristics and development—examine the foundational ideas of the American republic, the “Tudor” institutions, the conflictual situations preceding the revolution of the 1770s–1780s, and the myths created around the Constitution.⁷ On the basis of these elements, Stillman concluded, one can understand how American government has been, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, a government not of men but of laws, founded on a process of limitation of the executive branch and on the negation of any kind of systematic process for the creation of an effective administrative authority.

This “alternative statehood” had already been observed by Alexis de Tocqueville, certainly the nineteenth century’s most acute theoretician of American statelessness, who noted that administrative power in the United States presented neither a centralized nor a hierarchical structure; for this reason, this power was difficult to detect. The power existed, but one did not know where to find those who represented it. According to the French intellectual, there can be glimpsed “the faint traces of an administrative hierarchy,” and there was no “center in which there converged the spokes of administrative power.”⁸ For Tocqueville, the “hypo-administrative” configuration of American democracy could better guarantee protection against despotic degenerations of power, even though this same thinker’s alarm regarding the possible degenerations of liberal democracy toward mild despotism could hold true for the United States.

This invisibility of public administration, already noted by early nineteenth-century thinkers, did not, however, mean that there was no uniformity in the work of public employees or that these did not come under forms of political control. Tocqueville, in fact, understood quite well that a dominant concept in the United States was supremacy of the law, which defined administrative action and the activity of civil servants by imposing juridically binding norms that could, above all, make themselves readily respected in courts of law. He wrote,

In the New England states legislative power extends to a greater number of matters than in Europe. The legislative branch penetrates, in a certain sense, into the very heart of the administration; the law descends, to regulate and minutely execute them, and in this way constrains the secondary organs and their administrators with a series of rigid and rigorously defined obligations.⁹

These trends occurred in the United States because the new country had embraced the Lockean principle that had characterized the English revolution, that is, the protection of the citizen from the actions of an arbitrary government. The very Constitution was born in order to limit and regulate the action of the government with regard to its own structures and individuals, and for this reason administrative intervention was conceived as the mere execution of the will of the only legitimate body for representing the sovereign people, namely, the legislature. Based on these assumptions, public administration thus had to be legally limited, to avoid the danger of excessively arbitrary decisions on the part of civil servants, considered to be detrimental to both the rights of individuals and the principle of the separation of powers. And for these reasons, unlike the case of Continental Europe, at the time Tocqueville was writing there did not exist a special branch of the law, the droit adminitratif, to regulate the relationship between citizens and the state.

As explained in the writings of Albert van Dicey, the leading British constitutional lawyer of the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition has been marked by the extraneousness of droit administratif. In his Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, he wrote that the droit administratif rested on ideas that were totally alien to English law: according to administrative law, the relationship between individuals and the state is governed by substantially different principles than those which, in private law, safeguard the rights of citizens with regard to their peers. For English law, questions concerning the application of these principles did not pertain to the jurisdiction of ordinary courts. This essential difference made it impossible to identify administrative law with any branch of English law.¹⁰

In the Anglo-American world, the ordinary courts were the ones to determine the lawfulness of legislation and, consequently, the legitimacy of acts undertaken by civil servants. Nonetheless, if administrative action came to be defined by the normative production of the legislative body, and by the legal control of the courts, the problem of the recruitment of bureaucrats, at both the federal and state levels, was moved to the background. In fact, the criteria of selection did not have to respond so much to competence and professional qualifications as they did to the principle of representing popular sovereignty. The public employee was understood as a civil servant of the people and the power emanated from them, and not as an intermediary between the will of the government and society at large. Thus, in the United States, the presence of civil servants gained its own legitimization from a democratic process. These officials were representatives, directly elected or nominated by those who were chosen by the people.¹¹

This process of legitimization, for European theorists of administrative rationality, was something inconceivable and incompatible with the role of public administration, which was seen as an indivisible element of the organic state and as a branch for executing sovereign will, not for representing common people.¹²

In sum, there emerged the interpretation, which would become a persistent one, that the American State was born and raised, compared to European States, as essentially weak, and in administrative terms, it was considered as acephalous, non-autonomous and ruled by “courts and parties.”

However, whereas it seems fair to say that European countries have a strong-state tradit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The American State and Its Administration
• 2 From the Foundation of the Republic to WWII: A Brief Overview of the U.S. Civil Service History
• 3 From the Postwar Period to the 1960s: The Role of Federal Bureaucracy between Administrative Reorganization and Development of the Welfare State
• 4 The 1960s and 1970s: Administrative Growth, Pluralization, and Management
• 5 Toward the Neo-managerial Age
• Conclusion: Continuity and Change in the U.S. Federal Civil Service
• Index