The following is an excerpt from our short course entitled “What Could Governments Do for Us?”
In this post, we discuss issues related to governmental capacity to get things done, and done well.
Previous posts dealt with issues related to taxation and borrowing and how various governments manage them.
Government revenue and spending policies get good or bad results depending upon the capacity of the government departments and agencies involved.
Capacity comes from government employees, the quality of their education and training, the quality of the procedures they must follow, the complexity of the regulations and laws they must implement or enforce, and the quality of the software and hardware used to aid them in their work.
Capacity also comes with the quality of the private firms that the government contracts with.
That, in turn, depends upon the quality and competitiveness of the procurement process.
- Federal government employment fell from 3.2% of total employment in 2010 to 2.8% in 2023. Most countries employ much higher shares. State and local government work-forces also fell, from 12.2% of total employment to 11.6% over the same period.
- Click here to see the share of employee compensation in public spending for various countries in 2023. The U.S. share is lower than most.
- Many presidents have prized party loyalty over expertise in deciding who the government employs.
- By 1881, the hiring system had gradually succumbed to corruption characterized by exchanging money and favors for political offices and the systematic purging of officeholders every time the presidency changed party hands.
- The system changed after President Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by a man repeatedly denied an appointed office.
- The 1883 Civil Service Reform Act (called “the Pendleton Act”) gradually moved most federal employees into the merit system.
- As of 2024, however, more than 4,000 positions remain reserved for political appointees, excluding those in the Executive Office of the President. Of those, roughly nine hundred required Senate confirmation.
The next post in this series will discuss a much overlooked topic – the importance of monitoring for progress. Are government programs doing what they were meant to do and doing those things well?
To see the full short course, click on the blue link “What Can Governments Do for Us?“
We offer several other short courses on the U.S. system of government. You can find them here: https://cffad.org/topics/
