Chapter 2: Human Resource Management and Civil Service Reform: Change (Transformation) in Government

There is perhaps no area of public administration that has experienced greater change, professionalization, and controversy over the past four decades than public human resource management (PHRM) (Condrey, 2012; Sims, 2010b). And given the reality that government or public sector organizations continue to experience pressure to reinvent, reform or to radically change or transform (Sims, 2010a) as discussed in the chapters throughout this book it goes without saying that PHRM will have no choice but to continue to reinvent, reform, radically change and transform in kind.

According to Ban and Gossett (2010), efforts to reform the way in which governments handle the personnel management function have a long history in the United States. Kellough and Selden (2003) suggest that there have been at least 12 major administrative reforms in the 20th century alone. Ban and Gossett also note that the last 35-year period has seen almost continuous calls for reform, many of them leading to significant changes in how the human resource management (HRM) function is organized and managed in the federal government, starting with President Carter’s Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and moving through the Grace Commission’s recommendations under President Reagan (Hansen, 1985; Levine, 1985) to the National Performance era of reinventing government led by Vice President Gore (National Performance Review, 1993; Thompson, 2001) and to President George Bush’s President’s Management Agenda (Office of Management and Budget [OMB], 2002), which James Pfiffner (2007, p. 7) has characterized as containing possibly “the broadest human resource management changes since the Pendleton Act.” With the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 there was every indication his administration would have (and has had) an active policy agenda concerning federal HRM reform.