Pros And Cons Of The Pendleton Act

The Pendleton Act was steered through Congress by Senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio passed by Congress on January 16th, 1883 and it established the civil service to create a fair job market ("Pendleton Act," n.d.). Congress passed the Pendleton Act following the assassination of President James A. Garfield by a disgruntled job seeker ("Pendleton Act," n.d.). Before the act, it was standard practice for newly elected presidents to reward political friends and supporters with Government positions and this was common practice by the time Andrew Jackson was elected President in 1828. The act attempted to minimize the influence of politics on civil service employees by making it illegal to discipline an employee for political reasons. Also, the

Civil Service, 1974). The act received a few additional laws that provided further protection for civil service employees throughout the first ninety years of the law. Then in 1978, Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act which abolished the Civil Service Commission and replaced it with the Office of Personnel Management and the Merit System Protection Board ("Lumen," n.d.). These new agencies were an attempt to correct multiple criticism, problems, and try to make the civil service more efficient. Many states have state or local civil service processes to regulate hiring, promotions, and discipline of public sector employees; there are benefits and challenges to these regulations. Furthermore, the civil service is intended to remove politics from the hiring process, but perhaps it could be construed that it adds more politics along with adding excessive regulations that are already provided by other employee

But history has shown that any attempts for reform bring politics into play, the very thing the civil service tries to eliminate. For example, in New Jersey, an attempt to make small changes to the state civil service brought heavy criticism from the political director of New Jersey’s largest public-employee union. The New Jersey Civil Service Commission merely grouped some state jobs into similar classes which allow workers to promote from one job to another in the same class without having to take a civil service test (Chieppo, 2013). But the civil service has changed since its inception over a century ago. Today, more than one-third of the Nation’s public civil service employees are represented by a union (Chieppo, 2013), which in many cases duplicate efforts for equality in the hiring, promotions, and discipline, which are also protected by the civil service. Furthermore, a century of meddling with civil service regulation has brought about more politics than the civil service prevents. This is evident in Massachusetts where the state has adopted a preference points system that drastically alters civil service testing results. In 2000, Boston sought to hire 25 firefighters, but after applying the preference points, only one person that scored 100 percent on the exam made it to the hiring list, at number 1,837 (Chieppo, 2013). One additional facet that adds even more politics to the civil service is