As in the case of other bills that would expand the governor’s appointive powers, reform opponents produce stale if not gamey arguments in the case of stalled SB 181.

The bill by Republican state Sen. Jay Morris would amend the Constitution to give the governor more discretion in appointments to the State Civil Service Commission, and the Legislature the option to include more appointments to executive branch line departments. At present, although the bill drew a solid majority in a House of Representatives vote last week, it fell eight votes short of the two-thirds requirement to pass along an amendment to voters.

Currently, the seven-person Commission has six gubernatorial appointees, in the form of the governor picking from nominations made by six private university presidents, three each, serving staggered fixed six-year terms. The only stipulation is that a president’s nominees all must come from different congressional districts. The final member is elected by members of the state’s classified civil service, who in fiscal year 2023 numbered around 34,500.

Morris brought the bill because he felt the present setup made it too difficult to remove employees. For line departments – those that report directly to the governor or a gubernatorial appointee not including those run by other elected single and multiple executives – the governor appoints fewer than 100, all at the top or next layer down of bureaucracy. This makes it more difficult to implement policy, when having career civil servants at the next layer down and further who may disagree with a governor’s agenda and will subversively try to sabotage it.

The bill would let the Legislature unlock more of these senior positions in the civil service – which doesn’t cover nearly 25,000 higher education and health care employees, plus many others working for various boards and commissions or other elected and appointed officials who, along with the governor’s line appointees, are considered part of the unclassified service, as well as excepting the state police who have their own civil service system – so that a governor can make appointments. Presently, only the Commission can perform this unlocking.

It also would let the governor select three of the six at-large commissioners from all of the nominations and three without that input, and implement this with transitional procedures that would reduce terms to four years and limits from three to two terms, with the governor – practically speaking, within the term of GOP Gov. Jeff Landry – having the ability to reassign term lengths over the rest of his term that would speed up his ability to make nominations. They still would have fixed terms and have to meet the geographical distribution requirement.

Shaking up the Commission this way could wrestle it out of a lethargy that continues to impede quality service provision to taxpayers, as this addresses another aspect of the employment-for-life-without-ghastly-behavior dynamic embedded in the civil service generally: the inability to rid the classified system of subpar employees regardless of what level at which they work. Way back in the Republican former Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration, he made efforts to reform the system in pay and performance ratings, only to have the Commission, which has approval power over such matters, water these down which dramatically reduced their effectiveness in producing more responsive bureaucracy.

One terrible consequence of this has been the continuing shockingly low involuntary separation rate in Louisiana’s civil service, which in FY 2023 numbered only 131 or less that 0.4 percent of the classified work force (another 43 resigned on the heels of disciplinary proceedings). It’s hard to believe about 99.5 percent of such employees work so well as to avoid dismissal, which is a consequence of laws and regulations designed to protect employees from arbitrary/political firings but which are tilted so far in that direction that taxpayers suffer through the resulting reduced service level.

Giving a governor a substantial minority of unmediated Commission selections – and recognize that most states have direct gubernatorial appointments to their Commission equivalents, with none involving intermediaries like private college presidents – hardly seems like a radical change especially as the governor cannot replace them mid-term. Perhaps that’s why the arguments against the bill come off as uninformed if not terribly naïve.

As in the case of the bill now heading to Landry’s desk that changes a similar system with the Board of Ethics, the unreformed system overweighs the influence of New Orleans-area presidents and it blindly assumes, contrary to reality, that these presidents are not themselves politicians of their own kinds with political agendas that inevitably seep through in their nominations. It’s politically ignorant to assume their intervention entirely, or even majorly, sanitizes politics out of civil service administration; as any scholar of public administration will tell you, history shows politics cannot be separated from administration, so it’s just a matter of whose politics are filtered into administration.

Nor should the two be separated completely. All public sector administrative superstructures have to find a balance in responsiveness versus responsibility, or the ability to carry out efficiently service delivery as intended by officials elected by the people by placing qualified people in government jobs without interference from elected officials beyond faithfully carrying out their policy. It’s never attained, not even semi-closely, by any government and always sacrificing responsiveness, but in Louisiana’s case the ossification is especially stultifying. Breathing in a little responsiveness would improve matters, which argues for the Legislature in the next couple of days sending SB 181 to the people for a vote.