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Various scholars have put forth frameworks for interpreting how public sector human resource management (HRM) policies and practices have tracked shifts in societal values. Although such frameworks serve important heuristic purposes, the empirical support offered for the interpretations made is generally thin. This study employs content analysis techniques to assess the relative validity of these different schemes with a focus on the priority assigned to the different values by members of Congress in debates over the federal civil service. According to the results, among the most dominant HRM-related values for the 122-year period (1883-2004) are efficiency, morality, and progress.

As the Obama administration pieces together its own civil service reform program, it may find solutions to key reform challenges in an oft-overlooked Bush administration human resource management initiative in the national security arena. While press and scholarly attention focused largely on the administration's reform efforts at the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, discussed at length in the article by Kellough, Nigro, and Brewer in this symposium, the development of a common personnel framework across the U.S. Intelligence Community went relatively unnoticed. The author argues that human resource management changes made pursuant to the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 provide a potential model for the Obama administration as it addresses three key reform challenges that have long plagued policymakers: replacing the General Schedule with a modernized approach to compensation and classification, achieving a balance between uniformity at the executive branch level and flexibility at the agency level, and reconfiguring the Senior Executive Service.

The Personnel Demonstration Project (PDP) provision of the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978 was intended to promote innovative human resource management (HRM) practices and policies. The early experience in this regard was not encouraging. However, during the second 15 years of its existence, the Personnel Demonstration Project authority has been critical to the diffusion of two important human resource management policy innovations, paybanding and category rating. This analysis explores the policymaking dynamic through which this diffusion has occurred.

The Bush administration is promoting radical change to the labor-management relations status quo in the federal sector. Provisions of the 1978 Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute already leave the federal employee unions in a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis management. The changes by President Bush would tip the balance of power even further in favor of management. Are those changes an attempt to expand presidential control over the bureaucracy, or do they simply represent an alternative, promanagement philosophy of workplace relations? The conclusion here is that Bush has adopted a political management model of governance in which operational considerations are subordinate to control considerations.

Early in the history of the National Performance Review (NPR), observers speculated that the prescriptions it contained, if implemented, would shift authority over the bureaucracy from the legislative branch to the executive branch. This review of the actual impact of NPR on relations between these key institutional actors finds that to the contrary, NPR has served to strengthen the congressional role in administrative matters in important ways. Key to this outcome has been the recent tendency, promoted by NPR, toward the disaggregation of administrative structures and systems in the federal government.

With the failed attempt at comprehensive reform of the civil service system in 1995, the Clinton administration encouraged individual agencies to seek their own personnel flexibilities. That strategy met with some success with the granting by Congress of special authorities to units with a total of approximately 200,000 employees. However, the disaggregation of the federal personnel system this approach portends holds profound and potentially adverse consequences for the institution of the civil service, for the values of merit and equity that have been traditionally associated with the civil service, and for the public service ethos that provides the civil service a constitutive role in our system of governance.