ROSENBLOOM DESCRIBES THE THIRD AND LATEST WAVE OF PUBLIC PERSONNEL REFORMS TO SWEEP THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCENE-(THE OTHERS BEING THE JACKSONIAN AND PROGRESSIVE REFORMS) THE CIVIL SERVICE ACT OF 1978. HE IS PESSIMISTIC THAT DIVISION OF THE COMMISSIONS FUNCTIONS AMONG FOUR SEPARATE ORGANIZATIONS WILL RESOLVE CONFLICTS OF VALUES AND INTERESTS BEHIND THE REFORMS AND QUESTIONS THE NEW SR EXECUTIVE SERVICE.
Conceived during the turbulent period of the late 1960s when 'rights talk' was ubiquitous, Federal Service and the Constitution, a landmark study first published in 1971, strove to understand how the rights of federal civil servants had become so differentiated from those of ordinary citizens. Now in a new, second edition, this legal-historical analysis reviews and enlarges its look at the constitutional rights of federal employees from the nation''s founding to the present. Thoroughly revised and updated, this highly readable history of the constitutional relationship between federal employee
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"Since 1946, Congress has played an increasingly expanded role in federal administration. David H. Rosenbloom describes the evolution of the relationship between federal agencies and Congress, creating a better understanding of current administrative issues that have caused some to call for a reinvention of government."--Jacket
Heffernan v. City of Paterson, Mayor Jose Torres, Police Chief James Wittig, and Police Director Michael Walker modified and expanded constitutional tort law by (a) authorizing suits against public officials, employees, and municipalities for unconstitutionally retaliating against personnel on the mistaken belief that they engaged in constitutionally protected speech and (b) allowing such suits to proceed even when those personnel deny having exercised First Amendment rights. Heffernan also affords procedural protection to public employees disciplined for what was incorrectly considered protected speech. The implications for public personnel administration are (a) potentially greater difficulty for personnelists and managers to receive qualified immunity in summary judgments, (b) potential liability for a new type of constitutional tort with uncertain boundaries, and (c) and, unexpectedly, judicial intrusion into personnel administration by judges' second-guessing the reasonableness of managerial actions based on erroneous assessments of the constitutionality of employees' speech. Consequently, public personnelists and managers should closely follow Heffernan's progeny to protect rights and avoid suits.
Considering tradition and modernity in public administration encourages us to focus on the field's normative dimensions. Tradition teaches us that efficiency has not always been a dominant or default value for organizing public administration. Although efficiency rose to dominance in the 1930s, as with tradition, today it is contested by a plethora of competing public administrative values. Because there is no agreed upon framework for analyzing and organizing these values, this article offers a format for categorizing them and ordering their relationships to one another based on whether they are intrinsic, ancillary, or extrinsic to agency core missions.