The worst thing about the IRS scandal is that the bureaucracy blatantly took sides in a political dispute. Sure, I trust that most employees are honest. I do. But dishonest employees got away with their political actions and apparently thrived.
One could almost understand if political appointees bent rules or made up bad rules to advance political agendas. Not excuse them, of course. They should be fired and punished. But you can at least understand the temptation for them.
But when the civil servants act that way, how do we restore lost trust?
What distinguishes democracies from tinhorn dictatorships and totalitarian monstrosities are our permanent meritocratic government bureaus that remain nonpartisan and honestly report the truth.
The Benghazi, Associated Press, and National Security Agency scandals are scary, but not as disturbing as growing doubts about the honesty of permanent government itself.
It is no longer crackpot to doubt the once impeccable and nonpartisan IRS. When it assured the public that it was not making decisions about tax-exempt status based on politics, it lied. One of its top commissioners, Lois Lerner, resigned and invoked the Fifth Amendment.
A system of voluntary tax reporting rests on trust. If the IRS itself is untruthful, will it be able to expect truthful compliance from taxpayers?
I feel I have some authority to speak on this because I spent my career as a nonpartisan employee of the state legislature here in Michigan. I was not a civil servant. I was an at-will employee. My appointment, in fact, was confirmed by a committee of the legislature. (It was not advice and consent level stuff, I'll add. It was more like a fail-safe if my bosses had made a terrible error in hiring me--sorry, Brian, we'd love to keep you but the committee did not approve you. You have two hours to clean your desk out.)
What I was was a nonpartisan analyst and writer who worked for both sides of the aisle. I had fans in both parties. Indeed, I took pride in the fact that I sold figurative arms to both sides and both sides could not pin down my politics based on my interactions or product that I gave them. I worked for the institution of the legislature and it would have tarnished both my reputation and the reputation of my outfit to slant my work for one side or divulge information to the other side. That was unacceptable to me and unacceptable to my organization and unacceptable to the legislature itself. We earned their trust. If our bosses wanted information guaranteed to slant their way, they went to their partisan staff. Indeed, sometimes we had to turn down requests for work that was just too political in nature. And we could get away with that.
Indeed, I simply did not blog on domestic policies that might undermine my credibility to do my job for whoever asked me a question. Now I have that freedom, but try to stay in my lane for the most part. It's nice not to have to worry about straying outside my lane, but I still prefer not to do that.
So it is not unreasonable to have a federal workforce that sticks to doing its job and values the trust that either party can have in them to do their jobs--and no more.
The civil service system was put in place to replace the spoils system where political winners could simply clear out all the employees of the last group in power and reward their supporters with those jobs. It is no longer clear that the new system is superior to the old. At least in the old system, if people got mad enough about the behavior of the bureaucracy, they could punish the elected officials and expect at least a new crop of bums.
I think more of the mid-level management has to be outside of the civil service where it will be accountable for failures because they can be fired and held responsible for what their people do. Having a civil servant Lois Lerner at the IRS has not insulated the service from politics, it seems.
We need civil servants who do their jobs and who are trusted by both their bosses and the people to just do their jobs, without thinking of themselves as the shock troops of their favorite political party.
And of course, as always, the federal government is just too damn big.
