Over 140 years ago, the federal government began its reform of the bureaucracy to the civil-service system, a process which took decades to complete. Its pinnacle of reform came in 1939 when Congress passed the Hatch Act, which barred federal employees from conducting political activity on taxpayer time and government property. As government expanded rapidly from that point, though, the federal bureaucracy developed its own interests in policy, and this year we have reaped the results. In my column for The Fiscal Times, I write that the IRS scandal and the National Parks Service antics during the shutdown show that the civil-service ideal is dead — especially in this administration:
In May, the Inspector General for the IRS found that the agency had targeted groups applying for tax-exempt status on the basis of their political beliefs, especially those groups that referenced the Tea Party. Those target lists continued to be used as IRS officials such as Commissioner Douglas Shulman testified to Congress that the agency conducted no such targeting.Nor was that that the only way in which the IRS scrutinized President Obama’s opposition. USA Today reported three weeks ago that the IRS specifically targeted groups that had “anti-Obama rhetoric” in their literature.In one case, with an application from the Patriots of Charleston, the IRS flagged “negative Obama commentary” on their website as a reason to hold up approval for their tax-exempt application. For the Tea Party of North Idaho, “significant inflammatory language, highly emotional language” was enough to start peppering the group with demands to release information on their donors and the companies owned by those donors. …Unknown at the time but reported this week, the National Parks Service chased down a group of senior citizens at Yellowstone National Park when the shutdown commenced on October 1st. After informing the busload of tourists, some of whom were tourists from other countries, that the park was no longer accessible, the rangers locked them into a closed hotel for several hours with armed guards posted at the exits. When finally allowed to get back on the bus and leave Yellowstone, rangers stopped the tourists from pausing to take pictures, chasing after them for “recreating.”That arguably constitutes kidnapping or false arrest, especially conducted under color of authority for no other reason than to score political points in the shutdown. One of the tourists called it “Gestapo tactics,” and an NPS ranger anonymously confirmed this as a deliberate strategy by NPS. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can,” the anonymous ranger told The Washington Times. “It’s disgusting.”It certainly is, and it’s part of a disturbing pattern emerging in the second term of Barack Obama.
That last incident in particular goes far beyond the already-objectionable “Washington Monument strategy” of extorting operating funds out of Congress. It speaks to two related developments in American governance — the expansion of power in the federal government, and the arbitrary manner in which it gets applied. That may be called many things, but it’s neither “civil” nor “service.”
