Fire At Will: Civil Service Reform and Bureaucratic Accountability

Abstract

A recent effort in the United States seeks to remove the tenure protections of civil servants in the federal government. If successful a presidential administration could fire bureaucrats at-will -- rather than requiring cause -- and replace them with co-partisans. This approach to governance is not new, in fact, and is strongly reminiscent of the conditions that led, some 150 years ago, to the very tenure protections civil servants have today. In this paper, we model the principal-agent relationship between administration and bureaucracy under both at-will and just-cause terms of employment. We find that the greater the proportion of cross-partisans with which an administration must work, the better welfare is under just-cause relative to at-will terms.