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Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I rise today in support of Senator Kaine's request for unanimous consent for the Senate to pass the Saving the Civil Service Act. It is a critical bill that I hope all my colleagues would agree needs to be enshrined into law.

One of the great strengths of our democracy is that we have an independent, merit-based civil service. Back in the 19th century, we saw what happens when you had a Federal workforce that was made up of a system of spoils and political patronage. So the Congress, back in 1883, said: We ought to put in place an independent civil service.

That has been the law of the land for the last 150 years. Virtually every other industrial nation in the world has modeled their independent workforce after the American model.

We have 2 million Federal employees across the country. Virginia has 147,000. There are close to that many in Maryland and in the District, but they are all over. Senator Hirono mentioned earlier Hawaii has some of the highest concentration.

Senator Kaine's bill, which we are all proud to be cosponsoring, would simply say: Let's not break that system.

The idea--and the incoming President has said he wants this--to make and get rid of a merit-based civil service is, in my mind, beyond comprehension. Do you really want that nurse at the VA hospital, that the first criteria we are looking for is who did she vote for as opposed to whether she knows nursing; or that air traffic controller that says: Well, I may have been politically active for an unpopular candidate, so I am going to get fired? Or, more likely, one of the things that we have seen that has been a strength of our system: The independent economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Presidents of each party get mad when their numbers come out each month because those numbers are independently verified. Do you want to fire all those folks and put in political loyalists?

The rest of the world would run from that, and it would, frankly, undermine the reserved nature of the U.S. dollar as the currency of the backbone of the world, if we are cooking the books on our economic numbers.

There are a host of other examples that we could go almost category by category. I can tell you, the vast majority of Federal workers whom I interact with, most of them could actually have done better in the private sector. They do this work because of that sense of public service.

And if you get rid of a merit-based system and do it all for political patronage, who is going to actually join that kind of government on a going-forward basis?

This would undermine our economy, undermine our security, and obviously undermine the ability of the American people to get a fair administration of government services.

With that, I am going to yield to my good friend, the Senator from Maryland Senator Van Hollen.

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