The United States Civil Service Commission was a three-man commission created by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which was passed into law on January 16, 1883. The commission was created to administer the civil service of the United States federal government in response to the assassination of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, who is said to have been a rejected office seeker. Guiteau wanted a job via the spoils system, also known as patronage, and Chester Arthur didn't want to continue the system that killed his predecessor. The law required certain applicants to take the civil service exam in order to be given certain jobs; it also prevented elected officials and political appointees from firing civil servants, removing civil servants from the influences of political patronage and partisan behavior.
Effective January 1, 1978, functions of the commission were split between the Office of Personnel Management and the Merit Systems Protection Board under the provisions of Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1978 (43 F.R. 36037, 92 Stat. 3783) and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. In addition, other functions were placed under jurisdiction of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) and the Office of Special Counsel (OSC).
Under the Commission Model, policy making and administrative powers were given to semi-independent commission rather than to the president. Reformers believed that a commission formed outside of the president’s chain of command would ensure that civil servants would be selected on the basis of merit system and the career service would operate in a political neutrality fashion. Civil Service Commissions typically consisted of three to seven individuals appointed by the chief executive on a bipartisan basis and for limited terms. Commissioners were responsible for direct administration of personnel system, including rule-making authority, administration of merit examinations, and enforcement of merit rules.
Read more about United States Civil Service Commission: Presidents of The Commission
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, civil, service and/or commission:
“In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.”
—Thomas Nagel (b. 1938)
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there’s no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.”
—Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968)
“The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance would be criminal which told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)