February 19, 2016 at 3:39 p.m.
Civil service reform doesn't go far enough
Civil service reform doesn't go far enough
We're not actually advocating whipping them, of course, no matter how satisfying the thought might be, but the civil service system remains a firewall behind which ideological activists lurk and strike.
To hear liberals tell it, the new law is all about bringing back cronyism and dispensing with the critical science that serves truth, justice, and the American way. Why in the world, they wonder, would we ever want to go back to the days when bureaucrats served not science but special interests?
Well, yeah. About that, it's the bureaucrats these days who serve the special interests and who often end up working for them when their tenure at a state agency comes to an end.
Just one example of the revolving door: Todd Ambs left the DNR as head of its water division, where he crafted some of the most radically leftist shoreland zoning rules one could imagine, to become president of the leftist River Network, and then he moved on to lead the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition campaign.
For his work at the DNR, the River Network refers to Ambs as a "hero," not quite the four-letter label Northwoods property owners might give him.
Anyway, that science Ambs was pursuing inside the DNR might be legitimate to the hippies over at the healing network, but try to deviate from the script with some data that challenges the status quo, and liberals will call you a quack.
In reality, it's the liberal bureaucrats who are the cronies and quacks these days, and their science is often so slapstick it is laughed out of court (See Tom Baer and his Manitowish Waters cases). As far as we know and the last time we checked, the DNR was still using absurd, outdated, and indisputably wrong UN temperature models to predict average temperatures in Wisconsin 34 years from now. Looks like that is going to rise by six-to-nine degrees, if you believe these nut cases.
Yes, nut cases many of them are, but we can't get rid of them or stop their partisan shenanigans because of the civil-service system, which protects them ad nauseam by decreeing that they cannot be fired except for just cause.
That's a curious concept - just cause. It's curious because, as it turns out, it's liberals who define what just cause is.
Apparently, if typical union defenses of employees are any indication, there is no such thing as just cause. Unions will drag out disciplinary proceeding for months and years even for the most egregious personal misconduct. They don't just want fairness for their members; they want even the most corrupt members to survive and thrive.
More to the point, liberals don't believe "just cause" includes willful insubordination or any kind of substantial disregard for their employers' interests, though courts have consistently determined that that is indeed the definition of just cause.
The bureaucrats' employers are the people of the state of Wisconsin, and, when bureaucrats willfully undercut the directives of the people, as rendered by them in free elections, that should be just cause to fire them.
It isn't.
As we report in today's edition, back in 2004, bureaucrats, in league with environmental organizations, gleefully and publicly wrote rules designed to overturn legislation they didn't like. The bureaucrats should have been fired for doing so. They weren't because the civil-service firewall protected them.
In that case, the bureaucrats didn't get away with their attempted coup d'état but more often, on matters that don't draw the media's attention, they do.
This is exactly why we should have an at-will employment state - to ensure that the bureaucrats we hire to work for us are actually working for us and not for special interests.
But what about the science, one may ask? To be sure, we all want our bureaucratic "experts" pursuing credible science. And, when they don't, when they engage in hoaxology in the name of science, that, too, should be just cause for firing.
Of course, on many occasions the science is truly arguable. When our bureaucratic experts bring their science to the table, we should consider it. But, in the end, it's the people's elected representatives who should decide what the credible science is and what it is not.
They could be wrong. But so could the experts. And, indeed, the experts, as we know, are often wrong, even those who are well-intentioned and authentic. For example, the government now tells us it was all wet about the dangers of cholesterol, which, for decades until the latest dietary reports, was settled science.
At the end of the day, the liberals have performed a bait and switch about the role of experts. The public role of experts is not to make decisions. That's the job of elected officials.
The role of experts is to provide those elected officials with the best evidence and the broadest array of options available for them to make those decisions.
They may be wrong, too, but the 5.7-million heads whom they represent and listen to in Wisconsin and who live in the real world are usually better than a few bureaucratic noggins who live in the fog at government agencies, and who are often in the pockets of special interests.
In short, if mistakes are to be made, the people should make them, not the experts. We'll take that risk any day of the week because it's our interests that are affected.
At-will employment is the medicine we need to make that happen. Cronyism will always be a threat in either system - the civil service or the at-will public sector - but transparency is the antidote for cronyism.
The new civil service law does not get us where we need to go. It does allow executives to better control whom they hire, and to reward those they think perform at a high level. By itself, though, it won't clean the shelves of bureaucratic partisans masquerading as scientists and neutral experts.
We call for our elected leaders to be bold and take that next step. The ability to do their jobs could well depend on it.
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