Presidential Civil Service

A masterful account of the founding of President Franklin D. Roosevelt s Liaison Office for Personnel Management (LOPM), and his use of LOPM to demonstrate the efficacy of a management-oriented federal civil service over a purely merit-based Civil Service CommissionA Presidential Civil Service offers a comprehensive and definitive study of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt s Liaison Office for Personnel Management (LOPM). Established in 1939 following the release of Roosevelt s Brownlow Committee report, LOPM became a key milestone in the evolution of the contemporary executive-focused civil service. The Progressive Movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comprised groups across the political spectrum with quite different. All, however, agreed on the need for a politically autonomous and independent federal Civil Service Commission (CSC) to eliminate patronage and political favoritism. In A Presidential Civil Service, public administration scholar Mordecai Lee explores two models open to later reformers: continuing a merit-based system isolated from politics or a management-based system subordinated to the executive and grounded in the growing field of managerial science. Roosevelt s 1937 Brownlow Committee, formally known as the President s Committee on Administrative Management, has been widely studied including its recommendation to disband the CSC and replace it with a presidential personnel director. What has never been documented in detail was Roosevelt s effort to implement that recommendation over the objections of Congress by establishing the LOPM as a nonstatutory agency. The role and existence of LOPM from 1939 to 1945 has been largely dismissed in the history of public administration. Lee s meticulously researched A Presidential Civil Service, however, persuasively shows that LOPM played a critical role in overseeing personnel policy. It was involved in every major HR initiative before and during World War II. Though small, the agency s deft leadership almost always succeeded at impelling the CSC to follow its lead. Roosevelt s actions were in fact an artful and creative victory, a move finally vindicated when, in 1978, Congress abolished the CSC and replaced it with an Office of Personnel Management headed by a presidential appointee. A Presidential Civil Service offers a fascinating account and vital reassessment of the enduring legacy of Roosevelt s LOPM.