The Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service: A Personnel System under Siege

Abstract

c>*G mo HE past several years have been an exciting time for fed1-Z eral personnel management. Much of the excitement has surrounded the birthing and nurturing of the Senior Executive Service (SES), the acknowledged centerpiece of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. But while the implementation of SES garnered a lot of attention, it was not the only personnel action in Washington. While one set of officials spent a great deal of effort breathing life into the SES, a much smaller set has been arguing over whether to extinguish the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service, a personnel system that has been in existence for almost a century. Ironically, the Corps, located in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), contains many of the very characteristics that the SES was intended to have, namely the characteristics of a career service. In constructing his "ideal type" definition of a career service, Frederick Mosher, in Democracy and the Public Service, contrasts the rank-in-the-position feature of the general civil service with the rank-in-the-person feature of a career service (1). Associated with and promoted by the rank-in-theperson feature are such attitudes as esprit de corps, organizational loyalty, and commitment to mission. In addition, the career service provides agencies the capacity for short-run adaptability: careerists can be expeditiously deployed to meet agency needs, unencumbered by position-classification restraints. There is a widely shared understanding that Title IV of the Civil Service Reform Act establishing the SES was intended to create a career service of an elite cadre of mobile managers. Whether this has happened or can indeed ever happen is the subject of much recent debate (2). The Commissioned Corps already has many of the necessary features of a