The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, (October 13, 1978, Pub.L. 95-454, 92 Stat. 1111) (CSRA), reformed the civil service of the United States federal government.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 abolished the U.S. Civil Service Commission and distributes its functions primarily among three agencies: the newly established Office of Personnel Management, Merit Systems Protection Board, and Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Under the "rank-in-the-person" provision of the act, agency heads can move career senior executives into any position for which they are qualified. One provision of the act was the abolishment of the United States Civil Service Commission and the creation of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) and the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). OPM primarily provides management guidance to the various agencies of the executive branch and issues regulations that control federal human resources. FLRA oversees the rights of federal employees to form collective bargaining units (unions) and to engage in collective bargaining with agencies. MSPB conducts studies of the federal civil service and mainly hears the appeals of federal employees who are disciplined or otherwise separated from their positions. This act was an effort to replace incompetent officials.
The CSRA is codified in scattered sections of Title 5 of the United States Code.
Patricia W. Ingraham and Donald P. Moynihan describe the CSRA in Evolving Dimensions of Performance from CSRA Onward as "mov from personnel administration to the specific linking of human resource management to broader management activities and performance."
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“Both of us felt more anxiety about the South—about the colored people especially—than about anything else sinister in the result. My hope of a sound currency will somehow be realized; civil service reform will be delayed; but the great injury is in the South. There the Amendments will be nullified, disorder will continue, prosperity to both whites and colored people will be pushed off for years.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)
“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
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—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)