A State-by-State Comparison of Civil Service Structures

Civil-service systems at the state level fall on a rough spectrum, from constitutionally-protected merit systems at one end to substantially-at-will systems at the other. Louisiana sits near the protective end of the spectrum today. Amendment 1 would move it to a position occupied, in its specific constitutional form, by no other state in the union.

I. The spectrum, summarized.

II. Louisiana today.

Louisiana's current structure places it in the first tier. Article X of the 1974 Constitution establishes a classified state civil service with the following features:

• An independent State Civil Service Commission of seven members, with members selected through a structured process designed to insulate the Commission from direct gubernatorial control.
• A corresponding independent Commission for City Civil Service covering New Orleans and other cities of over 400,000.
• Cause-protection for classified employees, appeal rights, and judicial review of Commission decisions.
• Constitutional text that enumerates the unclassified categories. Additions to the unclassified service require either constitutional amendment or Commission rule-making.

Five other states have similar constitutional frameworks. California's is the oldest continuously-operating state merit system and the most extensively litigated. Michigan's is notable for providing the Civil Service Commission with near-exclusive authority over personnel policy. New York's, Ohio's, and Hawaii's are broadly comparable in structure.

III. Louisiana if Amendment 1 passes.

Amendment 1 does not move Louisiana into any of the existing lower tiers. It creates a novel configuration: constitutional framework with legislative override. Under the amended text, the Constitution would still establish a Commission and still reference classified/unclassified categories, but the Legislature would be constitutionally authorized to override the classification at will, by ordinary statute.

We have reviewed the state constitutions of all fifty states. No other state constitution contains a comparable provision. The closest analogues are:

• States in Tier 4 (Georgia, Texas, Arkansas), where the merit principle was never placed in the constitution in the first place. These states do not require a constitutional amendment to reclassify positions because the question never rose to that level.
• Florida's Service First initiative (2001) — accomplished by statute under a statutory, not constitutional, merit framework. Governor Bush was criticized at the time precisely because the move was made without a constitutional amendment; his critics argued that the merit principle was important enough to warrant constitutional placement. The Florida controversy stands as a cautionary tale: the Service First reforms have been the subject of continuous litigation for more than two decades.

What is unusual about Amendment 1, in comparative perspective, is that it proposes to keep the constitutional framework while removing the protections that constitutional framework was designed to provide. It is, structurally, a retention of the furniture with the doors unlocked.

IV. The direction of travel in other states.

A note on trend. The states that moved toward at-will personnel systems in the 1990s and 2000s — Georgia most prominently, then Florida, Wisconsin, and Indiana — did so on the basis of an argument from flexibility and accountability. The academic literature since has been broadly skeptical of that argument. Turnover rose in each of the reforming states. Vacancy rates lengthened. Retention of experienced staff declined. The reforms did not produce measurable improvements in service delivery or fiscal efficiency sufficient to offset the measured costs.

Several of the reforming states have, in fact, moved partially back. Florida has strengthened Selected Exempt Service procedural protections since 2010. Wisconsin has restored elements of the classified service in specific agencies. The net effect is that the reform wave has cooled, and the states that are currently considering similar moves — including, now, Louisiana — are doing so against a weaker empirical case than the reformers of 1996 or 2001 had available.

V. The federal backdrop.

Paper II addresses Schedule F at the federal level in detail. The brief point for comparative purposes: the federal civil service is in active turmoil over exactly the question Amendment 1 raises, with two rescinded and two reinstated executive orders, active litigation, and ongoing rulemaking. No state that pursued similar reforms over the past thirty years has emerged with a settled, stable workforce. The assumption that Louisiana would is unsupported by the comparative record.

VI. A table Louisiana journalists and legislators can cite.

VII. The bottom line for Louisiana voters.

Louisiana today has one of the six strongest state-level civil-service structures in the United States. If Amendment 1 passes, Louisiana will retain the formal architecture of a strong structure while losing the substance of it — a configuration that has no parallel in any other state constitution. The reform, in other words, is not a step toward any existing system. It is a step into territory that no comparable American state has been willing to enter.

Vote NO on Amendment 1.