came a legal resident of Virginia, a voter in Virginia; does that change it?

Mrs. McMILLIN. I think not. That is a technical question. Mr. Vipond, just what is the answer to that?

Mr. VIPOND. That person's appointment would still be charged to Minnesota, but any members of his family would thereafter be charged to Virginia.

Senator BYRD. Are there any statistics or records as to what extent the members of the families of those who moved into Virginia and Maryland have later obtained positions and thereby increased the charge against Virginia and Maryland?

Mr. VIPOND. No, sir.

Mrs. MOMILLIN. I do not think we have any statistics on that, Senator Byrd.

Senator BYRD. Of course, as you know, that has happened very frequently.

Mrs. MCMILLIN. Yes. That is one of the difficulties of administering the apportionment; one of the great difficulties.

Mr. MITCHELL. We went into that feature quite extensively, Senator, before you came in.

Senator BYRD. Yes.

Senator MEAD. Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask the Commission, in addition to the ascertainment of cost figures that might result from the application of the Classification Act to field employees who will be covered under the civil service by the passage of this bill, if they have given any thought to savings that will result from reduced turn-over or increased efficiency or changes in personnel control?

Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. Baruch will answer that question.

Mr. BARUCH. Of course, under title II, savings in actual terms of money are more or less conjectural, because of the large group of positions that I mentioned that are now being paid lower than the regular standard rates under the Classification Act. In the course of administration, however, as we have noticed here in the District of Columbia over the last 15 years or so, the tendency of the operating departments in making recommendations to the Commission as to the salary ranges or grades in which various positions should be placed is high rather than low. In other words, it is an unusual occurrence, to say the least, for the Civil Service Commission to find that a position, in terms of the difficulty of its duties and weight of its responsibilities, rates higher than the grade recommended by the Department. It is a usual circumstances for us, however, to find that the position rates lower, and sometimes much lower than the Department recommended.

That may be due to a number of things. That department, of course, has not got a full knowledge of the positions in other departments. It is not able to make an interdepartmental comparison as accurately as we can over in our shop where we have all the information in front of us. At any rate, the fact remains that the operation of such a statute as the Classification Act results in savings every year and every day in that the central control over the classification of positions, which eventually leads into the appropriate salary scales, results in a lesser expenditure by the department for quite a number of positions for which they have recommended higher salary ranges than the Commission found it is able to grant.

So far as savings of this nature are concerned, we have never actually computed any figures on that. We have always thought that the greatest benefits to be secured were of an intangible nature. That is, you cannot possibly expect good morale and effective service under conditions where the same kind of work is being done by different persons at widely varying rates of pay. That is always the situation which is created in the absence of a central control, a classification type of control over salary administration. Under the Classification Act each employee knows, for example, that his particular tasks and responsibilities, assigned to him by the Department, will be appraised in the light of their difficulty and their responsibility and a salary range fixed which will be comparable to the salary range fixed for jobs of equal difficulty and equal responsibility. If he does 1.ot agree, for example, with the Commission's initial decision, he has a right to come to the Commission again and get the thing reconsidered. The decision is not subject, so far as his pay scale is concerned, to the differing ideas of the various subordinate departmental executives under whom employees work. Out of that situation, the equal pay for equal work idea, comes the great value under the Classification Act and its amendments.

Senator MEAD. It is assumed that there is a great loss in the labor turn-over in a department as complex as the employees in the Internal Revenue Collector's office. I presume that we could ascertain the cost to the Government of breaking in a new man and bringing him up to a standard of efficiency that the employee that he supplanted had attained. For example, if a Federal administration changes, there is a great turn-over of personnel that has acquired, over a long period of time, an intricate knowledge of the tax laws of the United States attained at great expense to the Government. Eliminating that personnel suddenly with the change in administration would require another period of education and experimentation until the new employee was trained to work as efficiently as the old employee. In private enterprise they have determined that loss or that gain, and it occurs to me that we could determine that, to offset any charge that the provisions of this law will result in increased cost to the Government.

Mr. MITCHELL. Senator, may I suggest to you where you can get those figures. Internal Revenue Collector Hoey in the city of New York has some very interesting figures as to the greater efficiency of the older employees, which he was quoting to me just a month or so ago; and if you could get those from him, I think they would be of value to the committee because they show very clearly the advantage of having the positions under the civil-service law.

Senator MEAD. Those would be very interesting figures, because they would weigh heavily against the additional cost that of course will result from the application of the Classification Act.

Mrs. McMILLIN. Certainly, in the long run, in the final analysis, Senator, it will be economy to do so.

Senator MEAD. I believe so.

Mr. FLEMMING. Senator Mead, that is an argument also, a very strong argument in favor of the present provisions of the bill for dealing with the incumbents on a noncompetitive basis rather than attempting to throw all these positions open to open competition.

Senator MEAD. By all means. I believe we have made sufficient progress from the time when we used to cover employees without any regard to examinations, competitive or noncompetitive, to show that the method which your Commission has recently approved and put into practice is about as reasonable and as perfect as we hope for it to be, so far as our present knowledge of affairs is concerned. I think that the present system is all right.

Mr. Chairman, if it is agreeable to you, I have a hearing on a hospital bill that I should like to attend.

The CHAIRMAN. I will ask the reporter to insert this table, that has been furnished by Mr. Mitchell, into the record at this point. (The table referred to is as follows:)

TABLE 1.—Employment in the Executive branch of the United States Government by sex, and classification status of positions, December and June 1939

The CHAIRMAN. Is there anything else that you have in mind, Mr. Mitchell?

Mr. MITCHELL. I think we have covered it.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Kaplan.

STATEMENT OF H. ELIOT KAPLAN, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, NATIONAL CIVIL SERVICE REFORM LEAGUE

Mr. KAPLAN. My name is H. Eliot Kaplan. I am executive secretary of the National Civil Service Reform League, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

Mr. Chairman, I believe the report of the House committee, the earlier report to the House itself, set forth in large part the views and sentiments of the National Civil Service Reform League with regard to this proposal which we approve. I might just say, briefly, that this proposal for authorizing the President to extend the competitive service to positions that have been excepted by acts of Congress, or by Executive order in the past, has been before the Congress before in another form. The league had originally sponsored the Lee bill, many years ago, and the Hall bill about 8 years ago. So that this proposal for extending the classified service by taking those that were in the unclassified service in by noncompetitive examination, or even by the covering-in process in one form or another has had the auspices of both Republican and Democratic support as well.

The CHAIRMAN. As long as there was not any politics in the civil service?

Mr. KAPLAN. I was not aware that there was any politics in the civil service. Of course, when those bills were before the Congress, it is only fair to say that the number of positions that were excepted from the civil-service rules were no more than about 35,000 or 40,000, if you exclude positions of less than $900 a year and exclude all the part-time positions.

The situation is a very serious one now, with almost 275,000 positions excepted from the civil-service rules. You just cannot go on administering the personnel problem in the Federal Government with half the service under merit and the other half outside of the merit principle. I think it is demoralizing to continue that way.

Now, there has been much discussion of the proposal of attempting to cover in, in effect, by noncompetitive examination the present incumbents, and I do not mind saying that our National Civil Service Reform League has been criticized in some quarters for having approved that proposal, but the truth of the matter is that the great extensions of the classified service in Federal Government have come perhaps with the penalty of securities, of having to cover in incumbents. That has been the way that civil-service laws have been adopted in most State jurisdictions and extended even in the State of New York. In the constitutional provision for merit system, many extensions have been made by covering in the incumbents.

Only this last winter I was asked to draft a law, which is now on the statute books, in New York State to cover in the transit employees, the private company D. M. T. and I. R. T. employees, 35,000 of them, which had to be taken over into civil service and made part of the civil service of the city. Those persons are to be covered in through noncompetitive selection on a plan similar to the proposal in the Ramspeck bill. As a matter of fact, the only time in the history of the Federal Government that I recall, of a substantial moment, when we have invoked the competitive-examination process, when we changed from an unclassified to a classified status, was in connection with the prohibition enforcement force, and I think the Senators will understand quite fully why that was done. It was the scandalous situation surrounding the selection of the appointees that prompted calling a halt to the whole system. But the number involved was not very large, relatively speaking.

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The only State that I know of where competitive examinations have been invoked, where the civil-service law was first adopted, is the State of Rhode Island, and I might say that that resulted from a rather, shall I say, political situation which existed in Rhode Island, where there was an impasse between the Republicans and the DemoBoth of them sponsored different civil-service bills in one legislature. When the House passed one bill it was adopted by the Democrats, and the Senate passed another bill which was adopted by the Republicans, and both bills failed because of the impossibility of getting approval of either bill by both Houses, first because one bill had provided for open competitive examinations to take effect immediately, and the other bill provided for noncompetitive examinations to take effect only after the new election. Both organizations were on the spot. So the next year they compromised on a bill which provided for open competitive examinations for all. It just had to be done as a matter of good political strategy, rather than practicability in application of the law.

In Michigan, when they adopted the new law, they adopted the noncompetitive classification plan of giving qualifying examinations to incumbents similarly as provided in the Ramspeck bill. We believe that is the practical way to do it. Of course, it would be possible potentially, I suppose, to hold competitive examinations, open competitive examinations for all these positions. I daresay it would take many, many years, and the cost involved would be tremendous.

I do not think there can be any real defensible argument made against the approval of this bill from the point of view of the public interest and point of view of morale in. the service, and point of view of fairness to those who are serving.

I might say I rather differ with the Civil Service Commission. I was rather surprised at the statement made at the hearing this morning that under the terms of the bill, persons who are not nominated by the heads of department to take qualifying examinations are to be retained in the service in an unclassified status. We do not so understand the bill. Our impression, our construction of the bill is that they are required to take noncompetitive examinations in order to continue in service; that whether or not incumbents will continue in the service is dependent upon two criteria, first that the head of the department must recommend that the person is a person that is satisfactory to the department and, therefore, permitted to take the noncompetitve examination.

The CHAIRMAN. Maybe you are a little confused, or else I am. I think the contention of the Commission was that under the old law where a person did not pass a competitive examination, the department could still keep him, but under the proposed law his services. would be terminated at the end of 6 months.

Mrs. MCMILLIN. That is right.

Mr. KAPLAN. If that is correct, then I agree with that. I perhaps misunderstood.

Mrs. McMILLIN. But if they are not recommended for the noncompetitive examination, then they can remain on in the discretion of the head of the agency.

Mr. KAPLAN. We do not interpret the Ramspeck bill to mean that, and I did not so understand from the discussions on the floor of the House.