by Isa Lorenzo and Malou Mangahas
PRESIDENT GLORIA Macapagal Arroyo herself gives the lie to her administration’s avowed efforts to trim the bureaucracy of excess personnel.
A 2008 study by the Civil Service Commission lists Arroyo’s office as the agency with the biggest number of undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, advisers, assistants and consultants in excess of caps set in law, and without civil service eligibility.
What to do with these Arroyo appointees is the acid test that Ricardo Lirag Saludo must hurdle in his new post as CSC chairman with a fixed seven-year tenure.
When politics pollute civil service
by Isa Lorenzo and Malou Mangahas
THE RECENT nomination of Ricardo Lirag Saludo as chairperson of the Civil Service Commission (CSC) effectively signals the capture by political appointees of managerial positions in the bureaucracy that had previously been reserved to career service personnel.
A rabid defender and loyal functionary of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Saludo joined the government service in March 2001 as a political appointee and over the last seven years opted against securing career service eligibility.