THIS week, former chief justice Artemio Panganiban weighed in on the dynasty debate with a twist. He agreed with the Supreme Court and Catholic bishops that political dynasties are a problem but would rather fix the system than ban families. Two of his three remedies caught my attention as a manager: a permanent, merit-based civil service and more competent, honest Filipinos in public life.
The backdrop is Kapatiran Party v. Congress. In that August ruling, the Supreme Court faulted Congress for 39 years of inaction on an anti-dynasty law. A CBCP pastoral statement followed, saying public office must remain open to all competent Filipinos. Panganiban’s reply looks past who sits at the top to who keeps the machine running underneath.
Merit as operating system
His argument is straightforward. Entry into government service should require graded examinations, education and training. Once in, civil servants should be removable only for cause and after due process, not at the whim of whoever holds power. He cites Japan and Great Britain, whose bureaucracies run efficiently whoever wins at the polls. A permanent civil service, he writes, guarantees “operational continuity” and shields government from patronage.
Any business leader will recognize this. No company survives if every change of leadership wipes out its middle managers and its institutional memory. Continuity is not inertia. It is what allows strategy to land, projects to finish and lessons to be remembered.
Our numbers show how far we have to go. The Civil Service Commission counted about 2.1 million government employees as of June 2025. Alongside them is a parallel workforce: in 2023, some 832,000 job-order and contract-of-service workers, nearly 30 percent of everyone doing government work, without security of tenure. The Department of Budget and Management reported in 2024 that about 169,000 plantilla positions, roughly 8 percent, were vacant. So we have empty permanent seats beside a large pool of temporary hands whose contracts keep getting extended year after year. That is not a merit system. It is a workaround.
The World Bank’s B-READY 2025 report says the same thing differently. The Philippines ranked 26th on its regulatory framework but 80th on operational efficiency. We write good rules, and we struggle to carry them out. That is not a legal problem. It is a people problem, and it will not be solved by another circular.
Bringing our best inside
Panganiban’s second point concerns talent. Good governance, he argues, needs competent and honest men and women willing to serve. He holds up Jose W. Diokno, who topped both the CPA and bar exams, as the kind of public servant we should produce. The same holds for the bureaucracy: a merit system is only as good as the people who apply to it. If our brightest graduates see government as a dead end, or worse as a place where talent is punished, no examination will save us.
There are hopeful signs. After the flood-control scandal, Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon opened some 2,000 vacancies, mostly for engineers and accountants, and took recruitment to schools outside Metro Manila. “We need fresh blood,” he said. In March, the CSC issued Resolution 2600005. It directs agencies to adopt competency-based recruitment, performance management and rewards, and it names integrity, excellence and citizen-centeredness as core competencies for all public servants.
Pay still matters where skills are scarce. Cybersecurity professionals reportedly earn around P200,000 a month in the private sector, against roughly P50,000 in government. Idealism alone will not hold our best people forever. What we can do is make government a place where they are measured fairly, developed on purpose and protected from politics.
Culture is the missing reform
That is where culture comes in. Laws set qualifications. What keeps a capable young engineer at DPWH long after the job fair is her daily experience of the work. Are her ideas heard? Is good performance rewarded? Is integrity the norm or the exception?
In our line of work at Hungry Workhorse, we help transform people and organizations. Our employee experience practice focuses on building adaptive, empowered teams through purposeful systems, design thinking and digital fluency. Our government practice centers on performance governance, change management and public communication, so that transformation is inclusive, well-communicated and outcomes-focused.
Approaches like these could supply what laws cannot. A competency framework becomes real only when supervisors are coached to use it. Performance governance means little unless results are measured honestly and shared openly. Change management helps veterans treat new systems as tools rather than threats, and keeps new recruits from being absorbed by old habits. Every reform that a national government agency or even a constitutional commission will announce will either succeed or fail on that human layer.
Panganiban closed with a call for “metanoia,” a change of mind and character in those who govern and those who vote. I would add the two million who serve between elections. Nation-building is not only the work of senators and secretaries. It is also the daily work of the clerk, the engineer and the nurse who show up for every Filipino.
We need more of our best inside government, and a culture that keeps them there. Merit opens the door. Culture decides who stays.
Kay Calpo Lugtu is the chief operating officer of Hungry Workhorse, a digital and culture transformation firm.