The comments are mostly just a bunch of name-calling malcontents. There certainly are problems with the way civil service works, but all the touchstone gripes of both ends of the argument are not accurate.
To the people who cry about pay for performance on the 'pro' side, I had very negative experience with this in DOD's attempt to implement such a system. It was worse than the old one, because the 'Performance' that ended up being rewarded was how far up the organizational tree your job was (And how close to Fairfax County, VA you worked), and out at the installations, whatever was left went to whoever actually worked directly with the few senior managers who actually sat on the pay pool. It was just as hard to remove poor performers as ever, and shitty employees still had all the EEO, grievance, IG complaint, etc., procedures available to jerk the managers around. But, because the rewards above minimum were so near impossible to get for anyone without a sweetheart connection, all the people who normally busted their asses ended up getting classed with the loser dead-asses (Which really are a small minority in DOD at least), which screwed their morale and made them even more cynical about the government than they already were (To the extent that was even possible).
Ultimately, the few benefited, but it was the few in the right positions and with the right connections rather than the highest performers, who were generally the people doing all the grunt work within the organizations and directorates. Of course, from the point of view of the self-congratulatory senior managers and transient two-year-tour senior military officers nominally in charge of a bunch of office operations they didn't understand jack shit about below the surface, obviously the people they liked must be the best, because they themselves were obviously the best, and they wouldn't like people who weren't the best, would they? Of course, anyone whose job involved telling them things they didn't want to hear was going to be screwed, and so DOD became even more of a groupthink party than it already was.
The damage done by screwing all the hard workers to favor an in-crowd was only slightly moderated by the fact that the rewards were in a pretty modest range that would have been laughably modest in a corporate entrepreneurial environment. It did however keep hard-working people stagnated, and drove a bunch of them to transfer to other agencies under the old system where they could keep their accumulated retirement benefits but still be in a system where they weren't frozen out of slow but steady advancement.
The old system started to look better and better by comparison, and finally after four years of screwing the pooch, DOD had to bite the bullet and go back to the old system.
Now, the old/current system has problems, but the whole 'high risk/high reward' paradigm is not one of them, which is the big failing of all these sorts of 'Reform' ideas.
People outside the government do not WANT their government to be doing 'high risk' things outside of war zones, they want it to predictably follow laws, rules, and regulations.
By the same token, the kind of people who go to work for the government are a whole lot more interested in knowing how many hours they're going to work, what the rate of pay is definitely going to be, and what sort of set-in-stone benefit or retirement package goes with the job. By and large, these workers will work just as hard as anyone could want for that definite pay rate, and uncertainty about pay only acts as a disincentive for them.
