We Have Forgotten What the Lessons of our Past Taught Us
Turning Our Executive Branch Once Again into a “Spoils Machine” Offers Corruption Opportunities of Staggering Proportions
In the Eleventh Hour…
It was at the final days- the end of the Trump Administration in December 2020. Not much was going on in terms of DC politics with the exception of the city’s focus on the 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden had just won. Incumbent Trump still had not conceded his defeat, something everyone would soon find out the reasons why on January 6, 2021.
With all this focus on the recent election, and what was to be what many assumed (perhaps naively) a peaceful transfer of power, something unusual occurred. Not many noticed. It was a presidential Executive Order issued by the Trump White House.
It puzzled those that noticed it, including Susan E. Dudley of George Washington University’s Regulatory Center. Why, Dudley asked, would a lame duck president with barely a month left in office issue an Executive Order that created new civil service rules for staff at federal agencies including the Executive Branch’s important Office of Management and Budget? Why would civil service protections for these positions be removed placing them directly “under the thumb” of the lame duck president?
We Can See Clearly Now
Now, with 20/20 hindsight, we can see the answer as to why this was done. Then President Trump didn’t consider himself a lame duck and wasn’t planning to leave office any time soon. Not only did he plan to remain president (despite actually losing an election and despite the will of the voters), he planned to be a president in a way that destroyed with his pen more than a century of civil service rules and protections for thousands of Executive Branch employees. These civil service protections had over numerous years protected these employees from the whims of capricious self- serving politicians.
At the same time, these civil service rules had created a cadre of dedicated and professional public servants hired on the basis of their merit (i.e. testing) and qualifications whose first allegiance was to their area of expertise, their department, and the nation, not to a politico who had hired them based on their political affiliation with the winning candidate.
Civil Service Happened for a Reason
Many Americans do not seem to remember what they were taught (or may have never known), as to what public service looked like in the late nineteenth century before civil service reforms began. For the most part, the federal government work force was populated by patronage appointments, otherwise know as the “spoils system” (from “to the victor belongs the spoils”). It was a horrible system characterized by incompetence, waste, and corruption.
This has been well chronicled by historians. Those appointed to serve as Collector of Customs at major U.S. ports were considered to have among the most lucrative of patronage positions given customs and tariffs were a major source of revenue for the federal government. The pressure to not only receive, but to control such appointments was enormous. A fight between two wings of the GOP in 1878 resulted in the removal of one such agent for the Port of New York, Chester Arthur. Arthur eventually impacted the entire patronage system as we shall see.
Heather Cox Richardson describes the corruption of the Bureau of Indian affairs whose agents often gave contracts to their friend and cronies for inadequate and rotten food and supplies that went to Native Americans. These Native Americans were now assigned to reservations and could no longer free range to hunt for their food. This theft and graft literally starved Native Americans forcing them into rebellion and war that cost them, as well as the US Calvary, many lives.
Presidents have used this spoils system to fill federal jobs since our nation’s early days including Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. As the nation grew, patronage came to consume a large part of a president’s time at the beginning of their term. Corruption grew with it. President Grant’s terms were racked by corruption including the Credit Mobilier scheme involving the Union Pacific Railroad. Union Pacific created a sham construction company to build the eastern half of the Transcontinental Railroad, over charging the taxpayer millions and giving stock to Congressmen.
A disgruntled spoils job seeker assassinated President James Garfield early in his term in 1880. Garfield’s successor Chester Arthur inherited a corrupt bidding scheme scandal for stage coach postal routes called the Star Routes.
1882- Spoils are “Blown Up”
The elections of 1882 finally got the attention of President Arthur’s Republican Party. They had gotten shellacked in both Congressional and State races. Most of the party’s leaders concluded their debacle was caused by voter backlash against the spoils system and its co-regent “bossism”. The GOP recognized they had better get on the “reform bandwagon” or face even greater defeats in the future to the Democrats.
Civil Service in the U.S. is Born
Thus was created the greatest legislative achievement of the Arthur presidency- the Pendleton Civil Service Act (Pendleton). Until then, especially in the 1870s, elections were controlled by a party professional political class that viewed them primarily as contests for patronage. Thousands of public sector jobs, controlled by party bosses in each city and state, allowed “assessments” to be paid by those successfully seeking a spoils job. Those assessments were a party’s main source of funding elections But now, Pendleton had changed that system.
The Change Pendleton Brought
The spoils system and the assessments revenue political party’s depended on was gone at the insistence of the American voter who demanded reform. There was a new standard for federal employment. Now civil servants were to be appointed based on their ability to perform the job, not who they knew or how much they had paid. Employees were to be hired based on objective criteria applied through examinations administered by non-partisan civil service boards not affiliated or controlled by any faction. Once appointed, these civil servants were expected to serve society and not parties. There were no more mandatory contributions during elections and these civil servants were given job security in order to serve society free from having to please political bosses.
Within twenty years of Pendleton’s passage a professional civil service developed. Civil service, coupled with an increasingly complex economy and industrialized society, merged with the rise of bureaucracy. A new view of government coalesced- one that helped usher in Teddy Roosevelt’s and the Progressive Era. Government was no longer seen as the exclusive tool of rich businessmen or political elites. It belonged to the common good of all the American people.
Project 2025- It’s Threat to Our Democracy
With an understanding of our history of reforming American democracy through civil service , the threat of this moment becomes crystal clear. Trump and his MAGA GOP’s announcement of their anti-democracy blueprint should be a cause of great alarm for all Americans.
It is called Project 2025 and is now folded into the GOP’s party platform (Agenda 47) for the 2024 election. It has many anti-democratic parts. One of the most alarming is a continuation of what began at the end of the Trump administration- doing away with civil service protected jobs in the Executive Branch.
These jobs, estimated in the range of 50,000, would be converted to patronage jobs. Jobs will be filled based on one!s political leanings and who one know to get the job. The Civil Service System of filling these posts based on objective criteria such as job qualifications, technical expertise, job experience, or competency will be gone as a result of this change.
Instead, filling these Executive Branch positions would be based on cronyism, “suck up ism”, and ideologically extreme beliefs formed around one thing and one thing only- loyalty to and willingness to do ANYTHING for the party leader- Donald J. Trump should he be elected president. Loyalty to Trump by these now spoils system appointees would supersede loyalty to country and perhaps most importantly, loyalty to democracy.
Stupendous Corruption Opportunities
What possibly could go wrong with Trump’s eradication of civil service? In short- everything! Think about it. A qualified work force now replaced with nothing but modern day opportunists, grifters, and kleptocratic carpetbaggers. All of them there for one purpose only- to promote one person- Trump , and to do his bidding.
Certainly our professional civil service and the bureaucratic structure it operates within is not without its flaws, but replacing it with the rampant corruption of a spoils patronage system will spell doom for government that is accountable to the American people as opposed to a party leader. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the corruption in the last known bastion of the “boss system”, the City of Chicago. Or, examine the corruption of the Pendergast regime’s spoils system that dominated Kansas City, Missouri until a reform movement replaced it with a council-manager government.
Any spoils system is a “self licking ice cream cone”- a self perpetuating system set up for the benefit of those that operate in it and control it, not to the benefit of the citizens it’s supposed to serve. And with no objective civil service accountability, the opportunities for graft, theft, and all other types of corruption are boundless. They stagger the imagination and make the corruption of US nineteenth century history that gave birth to the reforms of civil service seem minuscule in comparison.
Beware Project 2025 or Agenda 47, the GOP platform on which it is based. Without a professional, legislatively created federal service, “the monkeys will be running the zoo”. And it’s likely they will be stealing it blind. History has shown us what happens when whole portions of our government’s jobs are filled by the corrupt spoils system. It would do us well to remember what happened, and how adversely it affected the quality of our government and the services it delivers.
We do not want to and should not try to return US government back to the way it operated in the 1870s.
Forewarned is forearmed