Civil Servants Are Not America’s Enemies

Donald Trump is waging war on the civil service in the name of efficiency. But Washington created the modern civil service to make the government efficient in the first place, ending a patronage system wracked with graft and incompetence. Trump’s so-called reforms will only make it harder for the White House and the Republican Congress to enact their own policy aims, and harder for any president to get things done in the future.

Trump sees the “deep state” as an impediment to policy change, not as an instrument of it; he attacks the idea of a nonpartisan civil service and the civil service itself. Government workers are “crooked people,” Trump said while campaigning last year. “They’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.” To that end, his White House has offered to buy out federal employees under his “Fork in the Road” policy, fired more than a dozen inspectors general, transferred hundreds of workers outside their area of expertise, spurred experienced career employees to quit, put thousands of workers on furlough or leave, and attempted to strip job protections from nonpartisan employees. A message sent to millions of civil servants late last month emphasized the importance of loyalty and trust; a message sent this week argued that fewer positions should be held by the “impartial.”

In many ways, Trump is seeking to return the country to the spoils system that existed in the 19th century. Pioneered by President Andrew Jackson, that system awarded tens of thousands of civil-service jobs to allies and co-partisans of the White House. (The phrase “to the victor belong the spoils” does not originate in ancient Athens or Rome. It was first uttered by New York Senator William L. Marcy in the early 1830s.) This kind of patronage was efficient, Jackson and his supporters argued: “Rotation in office” meant that the civil service aligned with the ideology of the president, and brought fresh workers into the stodgy government.

But having party loyalists manage the Postal Service and firing thousands of people every time the White House changed hands was not a model of efficiency. Postmasters, clerks, and surveyors paid a share of their salary as kickbacks to the party in control of their position. “Solicitation letters were sent by the party to each worker, return envelopes were provided to ensure that payments were made, and compliance was carefully monitored,” the economists Ronald Johnson and Gary Libecap note. Scandals abounded. The collector of the Port of New York embezzled $1 million, not adjusted for inflation, before fleeing for England in 1838.

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In 1880, President James Garfield ran on reform, promising in his inaugural address to pass civil-service regulations “for the good of the service” and “for the protection of incumbents against intrigue and wrong.” Shortly after, he was assassinated by a deranged preacher and onetime resident of the Oneida free-love commune who’d been seeking a diplomatic appointment in Paris. At that point, Congress decided things needed to change. Garfield’s successor, Chester Arthur, “only got his job as vice president because he was a product of the spoils system,” Jon Rogowski, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told me. Arthur had held the post of collector of the Port of New York too, and had gotten rich on the job. “He was this incredible messenger, saying, We should reform, even though it would dramatically upend the very system that I came through myself,” Rogowski said.

The Pendleton Act of 1883 finally ended the spoils system, requiring government employees to pass an exam and forbidding hiring on the basis of race, politics, religion, or national origin. It led to a 25 percent reduction in staff turnover and increased the qualifications held by bureaucrats. Postal-delivery errors dropped by 22 percent, and the volume of mail delivered by carriers increased as much as 14 percent.

During the Progressive Era and the New Deal—and after the Watergate scandal—Congress passed further regulations, making it easier for federal agencies to promote high-performing employees, protecting whistleblowers, ensuring that the executive branch did not overstep its authority, and eliminating racial bias and nepotism in hiring. Today, a thicket of laws prevents the White House from making partisan hiring decisions, and civil servants from engaging in partisan activity. The Government Accountability Office and inspectors general root out incompetence, inefficiency, and waste.

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Every bureaucracy has some bloat. But there are no more civil servants now than there were in the late 1960s, even as the population they serve has grown by two-thirds. The tasks these 2.2 million employees perform are often uncontroversial; the Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the largest employers, and 70 percent of the civil service works in defense and security-related agencies. Moreover, federal workers are more efficient than private workers; they are less expensive to hire too.

Nor is the system biased against conservative administrations. Government employees are not particularly ideological. They tend to have long careers, working with presidents from both parties. On the job, civil servants tend to be better than politicians at shaping policy. The country does not need White House staffers to make decisions “setting interest rates or deciding which banks to bail out, to determine schedules for Air Force aircraft maintenance, or to certify particular drugs as safe and effective,” the political scientist Francis Fukuyama argues. When they do, he says, “the results are almost always harmful.”

Other countries show the risks. Viktor Orbán’s attack on Hungary’s civil service has led to the degradation of the country’s water, sanitation, and electric systems, and corruption in the construction industry and real-estate market. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s purging of public officials made the government less efficient.

In the United States, the strong, nonpartisan civil service reduces costs for taxpayers, with meritocracy and impartiality bolstering the country’s economic growth, one sweeping review found. The system also protects the public from graft and lawlessness. “There is a group of actors that are sworn to uphold the Constitution,” Donald Moynihan, a scholar of public administration at the University of Michigan, told me. “If someone in the government is trying to do an illegal thing, there will be a general counsel who says no, and there will be a bunch of civil servants who raise red flags, and there will be an inspector general who will catch it.”

Civil servants and inspectors general are raising red flags right now, filing lawsuits and notifying members of Congress as scarcely adult Trump officials commandeer government systems, access private data, illicitly shut down payments, and put whole agencies through the “wood chipper,” in the Trump adviser Elon Musk’s phrasing, contravening the country’s laws. But, as Moynihan pointed out, Trump is attempting to “defang” these systems of internal control.

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As a result, Americans can expect greater incompetence, higher costs, increased turnover, less expertise, falling trust in government, and lower morale. They can also anticipate higher sovereign-debt costs: Investors charge eroding democracies with incompetent bureaucracies more to borrow. The fallout will not end when the Trump administration ends. Future presidents will have to rely on less experienced civil servants to enact their policies.

The country’s civil service could use reform—to empower it. Right now, Washington’s bureaucrats are mired in bureaucracy, tasked with meeting strict and onerous procedural requirements rather than achieving the government’s policy goals. Hiring rules make it hard for Washington to poach experienced workers from private industry; procurement rules make outsourcing over-common and expensive. But Trump is seeking to cow the civil service and politicize it, not reform it. Rather than seeing the country’s 2 million public employees as agents, he sees them as enemies. This is not going to make the government more efficient. It is not going to make America great.