The Costs of Killing the Civil Service
Trump’s blitz against the independence of the civil service is undermining a core pillar of American democracy.
President Donald Trump showed his admiration for Andrew Jackson when, eight years ago, he hung a portrait of the seventh president in the Oval Office. Now, Trump has installed the portrait once again. The act is symbolic of how Trump is shoving the nation back into the Jacksonian era’s “spoils system,” in which the appointment of public officials was based on political loyalty rather than merit.
Although attention has been given to how Trump’s obsession with personal fealty has produced several cabinet-level appointees with meager qualifications for the job, the Trump-led attack on public service goes much deeper than that. By “public service,” I mean not any position that receives a government paycheck but rather a commitment—especially a career-long commitment—to serving the interests of the entire nation and not just a single party, ideology, or leader.
The new administration is wasting no time in mounting the attack. Even before Trump was sworn in for his second term, his incoming national security adviser declared career civil servants to be personae non gratae. At the State Department, numerous experienced members of the foreign service, serving at various levels and not just presidential appointees, were told to leave.
The principal weapon in the attack was known during Trump’s first term as the “Schedule F,” which would have stripped tens of thousands of positions across the federal government out of the civil service and made them political jobs subject to hiring and firing at the whim of the president. Trump tried to implement the scheme late in his first term, an effort the Biden administration rescinded. Schedule F now has been reborn, without that name, in one of the executive orders Trump signed on the first day of his second term.
The scheme will multiply the already extraordinarily large number of political appointees in the U.S. government and multiply with it the disruptions to the people’s business that occur with each change of administration. More fundamentally, the scheme represents a rejection of the concept of a civil service that is both apolitical and loyal and—as the civil service in the United Kingdom has long demonstrated—can faithfully execute the policies of the government no matter which party controls that government.
The image of a politically biased “deep state” dominates the rhetoric in support of Trump’s measure. Naturally, those who are accustomed to thinking solely in terms of advancing the policies or political standing of a particular party or leader will believe in this mythical notion. However, the vast majority of civil servants work in positions whose very reason for existence entails apolitical objectivity. Their jobs ultimately depend on maintaining that standard.
For example, the purpose of the intelligence community, where I used to work, is to provide policymakers with the most accurate picture possible of the world outside the United States. Any bias would be a recipe for inaccuracy, and inaccuracies that become public lead to strong public criticism of the intelligence agencies and the people who work in them. More importantly, an inaccurate product ill-serves any administration, no matter what that administration’s party identification and policies may be.
Similar inherent commitments to accuracy and objectivity exist across the federal government, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with its provision of important economic data, to the National Weather Service and its storm predictions. When Trump tried to modify a hurricane map to make it conform with an earlier careless statement he had made about a storm’s path, his felt-tip pen was not amending a Democratic or “deep state” forecast. Instead, the map was the work of government meteorologists who know, at least as much as intelligence analysts do, that lives depend on their forecasts and that any inaccuracies will be publicly and sharply criticized.
The harms of the spoils system, as it existed under not only Jackson but also a series of presidents, became increasingly apparent during the nineteenth century. Instances of outright incompetence and corruption underscored how ability and experience are better performance indicators than political or personal loyalty—even jobs that involve the execution of policy. A fix began in 1883 with the enactment of the Pendleton Act, which created a merit-based civil service.
The problems of the spoils system in the nineteenth century will be re-created in the twenty-first to the extent that the system returns to a partial deconstruction of the civil service. Governmental performance will suffer, and distrust of government will increase.
However, the costs involve more than the skill with which public officials perform their jobs. Rejection of the concept of an apolitical civil service is a rejection of the principle that government should be of, by, and for the people—all the people, not just one politically defined segment. It is a denial that there is such a thing as the national interest that comprises many of the most basic aspects of the health, safety, and well-being of the American people, which do not change whenever the presidency changes hands.
Strong resistance to a merit-based civil service persisted through much of the nineteenth century, led by politicians with a stake in the spoils system. The political wind did not shift until a deranged job-seeker named Charles Guiteau assassinated President James A. Garfield in July 1881, four months into Garfield’s term. Guiteau believed that his identification with a wing of the Republican Party opposed to the president’s was the reason he did not get the federal position he sought.
Fortunately, factional politics within today’s Republican Party are unlikely to lead to a similar tragedy, partly because presidential security (and medical knowledge) is much better than in the 1880s. But the absence of a shocking, catalyzing event means little basis for building popular resistance to the ongoing re-introduction of the spoils system. Instead, there will be only slowly building disillusionment with a government that performs poorly and shows itself to be serving not all the people but only some of them.
Paul R. Pillar is a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia and the author of Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy.
Image: Chip Somodevilla / Shutterstock.com.