"They're Crooked People": Trump's Assault on the Federal Workforce (Part 1)

Our returning president, Donald Trump, has been very clear about his attitudes and emotions in regard to the more than 2 million workers in the massive federal civil service that he will soon be managing again. In Aug. 2024, he told an interviewer: “They’ve got to be held accountable [for] what they’re doing. They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.” He already held that view in his first term, and actively tried to purge any officials who he perceived as disloyal (let alone anyone seen to be actively resistant to any of his policies). Right before the end of his term, in late 2020, he instituted Schedule F, a plan, unprecedented in our history, to convert the status of as many as 50,000 workers from selection by merit (with protection against arbitrary dismissal), to being his political appointees (with no such protection). Though this “reclassification” did not take place, there is every indication that he will push to carry it out immediately in 2025. He may even go much further in his plans to fundamentally reshape the federal bureaucracy. So- what does the federal workforce look like today? What are his motives, and what does any such purge mean for our government and our democracy? I will be providing my answer in two posts: this one (“Building Up”, to Trump’s first election), and, next, “Tearing Down” (on Trump’s “war” on the bureaucracy since 2017, including his plans for his upcoming 2nd term).

The heart of his motives lies in the way our federal workforce has evolved to be, in the vast majority of its positions, ideally nonpartisan and insulated from the wave of political pressure that climaxes regularly in our prescribed 4-year elections. This focus on competence over loyalty has been lavished with praise for generations, as producing broadly efficient governing with relatively little corruption.

There has always been one major exception to the merit system- the 4,000 or so top jobs, including those in the Cabinet (the leaders of departments who frequently confer with and advise the president). It’s understood, and accepted, that incoming presidents will usually remove the people in those policy-making jobs, replacing them (usually with Senate confirmation required) with their own choices (even when the original holders were appointed by a president of the same party).

For a big chunk of our history, everybody was a political appointee! That’s the period known as the “spoils system” (named for a comment by a supporter, “to the victor belongs the spoils”), which dates back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-37)- the first self-made president (and someone much admired by Trump). As a passionate foe of anything he considered to be resembling aristocracy and privilege, Jackson originated the idea of mass post-election replacement of federal workers with his own political supporters. As this became a pattern (over the next half-century or so), each election essentially became a giant “job lottery”: thousands would flock to Washington right afterward, armed with recommendations touting their party loyalty by local party organizers, hoping to get picked. The president would still usually choose the top people based on his own knowledge, but all the other slots (including the largest employer of all back then, the Post Office Department) would be awarded to reward loyalty!

You’re probably already thinking- wouldn’t this be a huge mess, since selection had nothing to do with expertise and competence?? It did become one, but it’s worth remembering that, from the 1820s to the Civil War in 1861, the federal government was still very small. This system did start to get out of hand with the last pre-Civil War president, James Buchanan (1857-1861), who replaced all of his predecessor’s workers- even though Franklin Pierce was a fellow Democrat!

The system became an actual crisis under Lincoln, the first president of the brand-new antislavery Republican Party. He came into office with the rebelling Confederate States of America already formed, and found himself trying to conduct an immensely bloody and large-scale war, all while being personally besieged (as you can see in the Spielberg movie, “Lincoln”) by anyone who wanted even the smallest federal job! At the same time, the Union war effort required a colossal expansion of the civilian workforce, as well as of the military. Competence suddenly became a much bigger, and weightier, issue!

The military did shrink back to its prewar size with Union victory (and Lincoln’s assassination) in 1865. But the civilian numbers still stayed larger than before, especially with the creation of the first true “social program” (the Freedmen’s Bureau, 1865-72, meant to provide basic help to the devastated South, including the 4 million ex-slaves, during Reconstruction). Former Union Gen. Grant, president from 1869 to 1877, made a half-hearted attempt to change the spoils system, but backed down when Congress refused funding for his Civil Service Commission.

The Republicans then compromised with the white South, withdrawing enforcement of Black civil rights in return for the election of their candidate, Rutherford Hayes, in early 1877. Paradoxically, it was Hayes who was the first president to take meaningful action to change the federal jobs process. He started with important but limited measures, introducing merit selection in two important departments, and going after the job of Collector of the Port of New York (up to this time better paid than the president himself, and therefore the most sought after presidential appointment!). But Hayes had promised at the start of his presidency that he would not run again; there was real danger that the spoils system would go on as usual when he left in 1881, after another Republican, James Garfield, was elected.

Then an unexpected and tragic event changed the politics overnight. As Garfield was walking through a train station, he was approached by mentally unstable Charles Guiteau, offended that the president hadn’t come through with the top federal job he thought he deserved for his political support. Guiteau fired two bullets into Garfield’s back at close range. Garfield lingered for two months (dying in fact not from the bullets, but from incompetent doctors who caused infection). Suddenly the whole nation’s attention was focused on the problematic system of trading political loyalty for a job!

And there was an organization of prominent men, the National Civil Service Reform League, which was ready to take advantage. It immediately put out thousands of pamphlets, blaming the Sept. 1881 death of the popular young president on the spoils system.

Now it’s time for the “big reveal”- who is the man most responsible for our present system- of millions of federal jobs being chosen on the basis of merit, and with removal requiring a public and convincing explanation of cause?

Dorman Eaton.

Dorman Eaton (1823-1899)- designer of the Pendleton Act (Library of Congress)

Who?? His name is not even mentioned in the vast majority of textbooks; nor is it on the law that started today’s civil service system. Not much information is even available for him. He was born in 1823, the son of an abolitionist Vermont minister; was educated at the University of Vermont and Harvard Law School; and settled in New York City as a highly successful lawyer. He seems, from his writing, to have been an earnest, wordy (his most important book repeats the same simple argument over hundreds of pages!), community-minded New England gentleman, with passion about two particular causes: creating a public health department in New York City (which was being swept by deadly epidemics), and reforming the federal civil service. He had already been head of Grant’s failed Civil Service Commission, and had, at Hayes’s request, visited Britain (the most powerful government of its day) for several months in the late 1870s to study its merit-based service (publishing his results in 1880). He and his fellow League reformers had already, before Garfield was shot, persuaded a top Democrat, Sen. George Pendleton of Ohio, to introduce a civil service bill, drafted by Eaton, in 1880 (which had failed). Pendleton’s political motives remain unclear (it doesn't help that he burned most of his papers!); but what he told the Senate was the same moral argument that Eaton used (that the spoils system was creating an incompetent government which was subverting democracy). But now Garfield's murder caused public support for reform to spread rapidly, and there was another new factor: the Republicans, in power for over 20 years and linked to a host of ugly scandals, lost big in the 1882 midterm elections (especially those opposed to reform), and badly needed an image improvement!

And now the new president, Chester Arthur, turned out to be a crucial ally. This was a very big surprise, because his career rised was entirely due to the spoils system (he had been New York Collector, and had been fired by Hayes!). But Arthur now threw full support behind Pendleton’s (Eaton’s) bill, and he signed the Pendleton Act into law on Jan. 16, 1883.

It had three essential features: that federal job applicants and employees it covered would have to pass a competitive exam; that no federal worker would have to pay “political assessments” (mandatory campaign contributions to the president who appointed them!); and that future presidents would have the power to expand the system. The “assessments” were hardly just symbolic- the estimate is that about 75% of campaign financing then came from the federal workers!! A new Civil Service Commission (three people, of which no more than two could be from the same party) was set up to carry out the tests and award the jobs. Its impact was relatively small at first (the merit system applied to just about 10% of federal jobs, or about 14,000 of 132,000 (and at first mostly low-ranking clerks).

I will speed through the rest of the story. Basically two big factors have boosted rapid growth of the merit system over the next 130 years (along with more and more protections against many forms of discrimination), even as the nation's population and the federal government have both grown rapidly too. One is that presidents realized that they could “blanket” jobs, converting entire agency workforces in their thousands, before their terms ended (thus keeping their own people in their jobs by changing their classification from appointed to merit). And, wonder of wonders, because more and more workers were now being chosen by basic standards, and then stayed in their jobs long enough to develop expertise, those workers broadly improved the federal government! That’s not to say that there weren’t plenty of politicians who tried to hang on to the old “spoils” system- but they lost ground. The first half of the 20th century was the boom time for the growth of the federal workforce (which leveled off at about its present level in the 1950s).

But there were important developments along the way- especially the various harsh measures by a number of presidents to eliminate categories of federal workers (they can really be described as “purges”!). The first of these was done by Democrat Woodrow Wilson from 1913-21 (the first Southern Democrat since the Civil War). Wilson was a child during that war, and grew up with slave-owning parents who fully supported the Confederacy (his father was a chaplain) and also fully believed in white supremacy. When he became president of Princeton University in New Jersey in 1902, he refused to admit any students of color. He let a close friend with similar values, “Colonel” House of Texas, pick his top officials. In the first Cabinet meeting, Postmaster General Burleson (another Southerner) proposed wholesale racial segregation; by then about 23,000 African Americans held federal jobs (a clear minority, and almost all in low-paid positions). Burleson, with Wilson’s full support, both separated the workers (with room dividers or separate workspaces), and did his utmost to push Blacks out altogether (despite strong protests from both Black and white activists).

The second purge came right after World War II (when some of Wilson’s barriers were lifted, and the workforce hit its all-time peak, at about 4.5 million). With the start of the Cold War in 1947, Democrat Truman decided, by executive order, to require “loyalty oaths,” aiming to rid the workforce of those with Communist beliefs. Fewer than 400 were actually dismissed as national security risks (there were important Soviet spies, as I’ve discussed in an earlier post on the VENONA project, but this purge did not affect them!). About 5,000 resigned voluntarily rather than face investigation or even Congressional hearings.

The next purge was done by Republican Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950s, Truman’s successor, again by executive order, and also on the excuse of national security. This is the so-called “Lavender Scare,” when any worker suspected of being gay (then a crime) was fired (the idea being that their secret sexual orientation could be exploited as blackmail by the Soviets). Between 5,000 to 10,000 workers either were fired or resigned (and endured public humiliation) as a result.

The fourth purge was much more secretive and was broadly unsuccessful. Republican Nixon, who came to office in 1969 during the Vietnam War and much domestic upheaval, was the first to try to do what Trump has intended to do- to remove workers for perceived disloyalty to him and his policies. In Nixon’s case, it was created by the White House personnel chief, Fred Malek, and was given the innocuous name of the Responsiveness Program. Malek was given the mission of trying to move (to obscure roles) anyone perceived as having “liberal bias” (he was also told to supply a list of all the Jewish employees in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though there’s no evidence of any being removed as a result). Targeted employees were also harassed with tax audits. The program was exposed by prominent DC journalist Jack Anderson, and ended up becoming just one of the many scandals that emerged in the Watergate era (1973-74) which caused Nixon to resign the presidency. Two later Republican presidents (Reagan, 1981-89, and George W. Bush, 2001-2009, also tried to bring about more political control of the workforce, but without measurable success.

Nixon, in 1971, also separated a large part of the federal workforce (546,000, or about a quarter) from the government, by moving the Post Office employees (after a big strike) wholesale from being in a Cabinet department, to the present “government-owned corporation”, the US Postal Service.

Some other major developments, outside of purges, need brief mention. The first is unionization within the workforce, which had begun by 1901, and accelerated with the labor legislation of the 1930s; the various unions have greatly improved the working conditions, including winning pensions and more opportunities for women (it was a long struggle just to win collective bargaining rights; about 25% belong to unions today). A second major change came about, amazingly, because up to 1923, there was no organized classification (i.e. clear definition of tasks, titles, promotion ladder, and pay scale) for federal jobs! Change finally came after, for example, it was discovered that there were 105 positions all labeled “record clerk,” with salaries ranging from $720 to $2,400 a year! It took much union pressure (and then an act of Congress) to create the multilevel “GS” (General Schedule) system in 1923 that we have today.

Democrat Jimmy Carter, elected to clean up the government after the Watergate scandals in 1976, brought about the biggest workforce change since the original Pendleton Act- the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. It replaced the old 3-person Civil Service Commission with today’s powerful Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which has a single (presidentially appointed) Director. It set up a clear conflict resolution component (the Federal Labor Relations Authority, FLRA) for disputes within the workforce, plus protections for whistleblower workers exposing corruption, and guidelines about the Hatch Act (which limits political activity by federal workers). And it created an intermediate high-paying category of workers who are partly political appointees just below the department heads, but who also have removal protections (the Senior Executive Service; about 9,000 today).

In essence, that law created the system we have today. Now 80% of workers are protected against removal without demonstrated cause, and are protected from discrimination by race, gender, sexual identity, and physical handicap, and even by DNA information (removal for becoming pregnant is also now illegal). The 2-million-plus federal workers of today can be found in every corner of the country. They frequently express their pride in being nonpolitical, as they continue to provide expertise, regulations, and services that touch all of our lives in countless ways (daily weather data, courtesy of the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, being just one everyday example). They even have their own annual merit award (the "Sammies"!). Certainly, being fallible humans, they and the agencies they serve have had flaws and scandals (as have the presidents and members of Congress who have had the power to affect them). But it's very hard to imagine how today's vast and complex nation, of over 330 million (compared to 50 million at the time of the Pendleton Act), would function without the (largely) depoliticized federal civil service.

Next time, in "Tearing Down", I will lay out this important story in more detail: how Donald Trump sought to radically reshape the civil service in his first term; the motives behind that drive; why he failed the first time; who he relied on to carry out his mission, and who will likely be in place to do so in 2025; and just what is in store in his upcoming second term! Coming soon!

Resources (for Part One):

Aneja, Abhay. “Strengthening State Capacity: Civil Service Reform and Public Sector Performance during the Gilded Age,” American Economic Review,

VOL. 114, NO. 8, AUGUST 2024 (pp. 2352–87)-

(https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20230019&&from=f)

Eaton, Dorman B. ““Civil Service in Great Britain: A History of Abuses and Reforms and Their Bearing Upon American Politics” (1880); full digital text at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433075940829&seq=478

Johnson, Ronald N., and Gary D. Libecap. “Replacing Political Patronage with Merit: The Roles of the President and the Congress in the Origins of the Federal Civil Service System,” in Johnson & Libecap (eds.), “The Federal Civil Service System and the Problem of Bureaucracy.” (1994-

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c8633/c8633.pdf)

King, Desmond. “Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the US Federal Government.” (1995)

Mach, Thomas S. “”Gentleman George” Pendleton: Party Politics and Ideological Identity in Nineteenth Century America” (2007). Faculty Books 54. (https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/faculty_books/54/)

Moreira, Diana, and Santiago Perez. “Civil Service Reform and Organizational Practices: Evidence from the Pendleton Act.” (2021- https://egc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2021-04/2021-0423%20EconHistory%20Conference/MP_Yale_Conference%20ada-ns.pdf)

Office of Personnel Management. “Biography of an Ideal: A History of the Federal Civil Service.” (https://dml.armywarcollege.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/OPM-Biography-of-an-Ideal-History-of-Civil-Service-2003.pdf)

Patler, Nicholas. “Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century.” (2004)

PBS Newshour. "How the Lavender Scare forced LGBTQ+ workers out of the federal government." June 30, 2024 (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-the-lavender-scare-forced-lgbtq-workers-out-of-the-federal-government)

Postell, Joseph. “From Merit to Expertise and Back: The Evolution of the U.S. Civil Service System.” (2020- https://administrativestate.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Postell-From-Merit-to-Expertise-and-Back.pdf)

Theriault, Sean. “Patronage, the Pendleton Act, and the Power of the People,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 66, No. 1, Feb. 2003, Pp. 50-68

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/1468-2508.t01-1-00003?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

Wikipedia.org. “Dorman Bridgman Eaton”, “Civil service reform in the United States”