The Spoils System Was Bad, and the Cure Built a Workforce Voters Cannot Reach

Two things are true, and the argument starts when you try to hold them together. The spoils system was a disgrace. And the cure we adopted for it, which most Americans regard as a plain and settled good, left the voters with less control over the government than they had before.

Most commentary picks one. The reformers' heirs say the first and stop, and some of their critics say the second and forget the first. A serious conservative has to say both. The history is the best way to see how a movement that was entirely right about the disease ended up prescribing a treatment that overshot. It runs from Andrew Jackson's rotation in office to a bullet in a railroad station and on to the reforms of the twentieth century, and it is worth walking through in order.

The principle that started it: rotation

Begin in 1829 with President Andrew Jackson, because the spoils system is usually blamed on him and the truth is more interesting. Jackson did not invent patronage. Presidents had been appointing friends and supporters since Washington, and Jefferson had removed a good number of Federalists. But Jackson gave the practice a philosophy: his administration defended rotation in office as an essentially democratic process.

His argument was democratic, and in its own terms it was not foolish. The argument, as it is usually summarized, was that the duties of public offices were simple enough for men of intelligence to learn, and that more was lost by officeholders staying on for a long time than was gained by their experience. Office, he held, is not a property right. It is a public trust, and the people are entitled to see it rotate.

You can feel the appeal. A permanent class of officeholders, entrenched, comfortable and unaccountable, was exactly what the Founders' generation feared. Jackson's answer was to keep the government dependent on the people's choices by changing its personnel when the people changed their president.

The slogan and the machine

The phrase "spoils system" comes from a Senate speech in 1832 by Senator William Marcy of New York, defending the nomination of Martin Van Buren as minister to Britain. Marcy said that the politicians of his state saw nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy. The remark was meant as a defense, and it stuck as an accusation.

Over the next half century the practice hardened into a machine. Every incoming administration cleared out the offices and filled them with its supporters: postmasters, customs collectors, clerks, revenue agents, lighthouse keepers. Jobs were the currency of party organization. An officeholder was expected to work for the party in elections and often to kick back a share of his salary to the party's funds, which were called assessments. The Post Office and the customs houses, the largest sources of federal jobs, were the main prizes.

By the 1870s and 1880s the costs were obvious. The incoming administrations spent a large share of their early months handing out jobs. The President of the United States, whoever he was, found his waiting room full of men who wanted a position, and he could scarcely find time for anything else. Competent people were turned out for the crime of belonging to the wrong party. The government of a country that was building railroads and fighting over currency was being staffed by the friends of the winning side. Reformers had a point, and a strong one.

The bullet: July 2, 1881

The reform movement had been building for years, and Presidents Grant and Hayes had both tried modest steps. What turned an argument into a law was a murder.

James Garfield, a Republican from Ohio, took office as the twentieth President on March 4, 1881. His party was split between the "Stalwarts," who defended the patronage system and were loyal to Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, and a reform wing. The early months were consumed with a fight over appointments, including a bitter dispute over a New York customs post that led Conkling to resign from the Senate.

On July 2, 1881, Garfield was walking through the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station in Washington when Charles Guiteau shot him twice. Guiteau was a disappointed office seeker who had wanted a diplomatic post, had been refused, and had convinced himself the country would be better off with the Vice President, Chester Arthur, a Stalwart, in the office. Garfield lingered for weeks, and he died on September 19, 1881. Guiteau was tried, convicted and hanged in 1882.

I take no pleasure in telling the story and no license to make light of it. A murderer is a murderer, and the system did not create him. But the country concluded, not unreasonably, that a government in which jobs were the currency of politics had a flaw it could no longer ignore. The political effects were immediate. Public anger rose, and in the elections of 1882 the Republicans, who held the White House, lost ground.

The Pendleton Act: January 16, 1883

Congress responded with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, named for Senator George Pendleton, an Ohio Democrat. President Chester Arthur, who had come to office as a Stalwart and now surprised his critics, signed it on January 16, 1883.

The act did four main things.

1. It created a Civil Service Commission of three members, appointed by the President with the Senate's consent, to administer the system.
2. It required competitive examinations for covered positions, so that people were hired on the basis of fitness rather than party.
3. It barred the political assessments that required officeholders to pay a share of their salaries to the party.
4. It allowed the President to extend coverage by order, to additional classes of positions over time.

Notice how modest it was at the start. The Pendleton Act covered only a small share of federal jobs, on the order of one in ten. Most of the government remained outside the system. What made the law consequential was the extension clause. Each President could, by executive order, place more jobs under the merit system, and each did, in part because a President who covered his own appointees protected them from his successor. Over the next generation the covered share grew to a majority of the federal civilian workforce.

Reformers deserve credit for this, and Theodore Roosevelt in particular. He served as a Civil Service Commissioner from 1889 to 1895 and made the commission a force. The accomplishment was real: the federal government was better staffed, less corrupt and less dependent on the political tides. The post on Theodore Roosevelt Made Conservation a Conservative Cause, and It Still Is describes another side of his career.

The second layer: protection from removal

Hiring by merit is one thing. Firing is another. Pendleton protected people at the door. It did not, by itself, protect them once they were inside, and for decades presidents could still dismiss a covered employee for reasons that had nothing to do with performance.

The Lloyd-La Follette Act of 1912, signed by President Taft, changed that. It provided that covered employees could be removed only for such cause as would promote the efficiency of the service. It also protected the right of federal employees to furnish information to Congress, which is a part of the story told in Public-sector unions, and why FDR doubted they could bargain at all and Even Franklin Roosevelt Thought Government Unions Had Limits.

That law is where the career civil service in its modern form begins. A federal employee in the competitive service could no longer be fired simply because a new President wanted his job for someone else. Again, the moral case was strong. A clerk who does his work should not lose his livelihood because an election went the other way.

The Hatch Act: August 2, 1939

If employees were to be protected from the party in power, the party in power needed protection from employees. The reformers had a worry that ran the other way: that a large permanent workforce could become a political army, used to collect votes for the incumbent. The scandals of the 1930s, in which relief workers were alleged to have been pressured to support the party in power, made the point.

Congress responded with the Hatch Act, signed on August 2, 1939, which barred most federal employees from taking an active part in partisan campaigns. A later amendment in 1940 extended the rule to many state and local employees whose jobs were funded with federal money. The idea was to keep the workforce out of electoral politics, so that it would be neutral. Notice the symmetry. The reform of 1883 kept politicians out of the civil service. The reform of 1939 kept the civil service out of politics.

The 1978 settlement

The system as we know it took final shape in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, signed by President Carter on October 13, 1978. It abolished the old Civil Service Commission and split its functions among three bodies: the Office of Personnel Management, which acts as the government's personnel manager, the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears employee appeals, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which oversees labor relations. It also created the Senior Executive Service, a corps of top managers, and wrote the "merit system principles" and a list of prohibited personnel practices into law, with protections for whistleblowers.

The 1978 act was intended to make the system more manageable, by giving managers tools to reward good performance and remove poor performers. How well it did that is disputed. The point for our purposes is the structure it confirmed: a large career workforce, hired by merit, removable only for cause, with a multi-step process for appeal.

The steelman: why the career service is a good thing

Here is the strongest case for what we have, in the terms its defenders would use.

One: patronage was corrupt and incompetent, and the merit system ended the worst of it. Two: expertise matters, and a workforce that changes with every election would lose it. Three: stability protects citizens from arbitrary treatment. A clerk who could be fired for his politics could be told to deny a benefit to an opponent. Four: the career service serves any President, and the continuity of government through transitions is a strength. Five: the alternative to a career service is not an idealized democratic control but the return of the boss and the machine.

Those arguments are good, and I take them seriously. Nobody should want to restore the 1870s. A government that fills its post offices by party loyalty is a government that has stopped taking its work seriously.

The rebuttal: where the cure overshot

The reformers were right about the disease. Where they overshot was in the remedy, and the rebuttal comes in numbered points.

One: accountability needs a hand on the lever. The Constitution gives the President the executive power and the duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The Appointments Clause of Article II, Section 2 gives him, with the Senate, the power to appoint the officers of the United States, and allows Congress to vest the appointment of inferior officers elsewhere. It does not follow that every person in the executive branch must be removable at will, and no serious person argues it should be. But when the great bulk of the workforce is effectively irremovable, in practice, short of a long process, the President is responsible for results he cannot direct. The post on Madison Called It the Very Definition of Tyranny, and Agencies Hold All Three sets out why separation and accountability go together.

Two: protection against removal for politics became protection against removal for poor performance. The original reason for protection was to stop dismissals for party reasons. A legitimate protection, over time, accumulated a set of procedures: notice, response, appeal to an independent board, further review in the courts. Each step has a reason. In combination, they can make the removal of a poor performer a task that managers avoid. That is a cost, and it falls on the many federal workers who do their jobs well and watch colleagues who do not stay put.

Three: the voters can change the President and cannot change the workforce. Here is the heart of the title. An election can change who sits in the Oval Office and who sits in Congress. It cannot change the people who write the rules, process the claims and enforce the statutes, who will be there when the new administration arrives and when it leaves. That is a design some people value, and its price is that a majority of voters who want a different direction may find it takes years to arrive, if it arrives. The same structure shows up in The Federal Workforce Is Smaller Than You Think, and That Is the Problem and Seven Things Everyone Believes About the Federal Bureaucracy That Aren't So, and the argument about how much of the executive should answer to the voters is at the center of Schedule F Is Really a Fight Over Who Answers to the Voters.

Four: the same people who are protected also make policy. The 1883 reformers imagined a clerk who processed forms. The modern federal employee often writes rules with the force of law, a job Wilson's school treated as administration and the Founders would have called legislation. When protected employees make policy, protection from the voters is protection of a policy-making class. That was not the reformers' intent. It is the consequence of delegation, which is the subject of The Nondelegation Doctrine Says Congress Cannot Hand Its Job to Someone Else.

Five: the answer is not the spoils. The cure for an overgrown remedy is not a return to the disease. A workable reform keeps merit hiring and bans on assessments, keeps the protection for whistleblowers and for those who refuse to break the law, and fixes the accountability gap: shorter, clearer procedures for removing poor performers, a clearly defined set of policy-making positions that serve at the President's pleasure, strong limits on using that power for corrupt ends, and a requirement that Congress, not just the executive, set the lines. There is a real debate about where to draw them, and honest people disagree about particular proposals, which is why the question belongs in public argument and in statutes and not in whispers.

What the Founders would make of it

The Founders worried about two dangers in public office. One was the favorite and the placeman, the officer who owes his job to a patron and serves the patron, which is the corruption the Pendleton Act attacked. The other was the officer who owes his job to no one and answers to no one, a danger that the Declaration describes in its complaint about "a multitude of New Offices" and "swarms of Officers." They had no doubt that a free government needed to avoid both.

A republic is stable when public power is answerable and its servants are neither slaves of the party nor masters of the public. The history from Jackson to 1978 shows us swinging from the first danger toward the second, and the work of this generation of reformers, on the right and the left, is to find the balance. You can follow the debates in Congress through the oversight page and see how your own representatives vote on civil service questions at the scorecard page.

The case in brief

1. Jackson's rotation in office, defended in 1829 as democratic, hardened into the spoils system, a machine that filled government jobs by party loyalty and levied assessments on officeholders.
2. Garfield's assassination in 1881 by a disappointed office seeker led to the Pendleton Act of January 16, 1883, which began merit hiring for a small share of the workforce and allowed Presidents to extend coverage.
3. Protection grew by layers: the Lloyd-La Follette Act of 1912 required cause for removal, the Hatch Act of 1939 kept employees out of partisan campaigns, and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 settled the modern structure.
4. The reformers were right about patronage, but a career workforce that is effectively irremovable and writes rules with the force of law leaves voters unable to change how the government is run.
5. The answer is not to restore the spoils but to keep merit hiring and fix accountability, with clear lines about which positions answer to the President and which procedures remove poor performers.

What you can do: read Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution on the Constitution page, then ask your representative whether Congress should set, by statute, which senior positions serve at the President's pleasure and which are protected.