The administration’s argument deserves a fair hearing. Many Americans distrust bureaucracy for reasons that are easy to understand. Government can be slow, arrogant, opaque and almost impossible to reach. Agencies protect themselves. Rules multiply. No one wants a public office that treats citizens as interruptions between meetings. Pew reported late last year that only 17 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time.⁶
So when the White House says senior policy-influencing federal employees should be easier to remove for poor performance, misconduct, corruption or refusal to carry out presidential directives, that argument lands with people who have spent half a day trying to get a straight answer from a government office and would cheerfully trade a kidney for a human being on the phone.⁷ Presidents are elected. Voters have a right to expect the executive branch to be managed.
The test is what replaces the system being attacked. Reform makes government work better for the public. Patronage makes government work better for the winner.
Americans have lived with that before. The old spoils system treated public jobs as rewards for party loyalty. It filled offices, funded machines and taught workers that their livelihoods depended on political service. George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall defended that world with cheerful bluntness. “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” he said of what he called “honest graft.”⁸ He also explained the machinery behind it: “Men ain’t in politics for nothin’.”⁹
That history grew here.
The system eventually became too rotten to ignore, which in American politics usually means it had first become too obvious to excuse. James Garfield fought the patronage bosses over whether the president would control appointments or merely serve the political machine. In his diary, Garfield wondered whether he was really president or just “the registering Clerk of the Senate.”¹⁰ Then Charles Guiteau, a deluded office seeker who believed he deserved a diplomatic post, shot Garfield at a Washington railroad station in 1881. Guiteau reportedly declared, “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be President.”¹¹ His crime helped discredit the spoils system. Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883, beginning the move toward a merit-based federal civil service.¹²
The danger begins when public jobs, public money and public law become winnings to be distributed after an election.
Civil service rules, inspectors general, public integrity lawyers, whistleblower protections, procurement rules and independent courts are dull by design. They slow things down. They ask for records. They make phone calls. They tell powerful people no. A lot of honest government consists of someone in an unremarkable office refusing to move a file the wrong way.
That is the part most easily lost in the noise. The issue is not simply whether one official is replaced by another. The issue is whether the replacement understands the job as service to the public or service to the person who opened the door. In a healthy government, a desk carries duties. In a patronage system, a desk carries debts.
Corruption rarely introduces itself as corruption. That would be rude, and possibly bad branding. It calls itself efficiency, loyalty, responsiveness, disruption, common sense or knowing how things get done. Plunkitt understood that language. He did not say he was stealing. He said he saw his opportunities.