How the civil service system changed American government
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In less than a week, Donald Trump will assume the presidency of the United States for a second time. On the campaign trail, he promised to enact the most sweeping changes ever to the federal civil service. He plans to fire tens of thousands of government workers. He repeatedly insulted them in a tone typical of his campaign. They're crooked people. They're dishonest people. They're going to be held accountable.

Trump's intention, shared by his close advisers, is to replace nonpartisan federal workers with people who profess loyalty only to him. I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. And Trump has already moved to cement this massive change.

He picked Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which seeks to reduce the size of the federal budget and, as the name implies, make the government more efficient. Ramaswamy, now an unelected bureaucrat himself, says this about federal workers.

Fire 75% of the federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and send them home packing because they never should have had that job in the first place. Then there's Kash Patel, whom Trump has nominated to be the next director of the FBI. I am going to go on a government gangster's manhunt in Washington, D.C. for our great president. Who's coming with me? Kash!

And Russell Vogt. He's a prominent contributor to Project 2025, the document that details sweeping changes to the entire federal system intended to remake it in a Trumpian image. Vogt directed the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump administration, and he's slated to return to that role. We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.

well, would the nation too be, quote, traumatically affected? Now, the word bureaucrat is highly effective as a political insult. But government bureaucrats also happen to be people who do things like process your passport, inspect food, keep the Pentagon running, and issue Social Security checks, regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat is in the White House. They form the nation's civil service, not political service.

And that's for a very specific reason, a very specific and historical reason. The United States did not always have a civil service. It once had a highly political federal apparatus that was rife with partisanship and very low on accountability. After a series of actual historical traumas, that all changed in 1883 by something called the Pendleton Act.

So today we're going to look at how the United States nonpartisan civil service came to be and how it's shaped the operations of the federal government. We will also ask what parts of it are in need of greater efficiency and improvement. What needs to change and what needs to be preserved?

So to do that, we'll turn to Donald Moynihan. He's a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and expert in government administration. He also has a sub stack called Can We Still Govern? And he joins us from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Professor Moynihan, welcome to On Point. Thank you so much for having me.

So take us back to pre-1883 and specifically in the period between, let's say, 1880 and the end of the Civil War. How would you describe the functioning of the United States federal government then?

So we typically describe that era as the spoil system. And the phrasing reflects the claim that to the victor to spoil. So the president wins the office and then can hand out jobs to his political supporters.

And in that period, then, you know, we sometimes mark Andrew Jackson's presidency in 1828 as like the full embrace of the spoils system until 1882 with the passing of the Pendleton Act and then the gradual introduction of the civil service system. You see this really dramatic ethos where.

political supporters believed that the way into government was to join a political party, maybe bribe someone, petition their way to a job, rather than demonstrate qualifications for doing that job. And so it wasn't a golden period of American governance. It was marked by corruption. It was marked by fairly poor performance.

And even before the Pendleton Act, for decades, there was this push, especially after the Civil War, to make government simply function better. Okay, so let me just jump in here. I mean, some might say that bribing your way into government is still how you get an ambassadorship in this country. So at that end, things perhaps haven't changed that much.

But for more context, before I ask for some specific examples of the spoil system prior to 1882.

Right now, the federal government has about 3 million workers, but that's not including active duty military. But those 3 million federal workers compose about 1.9 percent of the entire civilian workforce. That's according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So that's now. Was it proportionally as large? No.

Prior to the Pendleton Act, are we talking about what was overall a much relatively smaller government? It was a much smaller government. If you go back to Jackson, when he took office, he replaced about 10 percent of the workforce right away. And that was 900 plus people.

So it was a government that was small enough where a president could actually know a lot of the people working directly for him. It's not until after the Civil War that you see government really start to grow. And then again, after the First World War and then the Great Depression, the government becomes much larger.

And today, government isn't actually that much larger than it was in the 1960s, if you use a federal headcount. If you set aside post office employees, we have about 2.2 million civilian employees. And that's about

where it was in the early 1960s. So we've gone through this period over the last 60 years or so when the actual number of civil servants has remained pretty static, even though the population has grown quite a bit in America and the types of tasks we ask governments to take on have become more numerous and more complicated. I see. Okay, before we go back to the history, because the history is absolutely fascinating, just as a point of comparison, how does this...

percentage of under 2% of the civilian workforce? How does that compare to other sort of peer nations, right? Because in the United States, this narrative has taken hold that like the federal government is just this giant, unwieldy, sort of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy kind of beast in comparison to the svelte governments in other countries that seem to somehow do more with less.

Yeah, and that is not the case. So the U.S. government is very large. It's in some – by some measures the largest single organization in the world. But in terms of actual employees, it is not larger than other countries. And in fact, it's smaller than many peer countries.

Now, it's important to note, of course, there's lots of state employees and there's lots of local government employees. But I do think one thing that is maybe markedly different about the U.S. is that we also contract out and we also privatize a lot of services.

So we have something like three to four private contractors receiving federal funds, helping to provide federal government services for every single federal employee that we have. And so that sort of shadow workforce is bigger in the U.S. than we believe it is in other countries. I see. OK, so back to the history here. I mean, was it as straightforward as a new president would get elected and say,

that man would come in and he and his transition team, as it were, in the late 19th century, literally just sweep out all the existing federal employees and replace them with their own? They didn't sweep out all of the employees because there was just some logistical difficulties in moving everyone out so quickly. But they did move a fair percentage. And by the time James Garfield was elected...

in 1880, there was just a strong cultural expectation that people could ask the president for a job. And if they were politically connected, if they knew the right people, if they had played a role supporting the president's campaign, they would be entitled to that job. And

And one thing that was very different about the president's role then versus today is that they would spend multiple hours each day meeting with job seekers. Garfield typically set something like three hours per day to meet with these job seekers. He got so tired of this after a while that he reduced it to one hour per day. But this was a huge portion of the president's responsibility as a public figure. Lincoln once joked,

when he was tired of meeting office seekers and he had a case of smallpox that he would welcome them in because he finally had something he could give to all of them.

So presidents felt pretty overwhelmed by this task of managing all of the office seekers who believed that they had earned rights to a federal government position. Okay. It's so interesting here because the kinds of people who ended up with federal positions in the spoil system as you describe it, I'm seeing here that in the American Historical Review, there's a quote from...

a list essentially, an 1867 list of employees in the treasurer's office. And it lists the previous occupations that these employees had.

Seven accountants. All right, that makes sense. Thirteen bankers, 18 bookkeepers, 27 clerks. And then it gets interesting. One detective, two druggists, one editor, five farmers, one hack driver, one housekeeper, one hotel steward, 16 laborers, one machinist, one manufacturer, one porter. I mean, like it goes on. Twelve students, two telegraphists, county treasurer, a washerwoman, a watchman, and one of no particular previous occupation. Right.

Was that typical of the sort of motley group of a president's supporters that would be brought in to do these federal jobs?

That was not unusual, but there were some jobs that were so attractive because of the opportunities for corruption and graft. And so, for example, the collector of the Port of New York was this very sought after position because essentially the person holding the job could both work.

employ their own people and also skim money off the top of revenues coming into government. Andrew Jackson's collector had to flee the country after he was caught stealing millions. And in fact,

Chester B. Archer, who became Garfield's vice president, his only public office prior to becoming vice president was the collector of the Port of New York. So some of these positions were incredibly important. Well, Professor Moynihan, stand by for just a moment. We have a lot more to talk about about the creation of America's civil service. This is On Point. On Point.

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You're back with On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. And today we are talking about the Federal Civil Service as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office once again and wishes to enact sweeping changes, sweeping reductions of the Federal Civil Service and also replacing nonpartisan federal employees with Trump loyalists.

We're taking a look at how the United States ended up with a nonpartisan civil service to begin with and why. And we're joined by Donald Moynihan. He's a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and writer of a sub stack called Can We Still Govern? So, Professor Moynihan, in order to better understand what led to the adoption of the Pendleton Act, which created the Federal Civil Service,

I'm wondering if you can give us one or two examples of the kind of corruption or kind of lack of accountability that you say was sort of rife under various administrations in the late 19th century. Because I'm looking here at a 1882 quote from Senator Preston B. Plum, who said, quote,

Quote, we are not legislating on this subject in response to our own judgment of what is proper to be done, but in response to some sort of judgment which has been expressed outside. I think popular opinion, so far as it has been given expression to at the late election or any other election, has been voiced in the public press. And it's been directed at condemnation of the assessment of office holders and the solicitation of appointments. So what was the press reporting regarding corruption or lack of accountability?

You really see this awareness of the problem with the spoils system emerge after the Civil War in particular and calls for reform at that point because it becomes obvious to people that the consequences of government failure and waste have life and death outcomes for the public.

And this could include the delivery of low quality health provisions to troops in the field. Also, after the Civil War, we tried to set up the nation's first pension system for veterans. And it was so rife with corruption and stealing that we effectively gave up on it until we created the Social Security system in the 1930s.

You also had very big problems at the end of the 19th century. You had mass immigration, you had tremendous growth in cities, people were living in tenements in unsafe conditions, and there was a sense that there was no real regulation to some of the basic problems that the public was facing, partly because government was not occupied by people who cared about the public interest, but cared instead about trying to extract as much resources as they could,

while they held office. Okay. So with this then sort of rickety and at times very non-functional federal government, we come to the presidency of Chester B. Arthur. Was he in favor of the spoils system? Because I can't imagine that an incoming president would want to let go of the opportunity to place all of his own people, to put it kindly, in key federal positions.

Well, Chester B. Archer was probably the least likely advocate of ending the spoils system because he was the product of the spoils system. He had been the collector of the Port of New York, which was – he had no real background beyond that in public life. He was viewed as a stooge of this incredibly powerful New York senator, Roscoe Conkling, who was the champion of the spoils system.

And he was put on the ticket in 1880, really as sort of a compromise between the anti-spoil system, part of the Republican Party, and the pro-spoil system. And the anti-spoil system advocates choose James Garfield. Conkling is unable to get his man in place, but he is able to get his stooge or his lackey, Chester Archer, into the position of vice president.

And so we can't really understand Chester Arthur and his embrace eventually of the civil service system without understanding James Garfield and the assassination of James Garfield. Because his assassination then leads the way to Arthur's presidency.

It leads directly to Arthur's presidency, but it also gives this incredible popular momentum to remove the spoil system. Correctly or not, the public judged that the general broad reason why Garfield was assassinated was because of the spoil system.

And so the back story here is Garfield is shot by Charles Guiteau, the person who had been petitioning the White House for months for a position that he believed he should be the consul to France. He should be sent to Paris. And he had been making his case to the White House. Guiteau was quite mad, right?

And he one day discovers a message from God that appears to him in a dream telling him that to solve his problems, he needs only to assassinate James Garfield. And when Chester Archer comes into office, all will be well.

And so the public, when Garfield was assassinated, was tremendously shocked and tremendously angry. And there was this incredible outpouring of not just grief, but anger towards the spoil system. And so Garfield's very short presidency, it ends within his within several months of taking office.

It doesn't produce much of a legacy beyond that public opposition to the spoil system. Wow. OK. But did Guiteau know Garfield personally or was he just he just believed in and of himself that he deserved to be the consul to France?

Ghetto had no real connection to Garfield. And in fact, I think there's a note in Garfield's historical records where he sees a letter from Ghetto and uses it as an example of the evils of the spoils system where this person has no real qualification or call for the job and is simply demanding a position because he thinks he's entitled to it.

Guiteau had met Chester B. Archer several times, however. As he went to New York, he became active in Republican politics, and he connected himself to the pro-spoils part of the party. And so he had no real meaningful connection to Archer, but he had met him several times, and that became sort of grist for the mill for speculation that Guiteau

the spoils system itself really had inspired Guiteau to act and take the life of the president. Just a minor little correction here. I believe it's Chester A. Arthur, Professor Moynihan. I think I'm...

I think that's right. Although Chester B. Arthur tends to roll off the tongue a little bit better. Duly know that my apologies to President Arthur. It's quite all right. It does not detract at all from this fascinating history that you're sharing with us. OK, so the assassination of Garfield then.

ironically is what paves the way for reforms to the spoil system, which essentially becomes the passage of the Pendleton Act. So what is in the act that completely remakes the civil service into a more professionalized service?

So the act, and this is really where we do see the starting point of the American civil service system, does one really important thing, which is require that all applicants for public jobs have to undergo some sort of qualifying exam.

And so it institutes some basic check on merit. It doesn't immediately do away with the spoils system. It takes a number of years before we see that happen. But by 1900, the majority of the employees in the public sector at the national level were civil servants. But it's really this idea of merit as reflected by these exams that the Act introduces.

It had been introduced before by James Pendleton, the senator from Ohio, and previous presidents had pushed for civil service reform, such as Redford Hayes and Charles Pierce.

But it's really not until Garfield is assassinated that people rally around this idea that merit should be a basis for selection in the public sector. I see. OK, so there suddenly becomes this basis upon which you have to prove whether you are competent enough for a federal job. And what about the notion that many of these jobs would remain unpaid?

Regardless of who was in office, that we wouldn't have this sort of churn with every top to bottom churn, let me be clear, with every incoming administration. Did that just sort of emerge organically?

Well, there's one compromise that's built into the origins of the civil service system is that presidents can blanket in people within existing government agencies into the system. And so over time, presidents might have hired a lot of people in a certain area. They may want to protect that agency. And they add those people into the permanent civil service system. And so that's

part of the way that the civil service system grows from initially about 10% of employees in the mid-1880s to 40% a couple of years later, the majority, and then 90% by the 1930s or so. Okay. And so what were the results then of this, you know, 19th century version of the modernization of a federal bureaucratic system?

Well, we see a couple of standout results. And one thing is it changes the nature of the American administrative state. It doesn't change the character of that state completely. One thing that's important to know and remains true today is the U.S. American or the U.S. administrative state is a relatively politicized one. We have about 4,000 political appointees in office still. So there's still lots of opportunities for patronage.

And that was a very deliberate break with other models of civil service systems, such as the United Kingdom, which civil service reformers were sort of drawing from, where really there are no large numbers of political appointees. You have a cabinet minister, maybe a couple of assistants.

But you don't have multiple layers of leadership that still remain part of the political class and still are expected to leave with every president. And so the U.S. does retain this fairly political aspect, even as it embraces the civil service system. Two other changes that we start to see, one is that there's less obvious corruption in government.

And the second is that the performance of government seems to improve.

So, for example, there was a new study of the evolution of the post office from before and after the spoil system, which showed that the post office simply got better at its job, more efficient at delivering mail, delivered it to the right place more frequently. And that was partly because it significantly reduced the turnover of post office officials because of the civil service system.

Well, let me just play a thought here quickly from David Lewis, who's a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.

And when I asked you about sort of the organic evolution of a more professionalized civil service after the Pendleton Act of 1882, he had something to say about that because his point is that there actually isn't a lot of detail, virtually none at all in the Constitution about the mechanics of how the bureaucracy of the federal government should be run.

The Constitution itself doesn't say much about the bureaucracy. It has a few references to departments or officers, but it doesn't give you any detail about what they should look like or what their structure should be or how they should be populated or these kinds of things. The way it gets created is through politics. So it's through political decisions from year to year, from party to party. And so the government kind of builds up that way.

So, Professor Moynihan, feel free to respond to that. But it is dovetailed to the political question here. The Pendleton Act or sense that the civil service was actually updated by Congress in 1973 in the Civil Service Act. So tell me what that sought to accomplish. Yeah, I absolutely agree with Professor Lewis there. We shouldn't.

take too much emphasis from the thoughts of the founding fathers on administration, in my opinion, because they simply didn't give a lot of attention to the issue of administration.

Their business was mostly how do you build a national government and how do you build a new democracy? And that's where they put a lot of their thought and energy in the Constitution. They weren't thinking about how do you build an administrative apparatus that can run a government that has 100 million people or 200 million people or 300 million people to govern.

And so there's really just very bare bone thoughts within the Constitution and even the writings of the founding fathers about the way in which administration should operate.

What you do see at the time that the civil service system starts to grow is a new set of demands upon government and some degree of faith and expertise as a way of solving those demands. So, for example, we see the Food and Drug Administration at the start of the 20th century.

or an independent federal reserve at the start of the 20th century, where there's a belief that there are some real problems in society and the best way to solve them is to give a group of experts some measure of independence and autonomy to solve those problems.

And that was a political calculation. There was a sense that government and political parties were responding to demands from the public to make society more functional, a little bit fairer, less unpredictable, a little bit safer for people, for example, working in difficult or dangerous jobs. Right.

So then in the 1970s, we do have the Civil Service Act that comes along to make changes, to update the federal workforce. What did that act accomplish?

Yeah, and it's notable. We just saw the passing of Jimmy Carter. So the last major piece of legislation that we see, it comes under Carter's term, the Civil Service Reform Act in 1978, where Carter says,

Comes to government as a reformer. He is somewhat skeptical of the bureaucracy He used terms like the Washington Marshmallow, but it's also a time after President Nixon's abuses and corruption which included politicization of The civil service system on a fairly small scale, but for example moving civil servants

to positions or locations where they couldn't really play any role in his administration.

And so Carter is trying to do two things at once. He's trying to modernize the civil service system to make it less bureaucratic and more managerially oriented. So he does things like create the senior executive service, which is this intended to be this cadre of super managers who could work across government positions.

But he's also quite concerned about politicization. And so he establishes a declaration of the merit principles in the act, which says things like civil servants cannot be mistreated because of political partisan reasons. Yeah. OK, so Professor Moynihan, stand by for a moment with this really interesting history in mind about how we arrived at what we see as the modern day civil service today.

I want to get your responses to criticisms of the federal bureaucracy when we come back. This is On Point. You're back with On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. And Donald Moynihan joins us today. He's a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. And he's walking us through the history of how the United States came about having its nonpartisan federal civil service. And, of course, what would happen if that policy,

civil service were completely remade as the incoming Trump administration wishes to do and switches out maybe lifetime employees with Trump loyalists or loyalists to any particular president. So we're going to explore that in just a second here. But Professor Moynihan, I'm looking at the text of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. And, you know, it actually reads

To my eyes, as a document of a kind of really noble American ideal, right? Because here we, as you mentioned, we have in the right at the beginning of it in the first section, it says recruitment for federal positions should be from qualified individuals who

in an endeavor to achieve a workforce from all segments of society. And selection and advancement should be determined solely on the basis of relative ability, knowledge, and skills. So that, like, we want to seek the best, have a merit-based system in the federal government is right there. And then to your other point about, well, and also you have to, like, earn your keep, it says...

A little bit later, employees should be retained on the basis of adequacy of their performance. Inadequate performance should be corrected and employees should be separated who cannot or will not improve their performance to meet required standards. So merit and accountability really built into at least the text of the laws surrounding the federal workforce.

However, as you know, there's a great deal of criticism about whether those ideals are actually met in practice. So we spoke with Philip K. Howard. He's a critic of the federal government as it currently exists. He's the founder of Common Good. It's an organization that advocates for a more simplified government, in their words. And he says the civil service absolutely is in need of reform. At this point, we have a federal civil service where there's no—

near zero accountability. I mean, 99% of all federal employees get a fully successful rating because if you said anything negative, the civil servant has the right to haul you before an arbitrator and

make you justify the fact that you say that he doesn't work hard or cooperate well or whatever the supervisor said. So at this point, you have a system that's turned into a kind of anti-merit system that once you get in, it's really hard to get anybody out. Professor Moynihan, I mean, is that the case? And if so, doesn't that call for some sort of major reform?

So I think as a starting point, the merit principles that Carter laid out are really good principles. There are good principles that you should apply today. So the principles themselves haven't become outdated yet.

the implementation of the principles was from the very start a challenge. And so, for example, to the issue of why do so many federal employees get excellent merit ratings

Well, the Civil Service Reform Act envisaged implementing pay for performance where really outstanding employees would get higher cash bonuses. And it found that that did not work very well for a couple of reasons. One is that it's difficult to objectively separate the effect of an individual employee on some sort of government outcome. And so you're left with these sort of subjective assessments of their contribution.

And second is that the actual big performance bonuses never materialized. And so supervisors had to ask themselves, well, is there a lot of value in me trying to distinguish between the performance when it doesn't make much material difference to the employees? Now, that said, I agree there are problems there.

In terms of assessing performance, I think it's sort of generally accepted that the turnover rate in government is lower than in the private sector, partly because public sector managers believe that it's too difficult to remove poor performers, and so they don't invest the time and effort into doing it.

And so I think that's one aspect of a broader reform of government that's needed, where you think about how do you modernize the civil service system to make it a responsive but still attractive contemporary employer? 1978 was a long time ago. And so it's beyond time that Congress asks some basic questions like, how do we get younger people into government?

How do we keep them motivated? And how do we demonstrate that they're doing a good job? Right. So this brings sort of the common sense reality check into this conversation, right? Because

Even though the intentions and ideals behind laws might be in the right direction, as you're saying, in practice, it doesn't always work out. And I think everybody listening here right now probably has an example of trying to interact with the federal government in some way and finding it to be a very cumbersome process.

Painful process at times, whether it be you're trying to get an answer from the Social Security Administration about some minor change in your Social Security account that can actually, you know, test the patience of Job all the way to the Pentagon with its thousands and thousands of employees never being able to this day pass a single audit. Right.

So clearly something isn't working in terms of the efficient and high performance desire that we would have for the United States federal government. And I think there's a couple of things baked into your observations there. One is that the public sector is different in some ways in that unlike China,

private organizations, political support matters a lot for the size of the budget or the degree of autonomy an organization has. And so historically, the Department of Defense has enjoyed very large budgets and perhaps less intense scrutiny because it also enjoys very broad political support.

And if you actually look at the 2.2 million civil servants who don't have post office positions,

About 71% of those civil servants are in the category of either Homeland Security, National Defense, or veterans. So the vast majority of our civilian, not uniform employees, our civilian employees work in these areas related to security, partly because those areas have the broadest public support when you poll people about government agencies.

Wait, wait. I just want to say this again. Almost three quarters or 71 percent of non-post office federal employees are in security or military. Yeah. So if we were to radically reduce the size of the federal civil service, could it be done without touching those jobs? No. No.

And it's important also to note that the cost of government, so government costs about $6 trillion a year, is not really driven by employee costs.

I don't have the number off the top of my head, but Vivek Ramaswamy proposed at one point eliminating 75 percent of civilian employees. And I think that would save about $270 billion, which is – that's a lot of money.

But it's not remotely close to $6 trillion or even $2 trillion, which Musk has promised. It's less than what the Department of Defense spends in contracting. Right. I was going to say, if you're going to make that kind of massive cut, it has to come from the places that are driving the spending, which are the Pentagon's budget and Social Security and Medicare, essentially, which all three of them have been declassified.

declared untouchable, right, by administration's ad nauseum, including the incoming one. In just a minute, I want to hear from a federal employee herself, but quickly explain to us, Professor Moynihan, the wonderful bureaucraties of the federal government. What is Schedule F? Right, because it seems like a lot of the Trumpian controversies around this thing called Schedule F.

It's this very important but vaguely titled executive order that would give a president the power to turn civil servants into political appointees and by doing so allow the president to fire them for any reason.

And so this is an executive order and not an act of Congress. Is it legal? I mean, I guess it is an executive order. It could be. It hasn't been tested in court. It hasn't gone through Congress. It's a huge change, but it has had no legislative approval. OK, so and we wouldn't know of its legality unless it's actually tested in court or or or Congress acts. OK, so with that in mind, Schedule F.

Let's quickly hear from a federal employee or the representative of federal employees. This is Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees. It's a union that represents workers in the Social Security Administration. They also represent the Department of Agriculture food safety inspectors who ensure that meat processing plants are meeting federal health standards. And the union represents corrections officers who

And Simon says that even if Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, et al. were to fire all the people in the departments they are targeting, they still wouldn't reduce the amount of government funding.

spending they promised to curtail. They don't seem to understand that even if they got rid of literally every federal employee to make savings of that magnitude, they'd have to make deep cuts in Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, veterans health care. And I don't know if they're serious about that.

But Simon says if the incoming Trump administration does cut federal jobs massively, what it will do is limit the government's ability to protect Americans. And she says that even if her union members are protected by virtue of their union, reducing the number of non-union government employees could have an impact on how government is run. I mean, take food safety, for example.

If they start making the people who are supervising our members into Schedule F, which is basically turning them into political appointees whose only real job is to demonstrate loyalty to Donald Trump, then the standards will be lower for what level of disease in animals is permitted to make its way into our food supply. Because it's not profitable to throw out lots and lots of animals and say, nope, they're not safe. We can't process those. We can't sell that.

Simon does acknowledge that there's frustration on how government is run out there. Sometimes it's real, sometimes it's media driven. But what she says is that people don't see the labor that these federal employees and their teams do on behalf of citizens. I don't think on an everyday basis people think about the corrections officers inside federal prisons who are protecting us all from these dangerous criminals.

I don't think necessarily people think about what's going on in meat processing plants and slaughterhouses to make sure that the food they eat is safe. People probably don't think about people at EPA who are enforcing the law and regulation to make sure people have clean air to breathe and water to drink.

If you're not a veteran, maybe you don't know about the quality of care that's provided to military veterans inside veterans hospitals and clinics because our veterans have a lot of very serious and complex medical problems that are only addressed adequately inside a VA facility. And speaking of veterans, she says half of her organization's membership is made up of military veterans.

They don't scare easily when Donald Trump tries to bully them, when these billionaires try to bully them and make them fear for their jobs and criticize them and criticize their motivations. They don't take that lightly, and they certainly are not cowering in the corner, scared to death.

of the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy. They will stand up for their rights, they will stand up for their jobs, and they will stand up for the programs they work for for the American people. So that's Jacqueline Simon, Policy Director for the American Federation of Government Employees.

Professor Moynihan, in the last several minutes that we have, what I find most, I think, instructive about this historical tour that you've given us is that each change to the Federal Civil Service or the creation thereof has come in response to the nation's upset with the status quo, right? Upset with the spoil system. We have the Pendleton Act of 1882. Upset with corruption in the Nixon era. So eventually we get the Civil Service Act of 1882.

1978. And now I think you said this earlier, that there is a legitimate upset in terms of the expectation of how a business or large organization should run in the modern era. And I'm not saying that the entire federal government should be privatized, but we are living in a different world where customer service, completion of tasks, the ability to accomplish big things is

It's expected that large organizations can do this. And oftentimes the federal government is seen as lacking in that ability in the way a modern organization should be able to do. So short of a complete return to the spoil system, which is essentially what would happen if Donald Trump replaced the civil service with loyalists, how can we improve the operation of the federal government?

It's a great question. And I think what's important to know before we answer that question is that Trump's proposals are not popular. Now, certainly he won the election and he complained about the deep state. But if you look at polling of the public and ask them, would you prefer a more partisan way of managing the public sector or a nonpartisan approach?

Then about 90 percent of people, and this is bipartisan, say they prefer a more nonpartisan approach. And there's a variety of surveys that have sort of shown that really Trump's proposals do not have broad public support when it comes to managing the public sector. So we need modernization without politicization. Right.

One one fact is that about 30 percent of federal employees are retirement eligible. So it's an older workforce. The biggest crisis the federal public sector has is in getting young, skilled people into the job. And so I think having hiring processes that better capture the skills that government needs is

And making the workforce an attractive option for people who could go and work in other places like Silicon Valley, I think is important. One federal agency that people probably have not heard of is the U.S. Digital Service. It was created in 2014 after the failure of the Obamacare website.

And it's going around government looking for ways to make the actual service delivery work better. So, for example, my mother-in-law got her passport renewed digitally over Christmas and it worked fantastically. She got it back in six days because the digital interface has been improved.

Well, Donald Moynihan, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and author of the substack Can We Govern? Thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure. I'm Magna Chakraborty. This is On Point.