“To the victor go the spoils,” said William L. Marcy, a U.S. senator from New York, in 1832. He was defending the practice of the hiring of campaign cronies in the event of a successful election win. That practice was then dubbed the “spoils system,” as if someone had put it in place to work that way.
The denunciations against that slogan commenced and lasted for half a century. Then came “civil service reform” in 1883. It was supposed to make government employees objective and feed a system that was intelligent and not packed with cronies. It was designed to make government—particularly in the executive department—permanent.
At the time, this perhaps made sense. The corruption of the old system was well known. The fight for government jobs was ferocious following every election. That is still the case today, so it is not as if ending the spoils system actually ended the system of spoils. That is still with us more than ever.
What the new system actually did was build gigantic bureaucracies. It started with the Great War and the income tax. It grew and grew and exploded in size during the New Deal and World War II. The Cold War and Great Society added ever more. At some uncertain point, maybe very early or maybe more recently, the administrative state became more powerful and decisive in the lives of average Americans than the elected state.
This “state within a state” rose up largely without constitutional challenge or much juridical and legislative challenge at all. It just kept growing, as the people instinctively felt in each generation ever less in control of the systems of government. They would vote for new leaders and “throw the bums out,” but the new leaders could not gain a foothold over the system they sought to reform. The “bums” had permanent jobs.
The trouble with the new system that started in 1883 is that it eliminated the most important aspect of the “spoils system.” It’s not just about who you hire. It is about the capacity to send the personnel from the previous administration packing. Otherwise, they simply persist with the same policies, hide the correspondence and data, and deploy their better knowledge of the administrative bureaucracy to subvert the incoming administration.
That turns out to be the real purpose of “civil service reform.” It was to build a growing and eventually massive system of permanent employment that subverts democracy from within. If the new administration whom the people elect have no effective control over the agencies and the bureaucrats within them, the people who voted have their power taken away. Democracy becomes a sham.
I’m sorry to report that this seems to have been the fate of most Western democracies over these past 100 years. That sounds like an extreme claim. But it is the truth. These “states within the state” have become the ruling class, often operating on a global level, and yet are barely noticed at all by the people and the media. Indeed, these deeper states work very well with legacy media to feed stories and effectively stop any fundamental reform. It’s been going on for many decades.
Sadly, the piece ends in the 1890s with expressions of despair by the reformers, all of whom said that they had failed. They wanted the experts to run things in a way that disabled the democratic longings of the populist rabble. Instead, they entrenched all the policies they hated the most and ended up with a system that was even worse.
Despite their protests, the system lasted because, of course, no one knew how to restore the old spoils system, which, as bad as it was, at least was built in a mechanism that allowed the system to correct. When one administration would mess up royally, the next government would show up and purge the ranks of the bureaucracy. That allowed democracy to self-correct.
But with the new system, there was no mechanism in place to uproot the problems. Instead, they piled on top of each other, government by government, getting worse year by year. That is essentially the summary of every government from Theodore Roosevelt to the present. No one had yet found a solution to the problem.
Now comes the Trump administration in its second term. Defeated by the civil service the first time around, they had four years to plot a return. A main feature of this was an absolute determination to restore democracy against the “state within the state.” In other words, the second Trump term consists of the first elected government in more than 100 years that is seriously determined to be the government.
What has happened since being elected is the largest and surely the most clever attempt in the history of industrialized democracy to purge the permanent civil service. The Trump administration did this by offering buyouts, accepted by perhaps 5 percent of workers. It then turned to eliminating collective bargaining, freeing workers of the legal obligation to pay dues to their exploiters. Then it started eliminating whole divisions and agencies.
I’m writing on the day in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has fired 20,000 or more workers from the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and National Institutes of Health. It’s a start but a magnificent one. These terminations will, of course, be challenged in the courts. The Supreme Court will have to decide whether and to what extent the president and his appointees truly have power over executive agencies and their personnel.
It might seem like a silly question: Does the president really run the executive branch? Incredibly, the Supreme Court has given no clear answer. This is largely because the “state within the state” has risen up and grown up in plain sight but without a single major political figure being in a position to challenge it with any kind of serious action.
Finally, the day has come. What the Trump administration has achieved here could, in fact, be for the ages. Let us hope they have just begun the process. The “spoils systems” must come back, not because it is perfect but because it provides a mechanism for democracy to self-correct. The process of reform has begun at last and the error of nearly 150 years can at last be fixed. As Murray Rothbard demonstrated in his magisterial article, the original reformers would likely cheer the results.
