The Historic Dangers of Politicizing Our Civil Service

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are working to dramatically reduce the size of the federal civil service. They have already laid off numerous government employees who work on issues ranging from food safety to wildfire mitigation and are threatening to expand layoffs. These developments accompany an executive order that looks to convert a wider share of the civil service into at-will employees who can be more easily dismissed by the administration and replaced by people deemed more loyal to the president.

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Today’s civil service is the product of hard-fought reforms advocated for by working people in the 19th and 20th centuries to eliminate incompetence, corruption, and perversion of democratic choice in our government. In the 21st century, our need for a professional civil service is greater than ever as the complexities of a modern, industrialized society create many different risks to public safety, ranging from food contamination to the transportation of hazardous materials.

Prior to the 1880s, the federal civil service of the United States was entirely staffed by at-will employees who were supporters of the president and the political party that won the most recent election. This practice became formalized with the victory of Andrew Jackson over incumbent President John Quincy Adams in the election of 1828. The federal government was small by modern standards, but President Jackson’s appointment of loyalists as federal land agents and postmasters meant that political appointees had power to allocate lucrative land sales in the frontier and distribute partisan newspapers. This conferred enormous powers to presidents and their political party.

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In the years following, both political parties treated employment in public institutions as a reward for loyalty or payment for favors taken during the election. Some supporters of this system like President Martin Van Buren, who served from 1837 to 1841, believed that such a system would foster greater collaboration between government employees and the administration and help presidents implement their policy objectives more quickly. Giving some credence to Van Buren’s claims, many historians attribute the lackluster policy accomplishments of President John Quincy Adams to opposition from Jacksonian partisans within the federal civil service who actively campaigned for the opposition from within the government.

However, this patronage system created extensive dysfunction. Foremost, the exchange of favors for gainful employment fostered corruption. Many individuals who effectively purchased postings in government used the office to “recoup” their investment and extract personal wealth. A classic example is Samuel Swartwout, who President Andrew Jackson appointed as the collector of customs at the Port of New York in 1829. Serving over a decade, he embezzled $1.2 million (over $41 million in 2025 dollars) of tax revenue collected from merchants—and then he fled to England.

Throughout the 19th century, the U.S. government was rife with cases of similar malfeasance. Government officials were rarely held to account because many used the money they embezzled to support political campaigns. In 1878, federal employees contributed $80,000 to the total of $106,000 raised by the Republican Congressional Committee for political campaigns .

Government employees who were chosen for roles based on their financial contributions and loyalty often lacked the skills needed to do their jobs. The business community in particular voiced concerns about the incompetence of politically-appointed government officials who neglected key services that merchants relied on for their livelihood. For example, in 1881, a group of businessmen complained to Congress that politically-appointed post office workers who prioritized political connections over performance abandoned bags of undelivered mail in locked rooms. Trans-Atlantic traders also pointed out that customhouses in Prussia and Britain, staffed by professional civil servants, were four to five times more cost efficient than their American counterparts.

The system of doling out positions as a reward for loyalty also contributed to waste, as presidents and members of Congress alike saw creating offices in the federal government as a convenient method of clearing debts and favors owed to people. An 1877 investigation by the Treasury Department reported that the New York custom house had a labor force that was 20% larger than necessary for this reason.

In addition to waste, shrewd politicians also used their appointment powers to buy the votes of elected officials and subvert the public will. Most infamously, President James Buchanan (who was in office from 1857 to 1861) offered government posts to politicians who would support a pro-slavery Kansas state constitution drafted in 1857. This state constitution was not supported by either the majority of white Kansans or the territorial governor, but Buchanan’s meddling led to the state constitution receiving U.S. Senate approval. Fortunately, this constitution was rejected by Kansans.

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Public discontent towards the corruption, incompetence, waste, and subversion of democratic governance contributed to the U.S. government finally taking on civil service reform, particularly after President James Garfield was assassinated in office in 1881 by a mentally-disturbed office seeker. The resulting Pendleton Act in 1883 started the process of creating a professional bureaucracy, and reforms continued into the 20th century to ensure that these roles were allocated based on merit.

These reforms coincided with growing complexities that underwrote everyday life in the U.S., particularly as innovations in mass production and long-distance communications meant that producers and consumers never directly met. In this environment, unscrupulous or ignorant producers sold rotten food or foods preserved in dangerous substances to unwitting consumers. When Congress passed laws prohibiting these practices, civil servants with a background in chemistry offered concrete rules to enforce the public demand for food safety. These federal employees, whose livelihood was not tethered to the political fortune of one party or the other, engaged in long-term research and built expertise on best practices for oversight and enforcement.

The needs of a professional civil service remain great today because society is continuing to grow in complexity. To name but one example: our industrial society contains facilities that produce pollutants that are deeply harmful to our health. Overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), regulations like the Clean Air Act help minimize the public’s exposure to these industrial emissions. When the Office of Management and Budget evaluated the financial benefits of the EPA’s regulation of one hazardous substance, soot, the report found that the public health gains translated to a figure that ranged between $18.8 billion and $167.4 billion per year. No agency is perfect, but the loss of professional civil servants at the EPA could create an opportunity for the agency to be staffed by people installed by polluting industries in return for campaign donations—or simply staffed by so few employees that polluters can act with even greater impunity.

Eliminating or weakening the professional civil service could turn back the clock to an era when the government was rife with incompetence and corruption. Reducing our professional civil service would hurt American society because we would likely lose experts who are best equipped to enforce laws adopted in the public interest. And we all would feel the consequences in the air we breathe, water we drink, and the food we eat.

Yong Kwon studies historical industrial policies for their application today in improving a country’s economic performance and environmental outcomes.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

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