by Daniel Greenfield, GATESTONE • November 30, 2022 at 4:00 am
The most fundamental virtue of our constitutional government is that the public has supreme power over the government. The civil service system has effectively eliminated that power. This is what a slow-motion coup looks like. (Image source: iStock)
- This is what a slow-motion coup looks like.
- The solution to patronage isn’t professionalism, it’s smaller government. Government is not a meritocracy and there’s no point in keeping up the pretense that any part of it is merit-based. The most fundamental virtue of our constitutional government is that the public has supreme power over the government. The civil service system has effectively eliminated that power.
- A smaller government begins with a much smaller bureaucracy.
- Apologists for the bureaucracy claim that eliminating the permanent patronage of the civil service would erode “public trust in our government” and “undermine the role of civil servants as stewards of the public good”.
- The public has no trust in the government. The one thing most of the country, across political and racial lines, can agree on is not trusting the government. Currently only about 29% of Democrats and 9% of Republicans trust the government. How much more trust is there to lose?
- Civil servants are not “stewards of the public good”. The American people are. Monarchies and tyrannies have stewards of the public good. The only true constitutional and democratic virtue of a civil service is that it is easy to fire. A bureaucracy that can’t be gotten rid of isn’t serving the people, it’s mastering them, and that is what the administrative state has long since become.
- The only reason Democrats are panicking over permanent patronage reform is because the ranks and especially the senior management of the federal bureaucracy are full of their people. There’s nothing democratic or merit-based about letting a corrupt partisan faction control the administrative state and the lives of hundreds of millions of people with no recourse.
- The next president who isn’t beholden to the administrative state should provide that recourse.
When former President Donald Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis, and Senator Ted Cruz, among others, endorsed rolling back the power of bureaucrats and their administrative state, Democrats panicked.
Senator Dianne Feinstein and Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, introduced a countermeasure which they called, “Preventing a Patronage System Act” according to Kaine, to “protect the merit-based hiring system for our federal workforce”.
Media editorialists claimed that making it easier to get rid of federal employees would bring back patronage or the spoils system. The problem is that patronage never left.
We have spent generations living under a permanent patronage system. The spoils system, as bad as it was, kept one party from permanently packing its supporters into the government. Removing it just meant that the Democrats have permanently packed the federal bureaucracy.
I have a comment to add here as a recently retired U.S. federal civil service employee of more than 40 years, with half of that spent in Personnel. The federal civil service is anything but a meritocracy. Hiring and promotion are based almost entirely on an illegal and unconstitutional quota system based on race/ethnicity and gender: white male bad, everyone else good. In order to meet the quotas, hiring officials are forced to hire and promote persons who are usually underqualified for the position and, frequently, completely unqualified. No matter – those quotas must be met or the hiring officials will suffer for it in their annual performance appraisals. The true miracle of all this, with so many employees unable to do the work for which they were hired because they simply do not qualify, is that anything in the federal government functions at all.