Opus 2019-215: The Spoiled System

One of the great reforms of the past is considered to be the switch from the spoils system to the Civil Service.  You may have read about this in regard to the federal shutdown. 

The spoils system meant that to the victor goes the spoils.  When a political party won an election they could replace any employee of the government that was below them in the pecking order.  Thus when a Democrat was elected president, he could fire everyone working for the federal government who was a Republican and replace them with his supporters.  If a Republican was elected it worked the other way.  All systems have problems and give opportunities for corruption.  In the spoils system the corruption took the form of using your position to get rich until the next election and also the probability that you had no qualifications for the job.

In 1883 the Pendleton Civil Service Act was passed by congress which changed the way government employees were chosen and how they were dismissed.  The Chinese had come up with the idea centuries earlier.  It was based on taking a test to show you were qualified rather than just listing your political party or whom you were related to.  You could not be fired for political reasons.  It gave continuity to the job of government.  Today it effects almost all government employees.  States have the same type of system. 

This system also has its problems.  It is almost impossible to get rid of incompetent or corrupt government workers.  You have experienced this if you have ever gone to get your license renewed and the person behind the counter is more concerned with their cell phone than you getting to work.  It is the kind of problem that leads to a government shut down having 800,000 people stay home and no one notices the difference.  If being gone does not make a difference, why are they being paid in the first place?

I don’t know the actual law but what I am reading and hearing is that if the shutdown goes long enough then the people who are furloughed can be dismissed through a reduction in force.  Sounds good to me.  It is must another reason to keep the shutdown going.

Of course this will be hard on those laid off but it seems like they are not needed anyway.  This might be a way to get rid of the Department of Education and the EPA.  The good news for all those getting laid off is that there are a lot of jobs available in the private sector.  The bad news is that they might have to actually work and produce. 

The adventure continues.

homo unius libri