To the victor go the spoils

The history of the spoils system and why we don't want it

This is a guest post by Chris Karr, one of The Racket News™ esteemed readers. We are always on the lookout for talent and stories within our reader community. You can see more from Chris on his new Initiative podcast and his personal blog, “Notes from the Void.” —Editors.

My only surprise around the announced appointments to the new presidential administration is how surprised others’ are reacting to the news that Trump has appointed Hegseth, Kennedy, the now-defunct Gaetz, and other manifestly unfit candidates to run the government for the next four years (or as long as they stay within Trump’s good graces). I’m on the record stating that I fully expect much of what we consider “the government” to be left a smoking crater before the American electorate wisens up and stops electing clowns to office.

I’ve lamented Americans’ lack of historical and Civics knowledge, so let me try and do my part addressing that with a short discussion of the spoils system.

The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Going as far back as George Washington himself, the federal government was typically staffed with friends and supporters of the President as a reward for their support. Contrary to the halos we tend to draw above the Founders’ heads, they were just as political and self-serving as the folks we have in Washington now. As the Senate works overtime fulfilling judicial appointments through the end of the year, I’m reminded of President John Adams and his “Midnight Judges” who staffed the federal judiciary in the days before Thomas Jefferson’s victorious Democratic-Republican ticket took power after the 1800 election. (Adams’ appointment of Federalist William Marbury during this flurry of activity led to the Marbury vs. Madison case, where the Supreme Court first asserted its role as a co-equal branch of government, which our own Chief Justice John Roberts has been busy negating lately.)

Prior to Andrew Jackson, the spoils system - also known as patronage - was typically a feature of local governments as political machines like Tammany Hall emerged in cities like New York City. In these cities, supporters of the local “Boss” would be awarded appointment on the basis of their support, as opposed to their actual competence. Supporters of this system argued that it made politics less elitist and made elected officials more accountable for what transpired during their terms - what The Boss giveth, The Boss can taketh away.

The spoils system re-emerged as a potent force with the election of 1824 and the splitting of the Democratic-Republican party into two, ending an era of single-party rule after the defeat of John Adams’ Federalists. When Andrew Jackson was victorious in the election 1828, he rewarded his supporters by removing over 900 people from federal positions and filling them with his supporters. The Jacksonians argued that too many federal workers believed that their position was their own unassailable personal fiefdom, and that reduced the responsiveness of the federal government. A system where the President exercised more direct control would be more responsive to the will of the electorate, they argued. I suspect that the four hundred postmasters Jackson fired - most with good service records - disagreed strongly.

Over the next few decades, the spoils system dominated Washington as the Democrats and Republicans traded power. By the 1870s, American citizens - recognizing that the spoils system was as corrupt and inefficient as the earlier system it replaced - began clamoring for civil service reform. President Grant established the Civil Service Commission that began implementing a merit system for government positions, breaking with the Republicans who demanded the return of patronage. Grant’s successor, Rutherford B. Hayes continued this transition, with the implementation of civil service exams, passing an executive order forbidding campaign contributions or participation in party politics as requirements for government appointments, and continuing to fund and make permanent the Civil Service Commission.

In March of 1881, James Garfield succeeded Hayes on a platform for civil service reform and advocated corresponding policies until his assassination six months later. A disgruntled Republican, Charles Guiteau, shot him in the back as retribution for being denied the Paris consulship after being deemed unqualified (Guiteau did not speak French), despite his narcissistic belief that his orations were key to Garfield’s electoral success. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was drafted in response to the assassination and passed by Chester A. Arthur in early 1883. The Pendleton Act made competitive exams the method for choosing some government appointments, and made it illegal to fire appointees in these positions for political reasons. It initially only covered around ten percent of government positions, but in the decades since its passing, its umbrella expanded, and today the vast majority of government employees are people hired for their competence, and not any specific political loyalties.

Given the history of the spoils system and the subsequent civil service reform, Trump is not really doing anything innovative or all that astonishing with his appointment announcements. He is acting contrary to the structure and expectations that we’ve lived our entire lives under, where the heads of departments are expected to manage the staff who have built competency and careers around the department’s mission. But those acts are not distinctly “Trumpian” - they are modern echoes of Andrew Jackson’s actions after he assumed office.

Now, the size of the government Trump will soon be heading is several orders of magnitude larger than Jackson dealt with, and vastly more complex. In Jackson’s era, the largest federal department was the Post Office. Today, that is the Department of Defense, with over 2.1 million employees (active duty and civilians). The federal government, in total, employs over 2.9 million. Will a FOX News host with scant experience managing people be able to run that department competently? We are about to find out, and I suspect that 21st century Americans will soon learn the same lessons 19th century Americans did. Everything old is new again.

Now, one aspect of Trump’s appointments that I haven’t seen discussed is to what extent they may function as political ablative armor for his administration. For those of you who aren’t robot combat nerds, ablative armor is a protective covering that functions by dissipating the incoming kinetic energy by vaporizing or chipping away portions of the armor, allowing that kinetic energy to dissipate instead of catastrophically penetrating sensitive interiors. My theory is that by picking marquee household names to run some of these departments, when things go south (as they are likely to do once Trump reinstates Schedule F and the competent people leave their government jobs), the energy and fury of the American electorate will be trained more on Doctor Oz or RFK Jr., than Trump himself. As we saw in the last Trump administration, for a guy that brags about only hiring “the best people”, there’s a lot of turnover among the folks that are picked to work on Trump’s behalf.

When Social Security and tax refund checks start arriving late, it’ll be important for Trump to have these personalities as ballast that he can jettison to keep the USS #MAGA from sinking further. We’ve already seen the playbook - Trump will pretend that he didn’t know what was going on and Doctor Oz was hiding something from him. Or he’ll claim that RFK Jr. was trying to sabotage him from within, and is merely disgruntled. Or perhaps, we’ll discover with Pete Hegseth a new way for Trump to toss someone under the bus, when the administration gets blowback for losing Ukraine or Taiwan.

Americans in the 19th century agitated for a competent civil service, despite not having had that to begin with. Americans in the 21st century have grown up and depend upon a competent federal government. While I expect Trump to exercise his Jacksonian impulses to the fullest extent, and leave office with the federal government as a smoking and ineffectual crater, I also view this as an opportunity to Build Back Better (if I may steal a Bidenism).

The entire reason Trump is in a position to cosplay Andrew Jackson is that Americans no longer appreciate the institutions erected in the aftermath of World War II that defined most of our existence. As Cinderella serenaded, you “Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone).”

To be fair to the institution skeptics, there’s plenty in our government that needs work or is left around as a historical vestigial limb. It’s clear that efforts to address those issues have failed in our current context, that enough Americans are comfortable handing Trump a sledgehammer and telling him to go to town.

Make no mistake, Trump, and his merry band of underpants gnomes, will attempt to stand up new institutions to replace the ones that they leveled. But none of these people are builders - they’ve reached their level of prominence not on the basis of what they’ve put out into the world, but on the volume of their complaining about what others have been doing. You’ll see some cargo-cult attempts at standing up cardboard replacements for institutions like the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health, but those shoddy simulacrums will collapse under the weight of their own internal inconsistencies.

We’re already seeing that with Brendan Carr (no relation), Trump’s man to head the Federal Communications Commission. On one hand Carr wants to move after Big Tech and social media under an anti-censorship banner. At the exact same time as he’s telling that Facebook that they’re obligated to transmit anything (legal) that their users post, he’s siding with the Internet Service Provider industry and defending their First Amendment rights to pick and choose which websites they will relay to their users for free, and which need to pay a fee for the privilege.

As someone who voted for Kamala Harris primarily on the idea that she wouldn’t be dismantling the institutions I appreciate, I’m oddly cheerful at the prospect of those institutions going away. And I think the reason is that I expect to be joined by a good number of new people with a newfound appreciation of solid institutions and a competent civil service. That should make it easier to marshall the required political support for standing those back up after Trump leaves the stage, and it will allow us to do some meaningful and informed housecleaning, unlike the past hatchet jobs that Elon and Vivek have mistaken for success. (“Hardcore” X is a lot less valuable than it was the day before Elon took possession.) Now, I don’t know when these new institutionalists will show up - it’s probably a function of how long they will tolerate the leopards gnawing on their noses - but I’m confident that they’ll show up, because we’re relearning the same lesson that 19th century Americans did when in similar straits.

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