A new broom sweeps clean, goes the old saying, but President Trump needs to approach the federal bureaucracy with more than just a broom.
Maybe something like a bulldozer.
With an imminent budget crisis — on her way out the door, Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed us that, oh by the way, the federal government was out of cash — Trump should seize the opportunity to slash spending, lay off federal employees (permanently), move federal offices to lower-cost areas like Plattsburgh, NY or Las Vegas (New Mexico’s Las Vegas, not the Nevada one), and impound funds earmarked for unproductive regulations and operations.
DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, will produce a long-term plan, but Trump should strike hard with such initial savings right off the bat.
And there’s another move that Trump should take, one that will not only save money and improve efficiency, but also return the United States to the Founders’ intent: He should abandon the bloated, unconstitutional federal civil-service system.
Prior to the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883, government employment operated according to the “spoils system,” under which hiring in the executive branch was controlled by the president, the actual executive.
When a new administration came in, everyone’s job was up for grabs, at least potentially.
This “rotation in office” had several advantages, which were widely appreciated at the time and propounded by presidents from Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln.
Chief among them: Instead of an entrenched bureaucracy, rotation in office meant fresh blood.
Contrary to popular belief, the arrival of a new president didn’t mean that everyone with a government job left it.
Even Andrew Jackson, upon taking office as an iconoclastic outsider, replaced only about 10% of the federal workforce with his own people.
Every president understood the value of continuity — and hiring new people is hard work.
But under the spoils system, the fact that the president could replace anyone meant that everyone worked for him.
This had two critical consequences: It meant that every federal employee was responsible to the president, and that the president was responsible for them — and for everything they did.
This is consistent with the Constitution’s vesting clause, which provides that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
If the executive branch does it, it’s an executive power, and if it’s an executive power it should be directly controlled by the president.
Under our “professional” civil service, though, no one is really in charge.
Presidents can’t fire the government’s many middle, and even fairly senior, managers without a lot of hassle.
The thought was that this would give us an efficient, well-run government staffed by politically neutral, expert bureaucrats.
We don’t have those.
They’re not neutral, for one thing; they’re Democratic apparatchiks who can’t be fired by a Republican president — or a Democratic one, for that matter.
Federal workers donate overwhelmingly to Democrats.
A recent poll by Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan Institute found that huge numbers of federal managers — 42% — would do their best to resist the Trump administration’s initiatives, something we saw occurring during Trump’s first term.
Not only that, they’re not experts, either: I defy anyone to examine the record of the federal bureaucracy over the past decade and suggest that it reeks of expertise.
It just plain reeks.
So “rotation in office” is unlikely to cost us expertise, but it would improve legitimacy.
The massive growth of the administrative state over the last century-plus has been justified by the claim that all these unelected bureaucrats making decisions are in fact supervised by the president, who is elected by the nation, thus legitimizing their actions.
But with 2.28 million civilian employees, that hasn’t actually been true for decades.
It is time for the civil service to go.
Replacing this failed system with something more politically responsive is likely to function better, and is certainly more in line with the notion of democracy than leaving most of our government in the hands of an unaccountable, left-liberal monoculture.
Its takeover by “professional” bureaucrats who get there thanks to exams and degrees is just another example of the gentry-class colonization of formerly diverse professions.
(Journalism, once a blue-collar profession now dominated by elite college grads, is another).
Well, the educated upper classes haven’t performed especially well lately — and as they’re the ones constantly prating about diversity, they should appreciate a more diverse federal bureaucracy.
Time for President Trump to make it so: Abolish the civil service, and restore American democracy.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
