November 28, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog
When former President Trump, Gov.
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'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.
That’s
how America became a one-party government at the federal level in
Washington D.C. Politicians of both parties come and go, but it’s the
Democrat bureaucrats who call the shots.
The same media outlets
now fussing about “patronage” were gleefully reporting how a
“resistance” was operating within the federal bureaucracy to undermine
President Trump. That same “resistance”, without the public posturing,
has quietly sabotaged every Republican administration and any
conservative piece of legislation that gets through the process.
Before the 2016 election, one in four federal employees claimed that they would leave if Trump won. Six out of ten federal employees supported Biden. Only 28% backed Trump.
In the 2022 cycle, the American Federation of Government Employees has doled out over a million dollars. 94% of that money has gone to Democrats.
Not only does the federal workforce tilt leftward, but the number of Republicans fell from a third to a quarter
over the last generation. The federal machine that controls the lives
of most Americans has limited representation for one of the country’s
two major political factions.
But even that's misleading.
The men and women who actually run things are mostly Democrats. 63%
of the senior executives, the highest officials within the bureaucracy,
are Democrats, while the number of Republicans drops into the low 20s. A
National Bureau of Economic Research paper notes that the "the overrepresentation of Democrats increases as we move up the hierarchy".
“Among
employees in grades 1-12 of the GS, we find about 50% of Democrats (30%
of Republicans and 20% of independents), which rises to approximately
56% at the top of the GS (grades 13-15), and to 63% among career SES,”
the research showed.
This is what a slow-motion coup looks like.
Apologists
for the bureaucracy might claim that this reflects a lack of
qualifications by Republicans, but the share of independents similarly
drops. Only the share of Democrats steadily rises. If we were looking at
a similar breakdown of racial groups in which the share of every racial
group declined as it moved up the ranks, except one, it would be
evidence of bias.
And a political coup is far more corrosive and dangerous to a government than racial bias.
Democrats
want us to believe that the consolidation of the civil service by one
political faction is somehow a natural occurrence which does not reflect
a calculated strategy or patronage.
In between political tests
like diversity and equity, the insistence on concentrating federal
leadership in Democrat areas, and providing special entryways and
promotions to members of identity politics groups more likely to vote
for their party, Democrats claim that it’s all “merit”.
After
fighting to eliminate merit in college admissions, the military, and
federal contracts, they want us to believe that they not only believe in
merit, but want to protect it in the civil service.
Democrats
created an independent bureaucracy that provides its own patronage. That
corrupt system has led to everything from massive theft to IRS
investigations of political opponents. And the result is much worse than
the rotten spoils system ever was because it’s immune to change.
The
modern civil service owes its existence to a crooked bargain between
President Grover Cleveland, the first post-Civil War Democrat to occupy
the White House, and one of the most personally and politically corrupt
men to hold that office in the century, and the Mugwumps, the Never
Trumpers of the era. The federal workforce massively exploded from 5,837
before the Civil War to 15,344 after the Civil War to millions over the
next century. The civil service “reforms” were a key ingredient in what
became a permanent patronage system built to benefit the Democrats and
the liberal Republicans who were instrumental in imposing it on
Americans.
Where before individuals had traded on their political
support and campaign activities to win a few hundred offices during the
spoils system, urban political machines packed the civil service with
tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of their supporters in
the next century.
The liberal promises of Wilson, FDR and JFK
required a symbiotic growth in government. The government programs never
delivered a better life, except by providing government jobs for
Democrats. The spoils system was corrupt, but permanent patronage has
not only rewarded members of one party with jobs, especially senior
roles, to the tune of billions, but it also shifted power away from the
voters and elected officials, and to partisan bureaucrats.
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.
Firing federal employees is a long difficult
process. The Merit Systems Protection Board has repeatedly intervened to
protect even the worst abuses by workers including outright criminal
behavior. Americans can lose their jobs, but they can’t do anything
about the bureaucrats who control their lives. Politicians come and go,
but the Democrat administrative state abides.
A smaller
government begins with a much smaller bureaucracy. President Trump’s
commitment to wielding Schedule F is important, as are other ideas by
conservative politicians. Schedule F would be crucial in rolling back
the power of key policy-making bureaucrats, but it’s only the beginning.
The Founding Fathers understood that government is innately oppressive.
And government, like any parasitic infection, naturally grows unless
it’s shrunk or it kills the host.
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.
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