As if you needed another reason to vote. This is a historic constitutional crisis in the making—Trump’s Order Sets the Stage for Loyalty Tests for Thousands of Feds if he wins re-election. https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2020/10/president-trump-signs-directive-would-potentially-pull-thousands-federal-employees-policy-making-positions-out-competitive-service-making-them-will-employees/169481/

“This executive order strips due process rights and protections from perhaps hundreds of thousands of federal employees and will enable political appointees and other officials to hire and fire these workers at will.”

For those of you unfamiliar: the Pendleton Act was established in 1883 through the hard work of a growing class of educated professionals who demanded a professional government to end successive crises, scandals, and endemic corruption.

The first federal regulatory body, the ICC, was established in 1887. Though weak & ultimately unable to control the expanding railroad industry, the Pendleton Act and the ICC were the first serious attempts by the US to institute a modern, professionalized government.

At first, the Pendleton Act was a failure, serving only to create a “nonpartisan gloss on a persistent partisan system.” It would take until the middle of the 20th-century for the majority of civil service positions to fall under Pendleton guidelines.

But the cumulative effort of the various reforms and bureaus created during the Gilded Age converged to create a far more autonomous and effective bureaucracy by the end of the period, which positioned the U.S. to take advantage of the 20th-century.

A century later, the civil service is again in dire need of reform and modernization. But removing Pendleton protections and increasing the number of political appointees is a step backward, a move back into the spoils system of old that it took decades of reform to break free of

This is a graphic I made accompanying my thesis at the National Intelligence Officer to show the timeline and relationship between tech advancements, political crises, and governmental reform, resulting in the government we have today by 1947.

Between the 1880s and the 1920s, the US gradually dismantled the clientelist spoils system and laid the foundations for a professional bureaucracy for the first time, a government capable of addressing the new problems of the industrial era.

Theodore Roosevelt, who had led civil service reform from 1885-1889, made modernization of government a priority when he became President.

“It is difficult for Americans [today] to understand the emotions which Civil Service Reform aroused in the last quarter of the 19th-c…thousands, even millions, lined up behind the banner, & they were as evangelical (and as strenuously resisted) as any crusaders in history.”

Government is a serious business, for serious people. Americans deserve a government that not only represents them holistically through every race, gender, orientation, and economic stratum, but that is also competent and professional, unbeholden to political whims.

21st-century problems are even more complex than 20th-century ones. The integrated nature of global and domestic issues today requires a civil service workforce that is quite literally world-class. Anything less will fail.

The Trump administration has sought to move our government backwards into an age of political plunder, in which to the victor goes the spoils. This system is more reminiscent of states in which the apparatus of government is a weapon wielded against one's political enemies.

America's non-partisan, professional civil service was once the envy of the world and could be again. But not if we move backwards into the 19th-century instead of progressing boldly into the 21st.