This was replaced with a system where it is very difficult to fire most civil servants but the executive could still select new hires (The Trump administration has tried the firing method via DOGE but with not much luck).
There is a common misconception that this reduces political influence and loyalty. This couldn't be further from the truth. What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.
This meant it is even more important to get loyal ones, since they will be there for a long time and can't be fired. So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group. It might be even worse than before civil service reform.
Can you name even a single time when two groups of civil servants sabotaged each other in this way? If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?
If this were true, why did the number of the federal government employees stop growing in the 80s?
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...
DOGE vs USAID
>If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?
I mean they have, look at all the civil servants who were fired and then sued for their jobs back with the leverage of judges who were prior appointed by Democrat leaning politics. Trump's attempt to eliminate large portions of the civil service has failed pretty spectacularly.
Even if it had kept growing, at some point there's a limitation on number of people in the USA that can even work those jobs.
Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point we're already paying 30+% taxes at the upper income bands, plus a large deficit, and there's just very little room left for the populace to tolerate new programs administered by bureaucrats.
Well that's what I'm trying to understand. So you're making an argument from the perspective of the political landscape in the 70s and 80s, and you'd like to return us to a federal level 50 - 100 years ago.
Your argument might have been more persuasive in the 80s, but today it's clear that the government is actually vastly more efficient than it has been in the last 80 years, serving a larger population with fewer government employees; there are over 100M more people living in the USA as there were 40 years ago, yet government employment levels remain the same. Returning back to pre-1980s or even 1920s level of government would leave the USA completely at the mercy of corporations (which for some that's the whole point, so maybe that's a good thing from your perspective, but I wouldn't choose that outcome).
The purpose of civil service reform was to end patronage, not to insulate the civil service from political supervision. The idea was to have well-credentialed employees, instead of political donors, carrying out the policies of the elected President. It was not to have employees exercising power independently of the policies of the President.
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was enacted in 1883. Four decades later, former President Taft wrote Myers v. United States, which still reflected the conventional view that the President was actually in charge of the executive branch.
My impression is that many of Trump's political appointees simply don't understand due process requirements, and interpret any legal obstacles to executing their will as sabotage by shadowy figures. You mention case developments, but as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
I think you are correct here, but it still leaves the open question whether the government's case is weak because it is weak on merits or because the people in charge of defending/executing/prosecuting the case intentionally made holes in it or botched it to make it weak. I won't claim either is the case, only point out either or a mixture of both is hypothetically possible and merely making your assertion true doesn't rule out the latter being true.
I don't doubt you have concrete examples of cases failing on merits, but I am only meeting you on the arena you presented.
I do very much expect people will present to cases on either side they believe are failures based on merits and ones they believe officials intentionally (or even accidently) botched. It's quite possible both have been true, in various cases. I won't make such assertions myself either way in this thread, only note that even if hypothetically what you say is true (even in the concrete) it wouldn't prove the underlying claim.
Trump had to fire Sally Yates who refused to defend it in court: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1/31/us-attorney-general.... There was no justification for her refusing to enforce the order. The legality of the order would be tested under rational basis review, which is extremely favorable to the government. And the case squarely implicated the President's authority over national security and the border. It wasn't a slam dunk for the government by any means, but it was way beyond the minimum "colorability" standard for the DOJ to make legal arguments to defend the order while complying with their ethical arguments.
> You mention case developments,
I mean not even updating political appointees about court rulings and such, hoping to keep the cases off the radars of the political appointees.
> as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
The new administration has won quite a lot of cases. For example, with the funding cuts, the legal strategy was quite well developed. That's why you heard so much in the media about impoundment. Impoundment is what you start talking about when you have no argument that "the administration cannot make this specific cut." It's the argument that, "well, if the administration makes all these cuts, it's an impoundment problem because the administration needs to spend that money on something within the statutory scope." That's why many universities have settled with the administration. They know that, even if they can win on impoundment or something like that, they can't make the administration reinstate the grants to them specifically.
Similarly on affirmative action, the administration has pursued a strong strategy. The kind of affirmative action that was allowed in universities before SFFA was never permitted in employment. But lots of companies engaged in blatantly illegal conduct in adopting preferences or quotas for specific groups: https://www.cadwalader.com/quorum/index.php?nid=9&eid=35. Companies aren't even fighting the administration on this for the most part on that front.
The new administration certainly has had some losses. Part of that is that they're litigating like liberals--making aggressive arguments to push the boundaries of the law, knowing that it will lose a lot of cases. The other part is that the administration doesn't have "A" players in every position. For example on the tariffs, there were major weaknesses in the trial arguments.