AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

In the first two months of his second term in office, President Trump has begun major overhauls of national policy on multiple fronts. Among the most visible and contentious efforts is the push to reshape the federal workforce, both in its size and its management.

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RASCOE: For a look at how this population of workers came to look the way it does now, we turn to the man we call Professor Ron. That’s NPR’s senior contributor Ron Elving.

RON ELVING, BYLINE: Trump spent 14 years as star of a reality TV show called “The Apprentice,” uttering his signature line...

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You’re fired.

ELVING: So why, Trump seems to ask, can’t government work like that? Why shouldn’t the president or a designee such as Elon Musk, hire and fire people as they see fit? The answer lies way back in American history, back to a practice now roughly two centuries old. In that era, there was pressure on each new president to hire friends and family, campaign donors and loyal backers of the president’s party in each state. Some new hires might be qualified for their new jobs, but many were not. Here’s how NPR’s iconic senior news analyst Daniel Schorr described it in 2005.

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DANIEL SCHORR: A long time ago, in the era of Andrew Jackson, it was called the spoils system. To the leader belonged the spoils. It was also called patronage.

ELVING: Andrew Jackson saw no reason not to distribute the goodies of government to his friends and those willing to be friendly. Soon, government jobs came to be regarded as rewards for political connections, and those who got these jobs often had to make donations to the party as payback, prompting widespread calls for reform as early as the 1850s. In 1876, no less a figure than Mark Twain actively campaigned against patronage, complaining, quote, “we serenely fill great numbers of our minor public offices with ignoramuses,” unquote. But reform had to wait until tragedy struck.

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WILL JANOWITZ: (As Charles Guiteau) 1881 - to the American people...

ELVING: Those are the words of Charles Guiteau, dramatized on PBS’ “The American Experience.”

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JANOWITZ: (As Charles Guiteau) The president’s tragic death was a sad necessity.

ELVING: That president was the newly inaugurated James Garfield, whom Guiteau shot the day that letter was penned. Garfield lingered more than two months before dying. The shooter’s motive - he had not been given the job he wanted in the new administration. The assassination supercharged the arguments of reformers like Ohio Senator George Pendleton. Dan Schorr.

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SCHORR: Starting in 1883, there came a series of reforms, culminating in the Pendleton Act, which established civil service and a merit system for persons competing for jobs.

ELVING: The Pendleton Act banned the hiring of relatives, donors and other supporters for a certain class of federal jobs that required special knowledge or skills. It also banned the firing of employees for political reasons. At first, the act covered just 10% of federal jobs, but it expanded to encompass the vast majority.

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ELIZABETH LINOS: Fast-forward to 1978, where we had another big reform - the Civil Service Reform Act.

ELVING: Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Political Policy and Management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She directs research on how to recruit, retrain and support the government workforce. In February, Linos talked on Fresh Air about what the Civil Service Reform Act accomplished.

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LINOS: So it created OPM, which is the Office of Personnel Management. It created the Merit Systems Protection Board, MSPB. And both of these agencies were really designed to bring performance and accountability into the civil service.

ELVING: We should note that even as civil service grew in importance, there remained a list of federal policy-making positions that were considered exempt. They remain the president’s to fill as he sees fit. That category begins with the president’s own cabinet and extends outward through the federal bureaucracy, where several thousand so-called politicals serve at the pleasure of the president. But they remain a tiny fraction of the civil payroll, which is about 3 million.

The vast majority of federal workers serve departments or agencies created and funded by Congress, and the people who choose to work and are chosen to work for those agencies are chosen through the civil service process. They do not work directly for the president and they have had a measure of job security through the civil service laws that began with the Pendleton Act.

Now in the last two months, Trump has lent his authority to Elon Musk’s mass firings of federal workers and closing down of whole programs in offices. One group that’s been targeted is the new, or newly promoted, employees called probationary hires. As of March 2024, the government counted 220,000 federal employees who had served less than one year and another 288,000 who had between one and two years of service.

Jennifer Pahlka is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning think tank, and she’s worked on civil service reform in the Obama and Trump administrations. She’s been a critic of the current system, especially the length of time it takes to fill positions.

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JENNIFER PAHLKA: It’s very, very widely accepted that this does not work well. I should say, there’s so many wonderful civil servants that it is not that we don’t get good people. It’s that the process makes it very hard to get good people and puts a huge burden on those who are trying to do the hiring.

ELVING: Pahlka is hopeful that something good can come from the current disruptions, as she recently explained on NPR’s The Indicator From Planet Money.

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PAHLKA: If we can get rid of some of the very overly strict policies that try to not use any judgment at all in the hiring and diminish some of the possible downsides, we could really end up, frankly, with a better hiring system at the end of these four years.

ELVING: So there could be improvement, Pahlka says, but there could also be regression. One of Trump’s recent orders includes a command to recruit workers who are, quote, “passionate about the ideals of our American republic.”

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PAHLKA: I think that that language is all messaging and all signaling. We don’t want to go back to a spoils system. And I think there’s fear right now that that would be returning to what we had before, which is essentially graft.

ELVING: Government reform has often included steps forward and steps back. Senator Pendleton of Ohio himself learned this in the aftermath of his breakthrough achievement in the 1880s. The year after the Pendleton Act was signed into law, politicians and party officials back in his home state, some of whom had thrived under the spoils system, blocked Pendleton’s bid for reelection. He never held elected office again.

For NPR News, I’m Ron Elving. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.