The Standard-Journal
October 10, 2024
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 was passed in order to professionalize what had been a notoriously corrupt, partisan, and incompetent civil service. These three features — corruption, partisanship, and incompetence — feed on one another.
The Act led to major improvements in the federal government’s ability to provide needed services that can’t be handled by individual state governments or by the private sector.
We depend on federal agencies such as the EPA and the FDA to keep our air, our water, our medicines, and our food supply safe. Disease does not respect state borders, and natural disasters often require a stronger response than most states can muster; hence, we need the CDC and FEMA. We need these various agencies to be run and staffed by competent professionals who understand their jobs and not by political hacks. But one of the top priorities for a second Trump term would be the replacement of career civil servants with political appointees, something Trump attempted to do at the end of his first term. This would (and would be intended to) undermine the professionalism and non-partisanship of the Civil Service. It would also strike at the very idea that there can be good government.
Sensible people know that we can and should have a government bureaucracy that is competent, engaged, transparent, effective at solving actual problems, and (therefore) non-ideological and non-partisan. To my mind, this alone is reason enough to vote Democratic this November.
Alex Wilce
Lewisburg