The second Trump Administration has decimated the civil service and with it many government functions Americans want and need. Around 14 percent of the federal workforce—more than 335,000 people—were fired, resigned, or retired in 2025. Those big numbers, though, do not illuminate the real consequences of these cuts for specific agencies. Fully one-quarter of the Centers for Disease Control is gone at a time when measles is spreading. One-fifth of the Securities and Exchange Commission has departed even as crypto scams multiply. And the Social Security Administration has lost 14 percent of its staff, meaning that every employee is now expected to serve around 1,500 beneficiaries.

Any future administration that hopes to succeed at anything will need to invest in personnel. However, the processes and procedures governing the federal civil service are outdated, brittle, and broken. Presidents and Congress have failed to invest in these systems for many years. Hiring is an arduous and ineffective nightmare. Decades-old job descriptions are still standard. The Office of Personnel Management is an underfunded bottleneck of policy, decisions, and agency support. Presidents have nominally undertaken personnel reform efforts over the last 50 years, but the initiatives have largely denigrated the workforce to consolidate power in the presidency—without improving governance.

Working within the existing system will not be an option. Large, structural reform is necessary and unavoidable. To build a government that works for the American people, the United States needs a personnel system designed to the mission rather than one that forces the mission to fit around a rigid, centralized, and increasingly politicized structure. A decentralized personnel system that makes agency flexibility and mission focus the default position would let agencies work better, decrease bottlenecks, and move us toward a healthier balance in congressional oversight.

A Brief History of Civil Service Reform

The story of civil service reform broadly charts the rise of a neutral bureaucracy from roughly the 1880s to the 1970s and the subsequent attacks by presidents seeking to centralize executive control over the federal government. While discussion of this history is often confined to specific personnel policies, the arc of the civil service should instead be understood as a, if not the, battleground of the interbranch power struggle.

For the first roughly 100 years of U.S. history, there was no neutral, apolitical federal workforce as we understand it today. At the founding of the country, class and connections largely determined who served. Later, President Andrew Jackson took a more populist view of the government and expanded what became known as the spoils system, turning government jobs into political chits and enhancing the power of the President and party leaders to staff the government with partisan supporters.

Then, in 1881, a disgruntled office seeker named Charles Guiteau shot and killed President James Garfield. The assassination led Congress and President Chester A. Arthur—himself a central figure in the machine patronage political system—to enact sweeping civil service reforms that had been percolating since the 1860s. Passed in 1883, the Pendleton Act established the Civil Service Commission, which administered and oversaw the merit system, and instituted competitive exams for a small percentage of federal government jobs.

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, the percentage of civil servants hired through the competitive process grew. Simultaneously, the structures governing the civil service matured, with the introduction of expanded protections for employees and a detailed classification system. The Classification Act of 1923, which formalized the concept of standardized compensation for standardized positions and tied pay to jobs rather than individuals, was passed as part of a wave of scientific management theory that dominated business and eventually government starting at the turn of the century. This system was updated in 1949 with subsequent classification legislation and the creation of the General Schedule payment system, which simplified the pay schedule system by creating 15 grades (and three additional, short-lived super grades) to standardize pay across the government. This is largely the same structure that remains today.

While the civil service grew in size and competence, another dynamic emerged: tension between the imperative of an independent, neutral workforce and presidents’ desires to advance their own agendas. Recognizing the political benefits of a competent workforce directed at executive priorities, presidents took steps to bring the federal workforce under executive purview.

With the crisis of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt drew on exceptions the Hoover Administration had gotten from Congress and had New Deal agencies exempted from hiring requirements. This allowed his Administration to hire people who aligned with Roosevelt’s bold vision and programs even as his instinct to centralize control was a harbinger of future trends. In 1921, the competitive civil service accounted for almost 80 percent of the government; by 1936, that number had dropped to 60 percent. As the New Deal programs turned from temporary crisis-response efforts into permanent fixtures, they came into the fold of the civil service. By 1952, the merit-based portion of the workforce had regrown to almost 90 percent. The next year, President Eisenhower arrived in office interested in increasing managerial control of the civil service in the White House and wary, not completely without justification, that his predecessors had filled the government with Democratic loyalists. He created a new category of service, known as Schedule C, that fell outside of the standard process and protections for government jobs directly related to policy or politically sensitive topics. This expanded the number of people the President could appoint directly, outside of the hiring requirements and protections of the merit-based system, and extended political influence further into executive agencies.

The next shift came in the 1970s. While previous presidents had recognized the benefits of shaping personnel policy to better enable their priorities but still publicly supported the civil service, President Richard Nixon used attacks on the bureaucracy as cover while he shaped the executive branch to consolidate power in the presidency. “Americans are fed up with wasteful, muscle‐bound government in Washington and are anxious for a change that works,” Nixon proclaimed in 1973. He reorganized the executive branch to better enable agency coordination by the White House, starting a period of neo-managerial proclamations and a presidency-centered government. In doing so, he created a playbook that many of his successors would follow: scapegoat the bureaucracy as responsible for any and every failing, announce a need for managerial reform, and consolidate control of institutions to advance presidential priorities.

President Jimmy Carter was the first to borrow the framework. Carter put civil service reform at the center of his presidential platform, capitalizing on the solidified perception that the Watergate scandal had somehow been a failure of the state, and pledged to “bring the horrible bureaucratic mess under control.” In office, he sent a reorganization plan to Congress to reshape the structures governing the civil service, which was submitted and enacted under the authority granted by the Reorganization Act of 1977; he then also signed into law the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978. Combined, these two documents dissolved the Civil Service Commission and created the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) in its place. The OPM director, unlike the three bipartisan chairs of the old commission, would be a political appointee reporting directly to the President and would assume the defunct body’s authority to determine and audit personnel policy. Further, under the auspices of improving managers’ responsiveness to political direction, the CSRA created the Senior Executive Service, converting the most senior General Schedule positions into a management class with fewer protections and more political appointees.

Though President Carter was interested in improving governance, his efforts fell considerably short of comprehensive reform, sidestepping issues around entrance processes, classification, and compensation. Instead, power was further concentrated in the presidency, creating a unique opportunity for future leaders less inclined to support the government. One scholar quipped in 1988 that the CSRA “enabled Reagan to be a successful Richard Nixon.”

President Ronald Reagan came into office at a moment of profound change in the civil service. In addition to the structural changes wrought by the CSRA, President Carter had also, to improve equity in government service and address legitimate concerns over adverse impacts on minority applicants, signed a consent decree as he left office that did away with the Professional and Administrative Career Examination, the primary form of access into entry-level positions for college graduates. While the consent decree was designed to enable a phased transition to a new test or more equitable evaluation tool, the Reagan Administration invested little time in structural improvements and instead largely turned to so-called excepted service appointments—those positions that, for various reasons, fall outside both the requirements and protections of the classified civil service. By seizing the opportunity presented by changes to the law and hiring process, the Reagan Administration was able to diminish and undermine the competitive civil service. Simultaneously, the new OPM director, Donald Devine, recognized the potential of his office to serve as a political weapon on behalf of the presidency. Devine reduced the office’s footprint, increased its percentage of political appointees, limited engagement with agencies, and implemented hiring freezes and reductions in force across the government. In the midst of throttled agency capacity, Reagan’s OPM pushed more responsibilities onto agencies, which—without dedicated and appropriate resources—developed ad hoc approaches to modernizing personnel processes in the new structure.

Like the Reagan Administration, the Clinton team had a preference for deregulation and decentralized implementation. They also saw the bureaucracy as ripe for downsizing and privatization, starting with, yet again, OPM. From 1993 to 1997, due to a slimming of its mission, the privatization of management training, and the delegation of all hiring to agencies, OPM lost half its staff. But like so many before them, the Clinton Administration overstated the reach of its efforts and claimed victory prematurely. Dramatically using a wheelbarrow to make his point, OPM Director James B. King “threw out” the Federal Personnel Manual, a 10,000-page document considered to be “the Bible” of federal hiring by human resources professionals. But he failed to change any of the underlying laws, meaning that the byzantine hiring processes recreated themselves in each agency. Despite pushing more duties onto agencies, the Administration also downsized across the government. HR departments were hit especially hard, losing 18 percent of their staff from 1992 to 1996. For agencies, the result was hiring units that had more responsibility, less guidance, less money, fewer people, and the same outdated statutory constraints. Meanwhile, they had to pay their governing body for help: OPM demanded compensation for its expert support, deepening the existing divide between the haves and the have-nots across agencies. Needless to say, the effect was not a government that “works better” and “costs less,” but was instead a system that stopped working in many ways while costs became opaque.

Using the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as an opportunity, the George W. Bush Administration tried and ultimately failed to implement agency-specific personnel policies. It is worth noting that the size of the federal workforce did bounce back, just in a different form: Though there were nearly 420,000 fewer civil servants in 2002 than 1990, the contractor workforce grew by more than 700,000 between 1999 and 2002. The Obama Administration tried to improve things around the edges with some policy changes and insourcing efforts. But some changes backfired, like the removal of narrative statements from applications, which made applying for positions easier but removed a key application filter and evaluation tool, overwhelmed an already shorthanded system, and encouraged HR shops to use unreliable self-evaluations. The first Trump Administration then began a process of radical change for the civil service, including creating a new excepted service known as Schedule F to reclassify thousands of civil servants into unprotected positions. The Biden Administration attempted to claw these changes back and reinforce protections by, for example, eliminating Schedule F and attempting to add additional protections through rulemaking. But now, nearly two years into the second Trump Administration, it is clear that the levees have given way.

A Diagnosis of the Current Structure

Today, the civil service faces three core problems. First, its governance mechanisms are outdated and do not meet the needs of the modern workforce or the challenges presented by a rapidly shifting economy, tech-forward government services, and public needs that require government intervention. Second, like other institutions, civil service governance has been increasingly consolidated in the presidency. Finally, the current system grants needed flexibility to agencies in an inconsistent, ad hoc manner.

Outdated and Brittle

Today, the U.S. federal civil service is governed by policies partially set by the Pendleton Act of 1883 within a structure most recently updated by the Classification Act of 1949. Though many presidents have trumpeted efforts to improve management of the workforce, these efforts, as discussed, aimed primarily to increase presidential authority. One scholar noted that the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, the most recent large piece of legislation nominally aimed at updating the structure, only touched “the fringes of the system.” It did not tackle the prosaic details of hiring policy, assessment paths, classification, or compensation structures. So while today’s system is profoundly broken, it is not that many have tried and failed. Rather, very little has really been tried. The reason for this inaction is twofold. First, elected leaders lack political incentive to focus on governance. Good governance is rarely rewarded: It is a topic that is not well known or understood by the electorate, and solutions are specific, nuanced, and boring. Second, presidents do have a political incentive to expand their own power by limiting the neutrality of the civil service and increasing its responsiveness to their own priorities.

Presidential and Centralized

The Pendleton Act took power over the federal bureaucracy away from the presidency and Congress to establish a neutral workforce. The story of the civil service since has been one of struggle by both branches to reassert their authority and the marked success of the presidency in doing so. Since the New Deal era, presidents have asserted the principles of managerial responsibility to increase their influence. Those who study the civil service have long understood this trend. Scholar Patricia Ingraham wrote of the reform initiatives of Presidents Nixon, Carter, and Reagan: “All of these efforts have been couched in terms of improved management and efficiency; without any doubt, their intent and effect has been to strengthen the Executive Office of the President at the expense of other key actors in the policy system.” Further, historian Lorenzo Castellani notes, President Reagan shifted the concept of bureaucratic competency from one of neutrality to one centered on responsiveness to the President specifically.

As presidents reshaped the bureaucracy in their image, Congress retreated. One illustrative example of this institutional capitulation: In 1995, during House committee reorganization and consolidation, oversight of the entire federal workforce was unceremoniously lumped into the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The Senate had included civil service oversight as part of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs in 1977, but then expanded the committee’s jurisdiction further to include homeland security in 2005 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. These sprawling committees, whose staff was also dramatically reduced in the 1990s, are a far cry from the narrower ones that preceded them, let alone the even more laser-focused Senate Select Committee to Examine the Several Branches in the Civil Service, which existed from 1875 to 1921.

This imbalance, though born in the name of better managerial control, is in fact bad for management. As scholar David Lewis has discussed, presidents, motivated by legacy and elections, tend to use personnel management as a tool for control rather than performance. Further, this centralization and short-termism lead to greater politicization, difficulty meeting public needs, and decreased public trust.

Ad Hoc Flexibility

The civil service mechanisms are outdated and increasingly tools of the presidency. Because of these compounding features, the civil service has evolved in a deeply ad hoc manner, with flexibility emerging like tree roots pushing through a sidewalk where cracks give way.

In the absence of comprehensive reform, agencies have been left to advocate on their own behalf to Congress and OPM for the policies they need. In 1989, the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act gave financial regulatory agencies pay structure autonomy. The Federal Aviation Administration, Postal Service, and intelligence agencies were later granted authority to develop their own personnel systems as well. Congress and OPM have added increased flexibility to certain job series, and agencies have creatively defined positions into existing classifications to take advantage of flexibilities where they exist. Hiring managers also turn to excepted service designations or use the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA). Schedule B, for example, allows for direct hiring where it is not practicable to hold a competitive examination, like for specialized technical roles, and through Schedule D, excepted service has been expanded to include pathways for recent graduates. Meanwhile, the IPA allows government managers to bring in people temporarily from academia or elsewhere whose nongovernment role is relevant to the position they would assume. In short, as renowned civil service expert Donald Kettl and his co-authors wrote in 1996, “[T]he federal government’s uniform merit system today is neither uniform, merit-based, nor a system.”

Brave New World

At 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2025, the U.S. civil service was in desperate need of comprehensive reform. But the extent of the damage wrought to the system since then makes this need unignorable. The second Trump Administration has intentionally degraded the capacity of most of the federal workforce. As noted earlier, the Administration has hollowed out countless offices and agencies that provide important and necessary services to the American public. But it has done something else as well: Building on a long tradition of using managerial language to centralize control, the Administration has taken unprecedented steps to increase the responsiveness of the workforce to the President directly and specifically.

The Trump Administration has successfully challenged the existence of independent commissions and agencies, bringing them into the fold of the executive branch. But the President has also attacked lower levels of bureaucratic independence and lawful neutrality. For example, following an executive order issued on January 20, 2025, titled “Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives,” OPM changed the first principle of Senior Executive Service evaluation from “Commitment to the Rule of Law and the Principles of the American Founding” to “Faithful Administration of the Law and the President’s Policies.” The OPM implementation memo notes that “Senior executives must demonstrate specific results that align with and advance the President’s specific policy agenda.”

Furthermore, the Trump Administration has upended federal worker union contracts, and it has reinstated one excepted service category and created another that together could convert 50,000 current employees from protected to at-will status. Under this rule, civil servants deemed to be in “policy-influencing positions” will lack the worker protections and appeal rights of their colleagues. On the occasion of the final rulemaking for the conversion, Trump’s OPM director, Scott Kupor, published a piece on Substack offering insight into the Administration’s reasoning for the change. The problem, Kupor explained, is that the civil service is too professional and too independent, and that what is needed for better governance—or at least better responsiveness to White House intent—is more “accountability.” As scholars like David Lewis have shown, Trump’s actions are unprecedented in their scale but not unique in their reasoning.

A Civil Service for the Mission

One vision of the future is clear: a return to a smaller, more political, and less capable workforce undertaken in the name of accountability but with the not-so-hidden goal of elevating the presidency. A civil service defined by the unitary executive theory. What, then, is the alternative? As we cannot revert to the status quo ante, this moment of profound change demands a bold alternative: a civil service built for the mission.

The National Park Service, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and National Institutes of Health have different missions, different workforce needs, and different relationships to the private economy. Uncontroversially, each of those agencies has different requirements for hiring, paying, classifying, and managing personnel. They need the ability to focus intently on what they are specifically being asked to do and to use all the tools at their disposal to do so, including personnel policy. Civil service reform advocates have struggled to build a single set of rules that accounts for an evolving government, world, and workforce and enables hundreds of teams—of all sizes—to accomplish challenging, changing, and deeply varied tasks. Instead, those who know their work the best should be able to build personnel systems that account for their needs, as is already the case in many parts of the government.

In this system, a central commission would provide expertise related to policy development and personnel management and processes, guiding agencies as they develop assessment techniques that meet their mission and unique workforce. This commission would replace the Office of Personnel Management and the Merit Systems Protection Board, assuming some of their responsibilities while the majority would be pushed to the agency level. Agencies would have the authority to determine position qualifications, a pay structure fit to purpose, and personnel policies and regulations that fit their mission. They would be bound by the merit principles as laid out in Title V, Section 2301 of the U.S. Code, which provide a values framework for ensuring a professional, competent, apolitical workforce free from discrimination or partisan loyalty tests. And for those agencies that for whatever reason aren’t up to the task of developing their own personnel system, the commission would develop and maintain a default personnel policy package that they could opt into, as desired or needed.

This change would have three important effects. First, as discussed, it would give power to the parts of the government that have immediate need and grant them the ability to set conditions for building and managing their workforce in the ways most needed to meet their mission. A one-size-fits-all set of regulations attempts to optimize for equity and portability across agencies, but it shortchanges flexibility, making hiring harder and policies too broad and constraining. To rebuild capacity and enable a process that brings more people into government, we must focus on ease of hiring and specificity of purpose, deliberately embracing differences rather than addressing them as edge cases. The Forest Service shouldn’t need to go to Congress to classify firefighters appropriately (rather than labeling them with the more generic title of “forestry technician”), nor should the Internal Revenue Service have to continually re-win the authority to create a pathway for hiring term-limited information technology workers into critical roles.

Second, this decentralized system would serve as a step in rebalancing the administrative state away from presidential primacy. The ascendance of the presidency as the first among equal branches is the tale of the last almost 100 years and is a story that can be told through the lens of civil service reform. The explicit intent of shifting responsibility for administration of the civil service from the Civil Service Commission to the Office of Personnel Management was to enable closer oversight by the President. To be sure, the Civil Service Commission was not without its institutional issues, but it is important to recognize the origin of the transition in order to evaluate potential reforms. History has shown that reform initiatives wrapped in the language of management improvement and accountability result in a more political and consolidated structure, rather than in improved results.

Finally, this restructuring would shift how Congress engages with the governance of the civil service. Currently, the House and the Senate each have one committee that is nominally charged with the administration of the civil service. Each of these committees is large and responsible for other important topics, meaning that members have little time or opportunity to learn the ins and outs of Title V, the part of the U.S. Code that governs the civil service, and its failings and effects. However, all the other committees that have jurisdiction over various agencies continue, as is to be expected (and encouraged), to provide their agencies with carve-outs, flexibilities, and unique authorities to enable their success without considering government-wide effects. Under a system in which agencies set their own personnel policies (governed by common merit values), committees of jurisdiction would no longer hesitantly engage with personnel policy as an ancillary concern, but rather would see personnel matters as core to the oversight of the agencies, as they should be.

Public trust in government has been declining for almost 70 years. While the men and women who have served and continue to serve proudly in the U.S. civil service bear no responsibility for this erosion, they will be at the heart of any successful effort to reverse it. People want a government that meets their needs, and many people also want to serve in pursuit of that aim. A decentralized, mission-centric civil service would better enable both.

In his inaugural State of the Union address, President John F. Kennedy said: “Let the public service be a proud and lively career. And let every man and woman who works in any area of our national government, in any branch, at any level, be able to say with pride and with honor in future years: ‘I served the United States Government in that hour of our nation’s need.’” We are again in such an hour. Meeting this moment requires a new vision and the deliberate construction of a civil service capable of fulfilling the missions with which the public entrusts it.