As he chose the gun he would use to kill the president, Charles J. Guiteau considered his place in history. The .44-caliber snub-nosed revolver, he thought, would look good in a museum someday.
But the man who murdered President James A. Garfield in 1881 could hardly have imagined that his most enduring, if accidental, legacy would be a transformation of the federal work force.
Strange as it sounds, historians say that Mr. Guiteau’s act of violence effectively gave birth to the civil service, that class of nonpartisan experts who cannot be hired or fired for political reasons.
Denied a diplomatic post he believed he was owed in return for supporting Garfield’s candidacy, Mr. Guiteau’s bloody vendetta electrified the cause of reformers who said the era’s standard practice of awarding federal jobs on the basis of loyalty without regard to qualifications not only made for bad government but had gotten a president killed.
The new ideal of government that emerged is one that has endured for the nearly 150 years since Garfield’s death, but that President Trump now appears intent on dismantling.
Last month, Mr. Trump signed an executive order designed “to restore accountability to the career civil service” that stripped longstanding job protections from federal workers. On Tuesday, he signed another order directing officials to plan “large scale” cuts to their departments and agencies, and a Wednesday Trump directive called for “reform” to America’s nonpartisan diplomatic corps.
The moves set in motion what public service unions call a plan to replace “thousands of dedicated, qualified civil servants with political cronies,” as a top union leader put it last month.
They are the opening salvos in what promises to be an epic and bitter war over the nature of the federal bureaucracy, one that could have major implications not only for Mr. Trump’s presidency but for the future of American government as well.
America’s 2.2 million civil servants make up roughly 90 percent of the federal bureaucracy and work under political appointees like cabinet secretaries and their deputies. In jobs as varied as health experts, trade lawyers, transportation planners and diplomats, they can serve for decades under presidents of both parties.
Civil servants “are a fundamental part of a well-functioning government,” explains the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group focused on improving the federal work force. The group notes that better-known political appointees “set policy and directives,” while civil servants “fulfill those objectives, regardless of the political party in power and their own political views.”
To Mr. Trump, however, civil servants are the enemy — an unelected “deep state” that undermined his first presidency and is likely to resist him again. His executive order would shift potentially tens of thousands of federal jobs into a new category, known as Schedule F, with much weaker job protections.
Conservatives have long called for reforming a civil service they call inefficient, indolent and liberal. Even many Democrats concede that layers of union-backed protections added over the years have made it too hard to fire federal workers for poor performance or even misconduct.
But Mr. Trump is challenging the very foundations of an American system that dates back more than a century — and whose origins are much older.
The civil service is not an American innovation. It can be traced back more than 2,000 years to imperial China, when rulers decided to stop awarding government jobs by birthright and required would-be bureaucrats to complete competitive examinations.
The idea caught on in America after Britain adopted its own civil service in the mid-19th century. But it wasn’t until Mr. Guiteau gunned down Garfield that it caught fire.
A disturbed, failed lawyer from Illinois, Mr. Guiteau had done some minor volunteer work for Garfield’s campaign the previous year and was convinced that the new president owed him a job.
His delusion was not totally inexplicable: Politicians of the era routinely rewarded their supporters with federal jobs, openly prizing loyalty over expertise. To the victors went the spoils, leading to the phrase “the spoils system.”
Rebuffed in his requests for a diplomatic job in Paris, Mr. Guiteau approached Garfield at a Washington train station and shot him at point-blank range. (Even after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln 16 years earlier, presidents did not travel with bodyguards.) The president died of complications several weeks later. Mr. Guiteau was hanged.
The assassination shocked the nation, but electrified an idea. Reformers had long blamed the spoils system for rank incompetence and corruption. Now it had caused the death of a president, they argued.
“That system is the real assassin of Garfield,” Senator George H. Pendleton, an Ohio Democrat, declared on the Senate floor that December.
The spoils system, Mr. Pendleton argued, should be chased out “with hue and cry,” and replaced with one “founded on the idea that public offices are public trusts to be administered solely for the public good.” That meant filling jobs with qualified candidates “proven to be the best by fair competition,” he said, and not political cronies.
Republican resistance allowed Democrats to cast them as corrupt and, after suffering losses in the next year’s midterm elections, Republicans abandoned the spoils system. In January 1883, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Act and Garfield’s former vice president and Republican successor, Chester A. Arthur, signed it into law.
The law created a new class of specialized employees hired on the basis of written exams, and outlawed their firing or demotion for political reasons. The law initially applied to only about 10 percent of federal workers. But within five years, the civil service quickly expanded to include about half of new nonpostal federal appointments, and presidents of both parties have bolstered it ever since.
“It was a bipartisan deal between Republicans and Democrats, and that established 140 years of bipartisan consensus about the importance of a politically independent, technically expert civil service,” said Donald F. Kettl, an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland and an expert on the federal bureaucracy.
“So Trump’s vision is a very, very sharp departure,” he added.
It is clear that one element of Mr. Trump’s plans include shrinking the federal work force, and he may simply eliminate or leave vacant as many jobs as possible. His administration offered federal workers the option to resign early with pay through September, a choice 75,000 accepted before the program was closed on Wednesday.
But Democrats and many analysts believe that the president’s chief goal is to exercise unquestioned control. Rachel Augustine Potter, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies the federal work force, said that Mr. Trump could install thousands of people into jobs below the level of political appointees, but still senior enough to influence the government.
“The idea is that they would be selected on their political orientation and their political qualifications,” Ms. Potter said. “Politics have the potential to affect policy in a much different way through this reshaping.”
Mr. Trump’s allies say he has good reason to distrust federal workers, some of whom considered themselves part of an internal “resistance” during his first term. His executive order on Schedule F refers to “numerous and well-documented cases of career federal employees resisting and undermining the policies and directives of their executive leadership” in recent years.
Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Mr. Trump’s plans for the civil service, said at his confirmation hearing last month that the Schedule F order was meant to ensure that Mr. Trump “has people who are working for him that are actually going to do the policies that he ran on.”
Democrats are skeptical, noting that in a 2023 speech, Mr. Vought said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” At his hearing, he allowed that some “amazing career civil servants” work in government. But he also insisted that federal workers had “weaponized” parts of the bureaucracy.
Mr. Trump’s plan faces obstacles, including union lawsuits and regulations implemented under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that anticipated Mr. Trump’s moves.
“They’ve begun the deliberate march to convert merit-based civil service into a cronyism-based system,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. “But we will fight them every step of the way.”
It is a political drama that Mr. Guiteau never could have imagined.
Nor did he foresee the odd fate of his deadly revolver: While Mr. Guiteau’s gun spent years on display at the Smithsonian Museum, as he had hoped, it has since been lost and never found.
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