Merit and Accountability Make Bureaucracy Less Dumb.
Throughout American history, the federal government has tended to expand dramatically during periods of war and crisis. About a generation after each crisis subsided, there tended to be a reset, an attempt to claw back the cronyism and dysfunction that results from large growth in budget, personnel, and authority. We’re in desperate need of such a clawback today.
President Lincoln used war powers to create new departments during the Civil War, and levied a small income tax in contravention of the norm that the federal government could not collect direct taxes (that tax was later ruled unconstitutional). For most of the 19th century, a “Spoils System” existed, in which the parties awarded professional government positions to friends. Incompetent “Spoils” appointees bloated the government, and created a mess. The Pendleton Act of 1883 ended the spoils system and created a robust system of merit-based tests for the civil service.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Congress and States adopted the 16th Amendment, allowing a federal income tax. The rest is history: the crisis of the Great Depression led to the New Deal, the biggest expansion of federal power to that point. The Second World War and its aftermath was another period of major expansion, when bureaucratic authority began to meld with military and industrial power. The clawback attempt came again: President Eisenhower, who fought the war in Europe, warned of the “military-industrial complex” growing out of control. And in the 1970s, when the U.S. economy faltered significantly for the first time since the Great Depression, the country was so anxious and fed up that even President Jimmy Carter felt the political need to campaign on reducing and streamlining bureaucracy.
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