13.3: America's Evolving Bureaucracy

At its founding, the national government of the United States was considerably smaller than it is today. The Founders, firm believers in the principle of limited government, designed a federal system in which the national government retained only those powers considered to be indispensable, such as waging wars, coining money, and conducting diplomacy. The national bureaucracy began small: President George Washington’s Cabinet contained only three departments — State, Treasury, and War — plus the office of the Attorney General. Anything that could be handled by state governments or private individuals and organizations was considered outside the national government’s purview. Americans got little from their national government, but they also expected little from it.

The early American bureaucracy lacked expertise as well as size. Beginning in earnest with the election of President Andrew Jackson in 1824, bureaucratic positions were routinely awarded to the president’s supporters under the spoils system. To recruit campaign volunteers and donors, presidential candidates promised prestigious government jobs (and generous government salaries) on the condition that they won the presidential election. Consequently, positions were often filled by people with no particular abilities that would qualify them to execute their new responsibilities. Even if they managed to pick up some skills on the job, they could expect to be replaced within four to eight years by an ally of the next president, likely someone with no relevant job experience. Under this system, the bureaucracy was unstable, incompetent, and corrupt, more a tool for campaigning than an effective means of implementing government policy.

The term spoils system comes from the proverb, “To the victor go the spoils.” Spoils refers to plunder or treasure seized in a war or raid. Early U.S. presidents treated the appointed positions they could fill less as tools for effective governance and more as prizes to distribute to loyal backers.

The flaws of the spoils system proved fatal in 1881, when Charles Guiteau, an obsessed supporter of President James Garfield who falsely believed his actions to have been crucial to Garfield’s victory, demanded to be appointed the American government’s consul (a diplomatic position akin to an ambassador) in Paris, France. After being rebuffed repeatedly, Guiteau approached Garfield at a train station and shot him twice in the back, wrongly believing that the Vice President at the time, Chester A. Arthur, would reward him with a patronage job in gratitude for elevating him to the presidency. In the aftermath of the assassination, Congress acted to dismantle the spoils system by passing the Pendleton Act in 1883, preventing presidents from firing certain bureaucrats for political reasons and instituting qualifications-based procedures for filling many bureaucratic positions. These reforms led to the development of a civil service of bureaucrats employed for their merit and expertise, rather than on the basis of political favoritism.

The American bureaucracy evolved further in the early 20^th century with the advent of Progressivism. Although it had already grown in size along with the country by hiring more personnel to deal with the nation’s increased territory and population, this growth mostly entailed performing the same tasks as before but over a larger area and for more people. By contrast, Progressives — including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt — advocated an increase in the government’s scope as well as its size, enabling it to engage in activities that were previously considered to be the responsibility of state governments or nongovernmental actors.

The Progressives’ political philosophy contrasted starkly with the Founders’ belief in the virtues of limited government. Fearful of putting too much power in the hands of the national government, the Founders separated power among three branches and rigged the Constitution with a complex set of checks and balances to prevent its misuse. In the eyes of the Progressives, this intentionally inefficient system tied the government’s hands too much, preventing it from dealing with policy problems — the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, two World Wars — of which the Founders could never have dreamed. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a set of programs aimed at combating the Great Depression, represented an unprecedented level of government involvement in the economy, including jobs programs, wage and price controls, and government-administered pensions in the form of Social Security.

Charles Guiteau assassinates President James Garfield in 1881, sparking the demise of the spoils system in the United States and the institution of a less politicized civil service.

Today, Americans expect their government to do many things that Americans two hundred years ago never would have, and the bureaucracy has grown to accommodate those expectations (as evidenced by the increasing size of the president’s Cabinet shown in Figure 13.2 below). Many of these new government responsibilities, such as disaster relief, food and drug safety, and air traffic control, are relatively uncontroversial: most people accept the government’s involvement in these realms. Other new responsibilities, such as welfare programs, national education standards, and publicly-administered health insurance, are topics of frequent and fierce debate.

Figure 13.2: U.S. Cabinet departments by date and precedence, 1789–2023 (Note: Justice, as an expansion of the older Attorney General’s office, takes precedence over Interior and Agriculture.)

What all of the executive branch’s responsibilities have in common is that they are fulfilled primarily by bureaucrats, working behind the scenes and without direct accountability to voters. This shielding from political pressure enables them to develop expertise over long careers without having to worry about suddenly being fired by the president. It also makes it exceedingly difficult to remove incompetent or corrupt bureaucrats from office, even when their misdeeds do not escape public scrutiny (which isn’t always the case).