Well Harry, here is some information.

Most State employees are Foreign Service Officers (about 6,500 of them). They are chosen by FSOs already in service through a series of examinations. The initial one is sort of like the GRE General Exam for graduate school and is not very difficult for someone with a college degree. Later there is a more elaborate personal interview and other sorts of tests. There is also a medical exam to weed out people who might not sustain the health problems in someplace like Lagos. Finally the successful candidate gets in on probation. After a while he becomes a permanent employee. Such people ar Federal bureaucrats, that is they are very hard to get rid of, short of a major blotting of their copybook.

The senior people are mostly promoted from within. Some of the most senior people are political appointees however. The permanent bureaucrats try to pull the wool over their eyes, of course.

The permanent bureaucrats try to maintain what they consider the proper policies, which genrally clash with those the political appointees want to follow, especially in a Republican Administration. The only checks on them are if the political appointees manage to control them, a difficult task.

Anyone who wants an understanding of how a government actually works, “modern government without tears” as you might call it, should read the books or view the TV series for “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister”. A friend of my family who headed a department in the governemnt of a US state told me that the picture there is absolutely accurate about the permanent bureaucracy fighting against their political chiefs, or as one character puts it pitting the political will against the administrative won’t. It sounds screwy, to recommend TV comedies for learning about government, but the series are really enlightening.