INEZ FELTSCHER STEPMAN: We Need To Do Something About Civil Service Reform:

In November 2016, Washington was abuzz with talk of “landing teams,” as though transitioning from a Democratic administration to a Republican one was akin to landing at Omaha Beach. After Trump’s election, his employees in the executive branch openly declared their intention to “resist” by undermining his policies. Republican insiders bemoaned the slow appointments of people to political office within the administration, knowing that even a full political staff guiding a hostile department is much like the rudder of a sailboat trying to turn the Titanic.

That’s because the bulk of the civil service—2.8 million bureaucrats—has become a permanent class of powerbrokers, totally unaccountable to the winds of democratic change. Regardless of whether the man who sits in the Oval Office is President Trump or President Obama, the functions of the executive branch agencies carry on in much the same way as they did before.

As Congress debated the Pendleton Act in 1883, the first of many laws over the next century that added layers of job protection for government employees, they thought they were correcting the excesses of the spoils system. They could never have dreamed of the kind of system we have today, where federal employees get two civil trial-level appeals before a Merit Board (including discovery and the calling of witnesses), and where it takes years to fire a bureaucrat convicted of a felony he committed in the course of doing his job.

But incompetence and corruption are the least of the problems with the modern civil service. With 95-99 percent of political donations from government employees going to Hillary Clinton in the last election, it looks less like a system of apolitical administrators and more like an arm of the Democratic Party.

Well, that’s because that’s what it is.