In Praise of PatronageThe executive branch needs more of it, not less.

Barack Obama introduces members of his National Security TeamWhen the Washington Post reported that political appointees throughout the Bush administration were being converted into civil servants, a practice known as "burrowing," liberals were furious. Senate Democrats called for a halt to the practice. Bloggers such as Matthew Yglesias (semi-seriously) suggested that "we'll have the top layer of the civil service filled with industry shills," while those at TPMMuckraker vowed to "see what we can find out." Their concern is that civil-service protections, ostensibly designed to insulate the bureaucracy from political influence, will instead safeguard the political appointees of a deeply unpopular lame-duck administration.

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It's a valid concern—but in this case, it's misplaced. President-elect Barack Obama will find it easier to replace the Oval Office draperies than to replace officials who supposedly work for him. What the executive branch needs is more patronage, not less.

Despite all of the talk of the resurgence of the imperial presidency, contemporary presidents actually have surprisingly modest powers when it comes to staffing the government. For most of American history, presidents enjoyed much greater power to hire and fire federal employees, from Cabinet secretaries to rural postmasters. True, many of those officials were subject to Senate confirmation, and the realities of politics have always made dismissing officials a dangerous business. Nonetheless, the president could remove many officeholders at will. (As Huey Long and the first Mayor Daley could attest, state and local executives long enjoyed even broader patronage powers.)

The textbook version of American history holds that patronage (or the "spoils system") was a wicked tradition that led to the assassination of President James Garfield by a disappointed job seeker and the consequent passage under the Chester Arthur administration of the Pendleton Act, which created the modern and efficient civil service that we enjoy today.

But Arthur biographer Zachary Karabell makes plain that the textbooks are wrong. Although Arthur (himself a product of the patronage machine of the New York Republican Party, who had only become Garfield's running mate to placate the base) supported the Pendleton Act, the real catalyst was the GOP's disastrous losses in the 1882 midterm elections. With Congress about to pass into Democratic hands, the GOP resurrected the Pendleton civil-service reforms during the lame-duck session in order to protect the tens of thousands of Republican patronage appointees in federal service.

It's true that civil service reforms did yield an approximation of the ideal of impartial competence. But the Great Depression and World War II proved that a civil service adapted to routine was incapable of managing large-scale innovation, necessitating the emergence of the so-called "dollar-a-year" men—former industry executives who oversaw war production and manpower efforts.

Yet during the past 60 years, it has been the civil service (viewed as professional and technocratic) and not political appointees (seen as corrupt or unqualified) that has gained the upper hand in public opinion. In 1976, the Supreme Court somewhat hysterically compared the patronage tactics of the Cook County Democratic machine to those of the Nazis. More recently, political appointees have been blamed for the failure of the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina, the mismanagement of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, a slew of scandals and investigations in the Justice Department, and various other misadventures during the last eight years. Indeed, many senior officials in the federal government would view the very term political as pejorative.

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