In the waning months of President Donald Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order that could have drastically reshaped the U.S. federal bureaucracy. The order created a new federal government job classification with far fewer civil service protections, called “Schedule F.” While most career civil servants in the U.S. federal government are protected from politically motivated firings and cannot be fired without cause, under Schedule F, employees “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” could be fired without following standard civil service procedures. With Trump now set to reassume power, Schedule F is back on the table, threatening to take away employment protections from potentially hundreds of thousands of federal employees and making it easier to fire civil servants for purely political reasons.

Commentators have pointed out the potential negative effects of Schedule F on administrative capacity, government performance, and accountability. But another key reason to be skeptical of Schedule F is that it represents a step backwards in the history of American civil service reform, which has its roots in 19^th century anticorruption movements. Civil service independence and merit-based hiring came about in response to endemic corruption in the federal bureaucracy. The anticorruption history of the American civil service holds important lessons for modern civil service reformers, both in the United States and elsewhere.

In the early years of the United States, corruption in the federal civil service was not yet the pressing political crisis it would later become. The number of federal jobs was fewer, political parties were less powerful, and the first few presidents exercised their appointment and removal powers conservatively, for the most part. But over the course of the 19^th century, the growth of federal government jobs and political patronage created new incentives for corruption. And the Tenure in Office Act of 1820 limited the terms of many officials to four years, allowing incoming presidents to freely remove and replace civil servants with each new administration. This created a perfect set-up for the “spoils” system, exemplified by President Andrew Jackson and his successors.

In the absence of competitive merit-based hiring, presidents like Jackson filled government positions with political loyalists. Echoing modern attacks on the civil service, Jackson justified his practices by arguing that he sought to democratize the civil service and prevent an entrenched and entitled bureaucracy. While the spoils system likely did draw from wider swathes of the population compared to the relatively elitist “fitness” test used by prior presidents, it undeniably created the conditions for inefficiency and rife corruption. Not only were appointees often unqualified, but they were also staggeringly corrupt. One customs collector appointed by Jackson absconded to London with over $30 million in today’s dollars of embezzled public money. The Postal Service, the largest government employer of the 19^th century, was similarly corrupt and incompetent. The spoils system eventually became synonymous with graft and degraded government services.

In response, a civil service reform movement arose over the course of the late 19^th century. Popular sentiment increasingly turned against the spoils system, while initial attempts at reform, like President Grant’s Civil Service Commission in 1871, put ideas like merit-based hiring on the table. Still, these reform efforts went nowhere in Congress until the assassination of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled jobseeker who unsuccessfully sought to be appointed to the consulship in Paris for his efforts to elect Garfield. The assassination shocked the country and represented the spoils system at its nadir, literally causing the death of the president.

The ensuing popular outcry and political pressure finally induced Congress to pass the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which established the key tenets of the modern civil service. These included merit-based hiring, protections against political firings, and prohibitions against federal employees giving political service or contributions. Although the scope of the original Pendleton Act was modest, the merit system expanded over time and covered over 90% of the federal government’s civilian employees by 1952. While the federal civil service system has changed over time (most notably with the elimination of the civil service exam), the core tenets of the merit system—which does not allow partisan political hiring and firing for career civil servants—have remained in place.

As civil service reform spread across the federal government, corruption decreased and government service improved. Civil service reform, sparked by a tragic assassination and fueled by popular outrage, resulted in a system that vastly reduced what seemed like intractable corruption. And these lessons are equally applicable today. Contemporary empirical evidence from numerous countries corroborates the conclusion that a politically independent civil service—with merit-based hiring and retention, tenure protections, insulation of bureaucrats from political interference—leads to lower corruption, as well as greater professionalism and more effective government (see, for example, here, and here). As the authors of one systemic review put it, “Converting civil servants to at-will status likely decreases government performance and increases corruption.” Proposals like Schedule F ignore the hard-fought victories of 19^th and 20^th century anticorruption reformers, who challenged a wildly corrupt and ineffectual federal bureaucracy. Schedule F would trade the benefits of better government service and reduced corruption for increased political loyalty to the President and his agenda. Like Jackson’s arguments in the 19^th century, these proposals cloak themselves in the language of democracy and accountability but only undermine good governance. And while there are legitimate concerns about the existing civil service system, and legitimate proposals to address those concerns, Schedule F would tend to make these problems worse, not better. To protect the anticorruption legacy of civil service reform, Congress should act now to protect the merit system.