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.

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