Thomas Lifson has correctly observed that reforming the Civil Service System ought to be a high priority for President-Elect Trump and the new Republican Congress. We need to understand why the Civil Service System first created as a reform in how the federal government operated.  "To the victors go the spoils" was the way Andrew Jackson put it almost 200 years ago.  Jackson expressed the view that the president has the right – legal and moral – to throw out government employees and replace them with cronies. The size of the federal government was proportionately much smaller then than today, and those political allies rewarded with jobs to deliver the mail or to collect tariffs seemed innocuous enough, at least until President Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled federal office seeker in 1881.  The Pendleton Act of 1883 created a system in which those who sought federal jobs, except for a layer of high-level executives, had to pass an...(Read Full Article)