Most Americans agree our current federal bureaucracy is neither efficient nor effective; a strong majority in a recent Pew poll found government agencies to be “almost always wasteful and inefficient.” The Trump administration has spent its first ninety days and beyond issuing executive orders to address widespread fraud, a lack of accountability, and outright defiance of the policies set by elected actors among federal employees and their corresponding agencies. 

How much do you know about the federal government and its lack of accountability to you as the American public? 

A. Federal employees receive little explicit instruction from Congress as to the operation of their agencies and departments, especially with regard to federal grants. 

B. A generalized merit entrance examination is required for candidates hoping to secure a federal job.

C. Federal employees do not feel accountable to the president.

Let’s take these statements one at a time:

A. TRUE! The plain language of the Constitution requires Congress to legislate and the executive branch to execute faithfully. But for decades, the reality has been that statutes in Congress have amounted to little more than vague direction to the executive branch. Phrases like “the Department shall,” and “the Secretary will promulgate” litter federal law, granting vast and vague powers to unelected bureaucrats to fill in increasingly large blanks while members of Congress grandstand for or against the ultimate consequences as best suits their reelection chances, an offloading of political responsibility onto actors who don’t share in any political accountability.

For decades, Congress has argued that because of the complexity of modern governance, delegation to executive agencies is necessary, but unelected bureaucrats should not be in charge of major policy decisions the Constitution leaves to the elected branches.

And civil service job protections have compounded the accountability problem. The Trump administration revealed that 41% of civil service supervisors are confident that they could successfully remove an employee engaged in serious misconduct allegations. Only 26% of civil service supervisors confidently responded that they could remove an employee for poor performance. Currently, federal employees can only be removed for cause, with employees having access to appeal determinations through the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Merit Systems Protection Board found that roughly 8% of federal supervisors try to demote or fire poorly performing employees, with the remaining 78% determining that the process to demote or fire an employee was too time-consuming. On average, it takes about 170 to 370 days for a federal supervisor to process the paperwork and submit evidence of poor performance. 

All of this adds up to giving unelected bureaucrats a lot of power and virtually no oversight or accountability to the American people.

B. LIE! The Federal Service Entrance Examination was dissolved in 1981 due to emerging lawsuits, at the time, that claimed the exam was biased against certain minorities. The Department of Justice under the Reagan administration removed the entrance exam, under claims that it had adverse side effects among prospective Hispanic and African American employees. Employee entrance exams first originated in 1955 to gauge prospective employees for their ability to perform well under pressure, problem-solving skills, and general aptitude. 

Today, there is an “exam,” but it consists largely of asking applicants to rate their own fitness for various roles, apparently the only type of examination that did not allegedly disadvantage black and Hispanic applicants, despite the former being considerably overrepresented in the federal government compared to the population baseline. 

C. TRUE! The Framers of the U.S. Constitution did not foresee a growing bureaucracy that assumes the responsibility of legislating delegated to Congress. The Framers did not anticipate the de facto nature of executive agencies that function without explicit direction from the president. In the 2024 election, federal agencies were anything but apolitical. Statistics reveal that the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management did not give a single donation to the Republican party. Of the 2,271,498 federal employees, 30.5% of employees donated to the Republican party while 69.5% gave to the Democratic party. 

Governance is necessarily political; decisions about overfishing enforcement, or for that matter how to balance the risk of infection with a novel pathogen against the economic and personal damage of a lockdown, are inherently political judgment calls in a way that no gloss of neutral expertise can change. The question, then, is not whether the executive branch agencies are politicized but whose politics they are enacting and who they are ultimately accountable to for the political decisions they inevitably make. 

The word for unelected bureaucrats enacting their own independent political judgment—a judgment that has an overwhelming correlation with one political party—is tyranny, not democracy, and there is no legitimate sanction in our constitutional form of government for executive branch actors unresponsive to elections.

Bottom Line: 

Regardless of personal opinions on any of the particular policy outcomes, what is really at stake in these battles over the control of the bureaucracy is a stark choice between two totally different forms of governance. The current structure of our government, the weaponized terminus of about a century of administrative development starting under President Woodrow Wilson, is based on the premise that it is “neutral” expertise that makes modern government possible and that the expert class needs a permanent seat at the table unrestrained by democratic oversight.

The government the Trump administration is attempting to resurrect is the vision of the constitutional system many of us learned in fifth-grade civics: the three co-equal branches of government, with a legislature that passes the laws and a unified executive branch tasked with execution under the direction of the elected president. There is no room in that constitutional system for an independent fourth branch exercising “expertise” rather than the expression of democratic will.

The outcome of these Trump administration actions, and the ensuing court battles, will determine whether we will continue to live under the illegitimate political persuasions of millions of bureaucrats who exercise important political powers while never having to run for election, or whether we will restore the Founders’ vision of a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.

To learn more about the civil service and constitutional government, read the policy focus HERE.