How Presidential Politicization Wrecked the Spoils System

Back in the 1990s while working for the Clinton administration’s U.S. Office of Personnel Management, I wrote articles in prominent scholarly journals with titles like "Thinking the Unthinkable in Public Administration: A Case for Spoils in the Federal Bureaucracy," and similar commentaries including one in Washington Monthly. Even though I was (and most years remain) Republican, I would have handed President Clinton the keys to the bureaucratic kingdom expecting he would do more good than harm; anyway, my team could always undo the bad after the next election. In the 2020s, the Trump-Biden…