Our federal government is bloated with political appointees, and that weakens democracy

Exploring critical issues facing our democracy and searching for solutions.

The spoils system and its use of unbridled patronage may have officially ended with the assassination of President James A. Garfield and the subsequent passage of the Pendelton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, but the federal government remains bloated with far too many political appointees after all these years.

A president today has the ability to make 4,000 political appointments, including about 1,200 that require Senate confirmation. This is dramatically more than any other Western democracy, and is a significant contributing cause of the failure of our government to keep up with the increasingly complex and dangerous world around us.

Many federal departments and agencies have become calcified, with layer upon layer of appointees in the chain of command. The problem is compounded by the entourage of appointees without line responsibility who surround nearly every senior leader. This has created bottlenecks, caused delays in decision-making and made it difficult for critical information to reach the ultimate decision-makers, even when, as is typically the case, the individual appointees are of a very high caliber.

There are secretaries, deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, principal deputy assistant secretaries, deputy undersecretaries as well as special assistants, special counsels, senior counsels, senior advisers, deputy chiefs of staff and special advisers to the chiefs of staff who clog the system.

The Defense Department is the largest federal agency and has the most levels in the chain of command of any Cabinet department, with five layers of Senate-confirmed political appointees. In the office of the defense secretary, for example, there are 17 assistant secretaries.

Four other Cabinet departments — Commerce, Energy, State and Treasury — have four levels of Senate-confirmed political appointees. The State Department has the largest number of positions among the group, with 26 Senate-confirmed officials at the fourth level, excluding ambassadors. In these departments, the fourth level of officials are overseen by an undersecretary.

Seasoned executives would reduce bureaucracy, inefficiency

While the high number of political appointees are often justified as a means of implementing a president’s agenda or controlling “unaccountable” career federal employees, it has created more bureaucracy and inefficiency, and it runs counter to what takes place in the private sector where much leaner chain of command is the norm.

Vanderbilt University professor David Lewis, in a primer for the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government, “Political Appointees to the Federal Bureaucracy,” correctly argues that the large number of political appointees creates high turnover and longer vacancies, and puts in place individuals with less subject matter and public management experience than seasoned career executives. This, in turn, creates instability in the management of many complex federal organizations and a lack of continuity and focus on critical management issues.

“Programs and agencies run by political appointees tend to perform worse than other programs and agencies,” Lewis wrote.

Lewis also argues that an increase in permanent leadership — career professionals — and the reduction of vacancies that would ensue “should improve performance by increasing long-term planning, greater investment and clearer goals.”

The number of political appointees is part of the debate in the current presidential race, with former President Donald Trump backing a plan he proposed at the end of his administration in 2020 that would have allowed him to undermine the merit-based, nonpartisan civil service system and pack the government with many more political appointees loyal to him.

Known as “Schedule F,” the plan calls for giving politically appointed federal officials unbridled authority to fire tens of thousands of civil servants who have been selected based on their expertise and capability, and replace them with people chosen according to their fealty to the president. In addition to undermining the expertise of the professional civil service, this plan would substantially increase the risk that governmental authority could be used to further the personal interests of those in power rather than the public good.

Reforms of the government personnel system are long overdue, and we might begin by right-sizing the number of political appointees, especially those that require Senate confirmation, and ensuring that those who are chosen have the necessary qualifications for the positions of trust they are selected for and are held accountable for their performance.

This is not some dry, academic question, but rather one that has profound consequences for the capability of our government to solve critical problems. The current proposals to return our government to the days of the 19th-century patronage system raise the stakes even further and put the future of our democracy on the line.

Max Stier is the president of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, an organization focused on building a better government and a stronger democracy.

The Democracy Solutions Project is a collaboration among WBEZ, the Chicago Sun-Times and the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government, with funding support from the Pulitzer Center. Our goal is to help listeners and readers engage with the democratic functions in their lives and cast an informed ballot in the November 2024 election.

Want to know more about political appointees to the federal government? Check out the Democracy Reform Primers, a series by the Center for Effective Government where expert scholars analyze and explain potential reform policies. Read the primer on political appointees.

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