Just a few years ago, then-Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio said that if Donald Trump were reelected, he would advise the president to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.” Nearly four weeks into his new term, Trump appears to be executing that plan, attempting to fire or place on administrative leave thousands of federal employees perceived to be politically adverse to him, and reclassifying many more to make them fireable at will. Those hired in their stead will be vetted by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, thanks to a new executive order.

Last week, two sets of FBI employees filed the first lawsuits challenging these moves on First Amendment grounds. Both allege that the employees were targeted as a form of retaliation. The essence of a First Amendment retaliation claim is that although the government may deny someone a valuable benefit for any number of reasons, “there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely,” including, pointedly, someone’s “constitutionally protected speech or associations.” The plaintiffs in the FBI cases allege that the Trump administration is demanding a list of 6,000 agents involved in investigating the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago cases in order to possibly punish or purge thousands of agents Trump perceives (surely wrongly in many instances) to be politically opposed to him. The FBI employees should win their First Amendment claims, especially if any mass purge takes place.

[Tom Nichols: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy]

Zooming out, thousands of other federal employees could well make similar constitutional claims, because what the Trump administration is doing with the FBI appears to be but a small part of a much larger effort to resurrect a government-wide political-patronage system, something the First Amendment forbids.

From the founding until 1883, a “spoils”—as in, “to the victor belong the spoils”—system of political patronage took root and flourished in the federal government. New administrations would fire federal officials belonging to the other party and hire their own people. President Andrew Jackson became particularly associated with the spoils system after campaigning on rooting out corruption and firing nearly 10 percent of federal employees, replacing many with supporters upon taking office, but he was far from the only president to reward political cronies with federal jobs, as the University of Pennsylvania law professor Kate Shaw has explained.

Political-patronage systems promote corruption at the expense of effective governance, and Americans grew dissatisfied with the cronyism and moblike rule that flowed from the spoils system. Following decades of effort to enact civil-service reform, momentum surged when a disgruntled office-seeker assassinated President James Garfield in 1881. In response, Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 to “regulate and improve the civil service of the United States,” establishing a merit-based system for federal hiring.

Under the current federal civil-service regime, fewer than 4,000 federal employees—including constitutional officers, such as the attorney general and secretary of state, and top agency officials—serve at the president’s pleasure, fireable for political disagreements or pretty much any other reason. The overwhelming majority of the more than 2 million workers who daily serve the American people in the federal civil service are wisely protected from political firings.

That protection flows from something even deeper than the Pendleton Act and other federal statutes. In 1947, the Supreme Court was faced with a First Amendment challenge to the Hatch Act, which limits the extent to which most federal officials can engage in overt political activity while in office. The Court upheld the act but made clear that the First Amendment would prohibit Congress from directly restricting the ability to hold federal offices to members of one party, such as by enacting “a regulation providing that no Republican … shall be appointed to federal office.” Notwithstanding the Court’s guidance, the worst practices of political patronage continued to crop up in state and local governments, forcing the Supreme Court to elaborate the point and put a stop to spoils practices in a series of cases.

The most relevant case to our present-day situation began in 1980, when Republican Illinois Governor Jim Thompson issued an executive order freezing all hiring across state agencies absent express permission from his office. Requests for exceptions became routine, and an agency was set up inside the governor’s office to vet them. Five job-seekers sued, claiming that in practice, the order and exceptions were being used to create a political-patronage system favoring Republicans.

[Annie Lowrey: Civil servants are not America’s enemies]

When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court held that systems of political patronage like the one established by Thompson violate the First Amendment. Quoting one of its first patronage decisions, the Court reaffirmed that “conditioning public employment on the provision of support for the favored political party ‘unquestionably inhibits protected belief and association.’” Doing so “pressures employees to pledge political allegiance to a party with which they prefer not to associate, to work for the election of political candidates they do not support, and to contribute money to be used to further policies with which they do not agree.” It is “tantamount to coerced belief,” something the First Amendment plainly forbids. Nor did it matter that Thompson had not issued a direct order specifying that only Republicans would be hired, because “what the First Amendment precludes the government from commanding directly, it also precludes the government from accomplishing indirectly.”

There is an exception to the First Amendment bar on political hirings and firings. Those officials in legitimate policy making positions can be dismissed for political reasons without offending the Constitution. That’s because in America’s representative democracy, it is important that lawful policy reflects the political will of the voters, as voiced by the executive. But the executive cannot simply label large numbers of officials “policy makers” and render them all fireable at will. Instead, courts must look through labels to the substance of an official’s role and determine whether political alignment is necessary in that role. In any given dispute, the government has the burden of demonstrating that a particular position is in fact a policy-making one before the job-holder may be fired based on raw political allegiance.

The Trump administration seems set on flouting this precedent. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump and those around him signaled that the MAGA movement would expect total loyalty from federal officials. On Inauguration Day, after taking office, Trump suggested that “all” of the “Biden bureaucrats” should be fired. The same day, Trump signed one executive order to freeze much merit-based federal hiring, and he signed another that will help him consolidate political control over existing employees. The latter order conveniently expanded the number of officials to be classified as policy makers—from fewer than 4,000 to potentially hundreds of thousands. The administration also expanded the type of agency hiring authority that would make bringing in loyalists easier. And late last month, federal employees were informed by email that the majority of federal agencies are likely to downsize, and that loyalty will be a determining factor in deciding who stays.

Meanwhile, purges of employees whom Trump likely views as politically misaligned with him have begun to roll out across agencies. The administration has directed agencies to fire most probationary staff, nearly all of whom were hired during the Biden administration. Department of Education employees were reportedly put on leave for simply attending a DEI training in 2017. The FBI officials who sued say they have reason to believe that the Department of Justice is planning to engage in the mass unlawful firing of agents who had any involvement in certain investigations related to President Trump, including the January 6 cases, and the lawful search of Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. DOJ attorneys involved in the January 6 prosecutions were terminated because their work on those cases purportedly would prevent them from “faithfully” implementing Trump’s agenda. At the beginning of February, the administration moved to shut down USAID entirely. Although the administration explains the move as aimed at preventing waste and fraud, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said—without citing any evidence to support the improbable claim—that the Trump administration had determined that “98 percent of the [USAID] workforce either donated to Kamala Harris or another left-wing candidate,” and Elon Musk posted on X, “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” As for replacing those fired, Trump signed a new executive order this week, directing that all future career-appointment hiring decisions be made in consultation with a team lead from Musk’s DOGE.

[Anne Applebaum: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

Taken together, the administration’s actions bear a striking resemblance to the Illinois patronage scheme that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional: freeze hiring, purge perceived political opponents, and consolidate all hiring and staffing decisions in a body close to the executive.

The Trump administration clearly knows that the First Amendment prohibits resurrecting a government-wide political-patronage system. That Inauguration Day executive order expanding the number of purported policy makers claims that “employees in or applicants for Schedule Policy/Career positions are not required to personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration.” Similarly, the administration’s implementing guidance, issued at the end of January, in fact cites the Supreme Court’s anti-patronage decisions, specifying that “Patronage Remains Prohibited.”

But the administration’s actions and statements suggest that the resurrection of a political-patronage system is well under way. Particularly if political purges continue, courts must see the anti-patronage posturing as pretext and enforce the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court memorably put it in the Illinois case, “To the victor belong only those spoils that may be constitutionally obtained.”

Donald Trump is waging war on the civil service in the name of efficiency. But Washington created the modern civil service to make the government efficient in the first place, ending a patronage system wracked with graft and incompetence. Trump’s so-called reforms will only make it harder for the White House and the Republican Congress to enact their own policy aims, and harder for any president to get things done in the future.

Trump sees the “deep state” as an impediment to policy change, not as an instrument of it; he attacks the idea of a nonpartisan civil service and the civil service itself. Government workers are “crooked people,” Trump said while campaigning last year. “They’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.” To that end, his White House has offered to buy out federal employees under his “Fork in the Road” policy, fired more than a dozen inspectors general, transferred hundreds of workers outside their area of expertise, spurred experienced career employees to quit, put thousands of workers on furlough or leave, and attempted to strip job protections from nonpartisan employees. A message sent to millions of civil servants late last month emphasized the importance of loyalty and trust; a message sent this week argued that fewer positions should be held by the “impartial.”

In many ways, Trump is seeking to return the country to the spoils system that existed in the 19th century. Pioneered by President Andrew Jackson, that system awarded tens of thousands of civil-service jobs to allies and co-partisans of the White House. (The phrase “to the victor belong the spoils” does not originate in ancient Athens or Rome. It was first uttered by New York Senator William L. Marcy in the early 1830s.) This kind of patronage was efficient, Jackson and his supporters argued: “Rotation in office” meant that the civil service aligned with the ideology of the president, and brought fresh workers into the stodgy government.

But having party loyalists manage the Postal Service and firing thousands of people every time the White House changed hands was not a model of efficiency. Postmasters, clerks, and surveyors paid a share of their salary as kickbacks to the party in control of their position. “Solicitation letters were sent by the party to each worker, return envelopes were provided to ensure that payments were made, and compliance was carefully monitored,” the economists Ronald Johnson and Gary Libecap note. Scandals abounded. The collector of the Port of New York embezzled $1 million, not adjusted for inflation, before fleeing for England in 1838.

[Read: Make government efficient again]

In 1880, President James Garfield ran on reform, promising in his inaugural address to pass civil-service regulations “for the good of the service” and “for the protection of incumbents against intrigue and wrong.” Shortly after, he was assassinated by a deranged preacher and onetime resident of the Oneida free-love commune who’d been seeking a diplomatic appointment in Paris. At that point, Congress decided things needed to change. Garfield’s successor, Chester Arthur, “only got his job as vice president because he was a product of the spoils system,” Jon Rogowski, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told me. Arthur had held the post of collector of the Port of New York too, and had gotten rich on the job. “He was this incredible messenger, saying, We should reform, even though it would dramatically upend the very system that I came through myself,” Rogowski said.

The Pendleton Act of 1883 finally ended the spoils system, requiring government employees to pass an exam and forbidding hiring on the basis of race, politics, religion, or national origin. It led to a 25 percent reduction in staff turnover and increased the qualifications held by bureaucrats. Postal-delivery errors dropped by 22 percent, and the volume of mail delivered by carriers increased as much as 14 percent.

During the Progressive Era and the New Deal—and after the Watergate scandal—Congress passed further regulations, making it easier for federal agencies to promote high-performing employees, protecting whistleblowers, ensuring that the executive branch did not overstep its authority, and eliminating racial bias and nepotism in hiring. Today, a thicket of laws prevents the White House from making partisan hiring decisions, and civil servants from engaging in partisan activity. The Government Accountability Office and inspectors general root out incompetence, inefficiency, and waste.

[Read: Trump’s campaign to dismantle the government]

Every bureaucracy has some bloat. But there are no more civil servants now than there were in the late 1960s, even as the population they serve has grown by two-thirds. The tasks these 2.2 million employees perform are often uncontroversial; the Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the largest employers, and 70 percent of the civil service works in defense and security-related agencies. Moreover, federal workers are more efficient than private workers; they are less expensive to hire too.

Nor is the system biased against conservative administrations. Government employees are not particularly ideological. They tend to have long careers, working with presidents from both parties. On the job, civil servants tend to be better than politicians at shaping policy. The country does not need White House staffers to make decisions “setting interest rates or deciding which banks to bail out, to determine schedules for Air Force aircraft maintenance, or to certify particular drugs as safe and effective,” the political scientist Francis Fukuyama argues. When they do, he says, “the results are almost always harmful.”

Other countries show the risks. Viktor Orbán’s attack on Hungary’s civil service has led to the degradation of the country’s water, sanitation, and electric systems, and corruption in the construction industry and real-estate market. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s purging of public officials made the government less efficient.

In the United States, the strong, nonpartisan civil service reduces costs for taxpayers, with meritocracy and impartiality bolstering the country’s economic growth, one sweeping review found. The system also protects the public from graft and lawlessness. “There is a group of actors that are sworn to uphold the Constitution,” Donald Moynihan, a scholar of public administration at the University of Michigan, told me. “If someone in the government is trying to do an illegal thing, there will be a general counsel who says no, and there will be a bunch of civil servants who raise red flags, and there will be an inspector general who will catch it.”

Civil servants and inspectors general are raising red flags right now, filing lawsuits and notifying members of Congress as scarcely adult Trump officials commandeer government systems, access private data, illicitly shut down payments, and put whole agencies through the “wood chipper,” in the Trump adviser Elon Musk’s phrasing, contravening the country’s laws. But, as Moynihan pointed out, Trump is attempting to “defang” these systems of internal control.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

As a result, Americans can expect greater incompetence, higher costs, increased turnover, less expertise, falling trust in government, and lower morale. They can also anticipate higher sovereign-debt costs: Investors charge eroding democracies with incompetent bureaucracies more to borrow. The fallout will not end when the Trump administration ends. Future presidents will have to rely on less experienced civil servants to enact their policies.

The country’s civil service could use reform—to empower it. Right now, Washington’s bureaucrats are mired in bureaucracy, tasked with meeting strict and onerous procedural requirements rather than achieving the government’s policy goals. Hiring rules make it hard for Washington to poach experienced workers from private industry; procurement rules make outsourcing over-common and expensive. But Trump is seeking to cow the civil service and politicize it, not reform it. Rather than seeing the country’s 2 million public employees as agents, he sees them as enemies. This is not going to make the government more efficient. It is not going to make America great.

The institutions of the American government are under siege by the president of the United States. Donald Trump claims that he is fulfilling campaign promises to slash the bureaucracy and reduce waste. But what he is in fact doing is weakening potential obstacles—especially the federal civil service—that might stand in the way of his accumulation of wide and unaccountable power.

No one likes bureaucracies, even if they must acknowledge that modern states cannot function without them. But Trump’s contempt for government employees is not driven by some sort of noble, reformist instinct: He distrusts public service because he does not understand it. The president has a solipsistic and binary view of the world in which everything revolves around him, and other people either support him or oppose him. He is unable to comprehend the principle of an apolitical service that must obey the Constitution and the law over the wishes of Donald J. Trump.

In Trump’s world, service—including military service—is for suckers and losers. Only saps forgo personal benefit and miss out on a chunky payday in order to be part of something bigger than themselves. The president and his MAGA allies, accordingly, have portrayed diligent government employees as schemers who are part of some nefarious ideological project. In a titanic act of projection, Trump has convinced millions of Americans that their fellow citizens are scammers just out for themselves.

I retired from the federal workforce in 2022 with more than 25 years of service in the Defense Department and on the staff of the U.S. Senate. I agree that plenty of agencies and deadwood employees should go gently into that good night, and sooner rather than later. But folding up federal agencies and firing their employees is a complicated business, requiring a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. Only someone with profound hubris would be willing to make such changes in a matter of weeks (especially if they lack any experience in the public sector), which may explain why Trump tapped Elon Musk for the job.

[Read: Elon Musk is president]

Trump’s project began with an executive order empowering DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” This is stilted hooey, but in any case, the unelected, unconfirmed, and unaccountable Musk took up the cause with gusto, barging into government offices, attempting to access classified facilities, and seizing control of information assets such as the Treasury’s payments system.

Some of this is constitutionally sketchy and probably illegal, as my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday. Some government employees may, of course, one day prevail in civil lawsuits, but with Trump now in control of the Justice Department and immunized for “official acts” by the Supreme Court, no one in his administration is going to stop him or Musk at this point.

Musk’s role in Trump’s efforts creates significant conflicts of interest. (He is a government contractor, after all.) His motives are somewhat opaque but likely come from both practical and ideological interests, especially because these days he sounds like a late-night caller to a MAGA talk-radio program. (The U.S. Agency for International Development, he posted on X, was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”) And if Musk can seize control of the federal payments system—as he seems to be in the process of doing—perhaps he thinks he is a step closer to fulfilling his dream of replacing the national financial system with some galactic payment app that handles everything.

But, like Trump, Musk also appears to just detest people who work in public service. Both men resent government agencies for two important reasons: They do not own these public institutions, and the employees do not instantly obey their orders.

Federal employees answer to their departments and to the president, but within the constraints of the law and the Constitution. Trump’s supporters will argue that the machinery of the federal government should, in fact, answer directly and completely to the president, but they’re trying to revive a settled argument: America already had the debate over cronyism and the spoils system in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is why the United States has laws specifically meant to prevent the abuse of public institutions for personal or political gain, including the Pendleton Act of 1883, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, and various iterations of the Hatch Act.

Indeed, even this administration seems to realize that what it’s asking is completely alien to the modern American credo of professional and apolitical national service. Trump has resurrected an order he issued back in 2020 (which was immediately rescinded by Joe Biden) with some careful edits. But the new language about “accountability” does not change the fact that Trump’s order reclassifies many civil servants as functionally equivalent to political appointees, removing their civil-service protections and making them fireable at will by the president. In other words, Trump is redefining public servants as presidential servants.

Trump learned the hard way during his first term that bureaucrats and other federal employees, with their pesky insistence on outdated concepts such as “the rule of law,” could be a consistent obstacle to his various machinations. When Trump tried to strong-arm the Ukrainians into investigating Biden by withholding U.S. aid, for example, federal whistleblowers sounded the alarm. Other federal agencies and appointees—including leaders of the United States military—were impediments to Trump’s most dangerous and unconstitutional impulses.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

The president appears to have learned his lesson. This time, he has prepared the ground for his attack on government institutions by demonizing the people who work in them at almost every level. He may not be able to disestablish entire organizations (although he might well try), but even short of that, he can make their employees so hated by the rest of the country that they can be terrorized into obedience or resignation. Trump’s campaign against the civil service, as one manager working in the federal government told NBC News, is “psychological warfare” on a daily basis.

Trump’s suspicion of the government he leads is also why he has sent shockingly unqualified nominees to head the Defense Department, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other agencies. Think of it as a kind of political pincer attack: At the top, Trump decapitates important organizations and removes their professional staff. He replaces them with people who do not know or care about what they’re doing other than carrying out Trump’s orders. At the bottom, Musk and the president’s new hires at the Office of Personnel Management ensure that whoever is left is either a loyalist who will support such orders or someone too scared to object to them.

President Trump regards people who take their constitutional oath seriously as, by definition, his political enemies. If he is going to rule as the autocrat he wishes to be, he knows he must replace career civil servants with flunkies and vassals who will serve him and his needs above all else. His attack on public service is not about reform; it’s a first strike against a key obstacle to authoritarianism.