I wonder if this means that Civil Servants will no longer have the privilege of lifetime employment.
The Pendleton Act was fine in the 1870s, but is entirely counterproductive today. When bureaucrats have NO fear of their jobs -- witness the acrobatics necessary to fire some incompetent ''civil service'' ''worker'' today -- their productivity goes straightaway to zero AND they use their position to further feather their own nest...not to mention the notable and general lack of any sort of competent ''service'' they provide.
Not tarring ALL ''civil servants'' with this brush, merely 3/4ths or so. Or 7/8ths. Or 95%.
I've wrestled with these cretins (in the specific case of the Missouri Department of Revenue) for upwards of two decades, besides also having gone a few rounds with their ''senior'' putzes in DoD.
I wasn't around for Andrew Jackson's famed 'spoils system', no idea of the results of that (probably rotten, but who knows), but the notion of effectively lifetime guaranteed employment for ANYONE who can screw over the average citizen at will, just by being an arrogant incompetent and being unable to be fired, is horrific.
Interestingly, there's SOME possibility that the new governor of Missouri, Mr. Blunt, intends to thin out the ranks of this timeserving and self-serving lot: he's already proposed, just less than 2 weeks after inauguration, reducing Revenue's staff by upwards of 1,000 (WAY overdue, btw), and even going after the wildly featherbedded, and so-called, Department of Mental Health (don't get me started on THAT one...). The only thing that said latter dep't has to do with ''mental health'' is that you'll go nuts if you try to deal with them in any rational fashion.