Washington’s bureaucrats make a sham of democracy — time for reform is now under Trump

Here’s a dirty secret about the federal government many Americans are just learning: It’s always run by Democrats, even when voters elect Republicans.

Presidents come and go, but the permanent federal bureaucracy remains the same, and it has a distinct partisan tilt.

When Americans send a Republican to the Oval Office, they get a government still administered mostly by the other party.

Yes, that makes a sham of democracy.

But no president before Donald Trump was prepared to confront the problem.

Because the bias in the federal civilian workforce of more than 2 million employees favors their side, the likes of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were never going to fix it.

And earlier, when the parties were less ideologically polarized and there were still quite a few conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, it wasn’t as obvious as today that the bureaucracy’s partisan slant meant a workforce opposed to the duly elected president — when he’s not a Democrat.

But from Ronald Reagan onwards, it’s become clear that a Republican who tries to get the bureaucracy to carry out a conservative agenda will face a revolt from inside.

The Constitution’s separation of powers doesn’t provide for an executive branch divided against itself — it’s the one branch that’s meant to be united within and checked from the outside.

Originally, the partisan makeup of the federal workforce depended almost entirely on who won the White House: Once the modern parties had formed, Republicans would hire Republicans, Democrats hired Democrats, and every federal employee knew he stood to lose his job if the party in power changed.

Politicians on both sides saw government jobs as rewards to give their supporters, even if this meant hiring people who weren’t the best qualified.

A nonpartisan, meritocratic civil service seemed like the solution to the inefficiency and you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours corruption of this system.

Yet like many well-intended reforms, this one backfired.

Instead of a nonpartisan civil service, what we have now is a civil service whose partisanship no longer alternates based on elections — a perpetual liberal government, unanswerable to voters.

Guo Xu, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, has studied the magnitude and effect of partisanship in the federal workforce.

Analyzing data from 1997 to 2019, he found roughly half of all federal employees were Democrats (compared to 41% of the public at large) — while the percentage of Republicans in federal jobs slid from 32% to 26%, with independents gaining the difference.

That’s an almost two-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the civil service.

The imbalance is even more pronounced in many departments and agencies, however, with Democrats making up some 70% of Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Education, and State Department employees, Xu found.

The bias is also stronger in the highest reaches of the civil service, with Democrats amounting to 63% of top-level federal career executives.

Xu and his research colleagues found cost overruns on government contracts increase by some 8% when there’s a partisan “misalignment” between the president and the bureaucrat overseeing the outlay.

“When we looked at HR surveys covering federal government workers, we also found that politically misaligned respondents were less motivated and less likely to identify with the overall mission of the agency,” Xu said in an interview on the BerkeleyHaas website.

Xu is no conservative critic of the system — he takes the lack of turnover in the federal workforce when party control of the White House changes to mean “civil service protections work, shielding career civil servants from political interference.”

In truth, civil servants with partisan commitments of their own are being shielded from the consequences of elections — as if the American people have no right to “interfere” in their own government.

A new report by the Foundation for Government Accountability confirms Guo’s findings and expands on them, noting, “In the 2024 presidential election, 84% of federal employees’ political donations went to Kamala Harris.”

The result: When voters elect a Democrat as president, they get a Democratic administration — but if they elect a Republican, they get a mixed administration weakened by partisan divisions between political appointees and the civil service.

This is one reason Republican efforts to scale back the federal government have failed for so long: In effect, there have only been semi-Republican administrations for decades, or one continuous Democratic administration with some temporary Republican heads.

It’s time to reform the civil-service reforms that created this mess.

There’s something to be said for returning to what older reformers got right, such as relying on standardized examinations for hiring and promotion in place of recent, highly politicized criteria such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Beyond that, though, it’s necessary to admit that bureaucrats are partisans too.

President Trump’s plan to reclassify many federal employees as Schedule F appointees, allowing him to remove them more easily, is a step toward making the bureaucracy more accountable to the democratic process.

By fighting the partisan bias of the permanent government, Trump isn’t endangering the Constitution, he’s restoring its balance.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.