History of the Federal Civil Service

About the Briefing

This handout was created for the AHA’s April 7, 2025, Congressional Briefing on the history of federal civil service. Panelists Joseph A. McCartin (Georgetown Univ.), Margaret Rung (Roosevelt Univ.), and Eric S. Yellin (Univ. of Richmond) discussed how the federal government’s bureaucracy has evolved over time, including who has been eligible for federal employment, significant legislation concerning federal employment, how federal hiring processes have changed over time, and the evolving role of unions.

The recording of the briefing is available to watch on C-SPAN. And C-SPAN Classroom has developed a lesson plan around the briefing.

 

Rise of a Merit-Based Civil Service System, 1870s–1910s

• Until the 1880s, elected officials appointed federal workers for political purposes. This “spoils” system was chaotic, corrupt, and inefficient.
• Each new administration meant a near wholesale firing of the federal workforce and weeks of presidents and their aides personally receiving office seekers and the politicians who sponsored them.
• Under the spoils system, the political party machinery was funded by the cut the party got from members’ government salaries.
• Pressure for reform strengthened in the 1870s. Federal employees were managing a more complex government and nation, and new ideas about meritocracy swirled around industrialized nations, including Germany, Great Britain, Canada, and Japan.
• In 1871, Congress voted to empower the president to appoint a civil service commission, the start of the modern civil service. Yet this led to few reforms.
• In 1881, President Garfield’s assassination by a disgruntled office seeker renewed public pressure on Congress for reform.
• The Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 established the use of examinations, apportionment of employees by state, an anti-nepotism clause, protections against political firings, and the US Civil Service Commission to provide oversight.
• The initial act covered only 10% of the federal government, but amendments and presidential actions brought 60% of federal jobs under civil service rules by World War I.

The Federal Civil Service at Mid-Century, 1930s–1950s

• 1933–50 marked the largest expansion of the federal civil service, transforming the government into a major employer and efficient producer of essential goods and services for the American people.
• At the start of the Great Depression in 1929, there were 590,000 federal employees (over half were postal workers). With President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election and the launch of the New Deal, the workforce expanded to 886,000 in 1937 for a nation of 130 million. By the end of World War II, employment numbered 3.5 million.
• Postwar contraction reduced federal workers to around 2.5 million in the 1950s. In 1955, approximately 90% were part of the merit-based civil service. The executive branch had become a sprawling and multifaceted machine, performing vital functions that ranged from food safety to stock market oversight to maintenance of historical records to mail delivery.
• With midcentury growth came innovative approaches to administration and a rising prestige associated with federal jobs. Agency officials, Congress, and the White House developed a sophisticated system of personnel administration coordinated across agencies; outlined a policy for federal civil service unions; attracted highly educated professionals; and diversified the workforce (especially with women and African Americans). Thus the federal civil service played a key role in ushering in the prosperity that the United States experienced in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Mid-20th Century to the Present

• The federal civil service has evolved over the past 75 years in response to several challenges.
• Cold War imperatives demanded that the United States reinforce its status as the world’s leading democracy by distinguishing its practices from those of communist nations. This led Presidents Kennedy and Nixon to issue executive orders that introduced (1962) and simplified (1969) union rights and collective bargaining in the federal service.
• The civil rights movement challenged the legacy of segregation that had long shaped access to federal jobs, leading the Nixon administration to embrace affirmative action policies to diversify the workforce.
• The 1970s economic turmoil led to the bipartisan Civil Service Reform Act (1978), which updated and solidified civil service policies and created new agencies (the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Merit System Protection Board) to oversee the system. Thus constituted, the system proved remarkably enduring through several crises.
• While efforts to privatize federal services began with the Grace Commission under President Reagan and expanded under President Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative, the federal government remained the nation’s largest employer and its civil service system exhibited remarkable stability during the first two decades of this century.
• Today, about 3.5 million people work for the federal government, serving a total US population of 332 million.

Participant Biographies

Joseph A. McCartin is professor of history at Georgetown University, where he has taught since 1999, and where he has served as the founding executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor & the Working Poor since 2009. His research focuses on the intersection of labor organization, politics, and public policy. He is the author of Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations and Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America. He is a contributing editor to the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History and currently serves as president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.

Margaret C. Rung is professor of history and director of the Center for New Deal Studies at Roosevelt University and formerly a GS-5 employee of the NASA history office. A specialist on 20th-century American history, she has published on topics ranging from the New Deal to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and government workers. Author of Servants of the State: Managing Diversity and Democracy in the Federal Civil Service, 1933–1953 and the forthcoming Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works, she has also published in the Journal of Policy History, Business History Review, The American Review of Public Administration, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Arizona History.

Eric S. Yellin is associate professor of history at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America and co-editor of Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader. Committed to communicating scholarly knowledge to the broader public, Yellin also is a museum curator, including the inaugural exhibitions of the Lillian & Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. His writing and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the PBS NewsHour, NPR, USA Today, and other media outlets.