Efforts toward reforming the US civil service began in earnest in the 1870s, but it wasn’t until January 1883 that the Pendleton Act was passed, which shifted the tide from the “spoils system” to a merit-based system. Another name for the spoils system is the Good Ol’ Boys Club, where officials would reward their friends, family, and/or political supporters with cush appointments that they didn’t earn through their own credentials or experience.

It would be like hiring your son-in-law and daughter as senior White House advisors or offering your top donor an unofficial & unauthorized role as Chief Hacker to the Treasury Department … hypothetically speaking.

Interestingly enough, the Pendleton Act also made it unlawful to fire or demote civil servants for political reasons. (I’ll just let that one sink in for a moment ...)

It was also during this decade that future President Woodrow Wilson published his now-famous essay, “The Study of Administration” (1887), in which he asserted that public service professionals should be held to high standards of work performance, laying the groundwork for the modern bureaucracy. Wilson also argued that the work of public administration should be kept separate from political influence (fancy that).

Wilson became widely known as the “father of public administration” over the years (although, Alexander Hamilton fans would disagree, which you can read more about in my book, Ethics in Fiscal Administration). When Wilson eventually began his presidential stint in 1913, he did so as the first US President with a PhD. He ushered in the passage of the Federal Reserve Act and was a key player in founding the League of Nations (a forerunner of the United Nations) on the heels of WWI.

Seemingly every day over the past week, we’ve witnessed new and even worse breaches of protocol, security, and legal precedent with regard to the public sector. Under the guise of allegedly rooting out waste and abuse, Elon Musk and his motley crew of digital pirates – none of whom have security clearance – have ransacked federal agencies and terrorized public employees.

It should go without saying that this illegitimate power play is atrocious and grossly illegal, but one of the biggest face-palms of the whole ordeal is how folks continue to shrug, like it’s no biggie. An unauthorized group has literally hacked into not only the Fed’s systems and exposed them to god-only-knows-what cybersecurity threats, but through that process, these criminals have also gained access to YOUR protected personal information {whatev, I guess}.

“We’re draining the swamp!” cry the Kool-Aid drinkers with their ugly red hats, thinking that a billionaire actually has their best interests in mind. What lunacy! If the collective We were really interested in addressing fraud, waste, and abuse of the public purse, then why wouldn’t we start by putting the spotlight on corporations like Musk’s Tesla, which reported $2.3 billion (with a B) in US income in 2024 but paid zero – that’s $0.00 – in federal income tax.

I pursued public administration in graduate school because I believed in the ideals of public service. I have shared before that my personal mission statement is to “Affect Positive Change,” and by studying, working, and focusing my volunteer efforts in the public & nonprofit sector, I have tried to live out those ideals. Unfortunately, public service in the US feels like it is in hospice care right now. The education, gumption, and elbow grease invested by hundreds of thousands of Americans is being tossed aside by an egomaniac who flaunts his privilege and doesn’t bother contributing his fair share to the bottom line.

And people are eating it up. They look at him and somehow think they can relate to him. How many people do you know who could make it six months in the event of a financial disaster? Three months? One month? One paycheck?? The reality is that 99.99% of us are much, much closer to becoming unhoused than we will ever be to becoming billionaires. All it takes is one catastrophic illness, one natural disaster, one devastating accident, or one furlough … And yet, people act like this despicable behavior is somehow helping ‘Murica become “great again.”

I worry that current events are the death rattle of public service as it gasps for breath, and too many people are going to figure it out too late.