The creation of the civil service in the US wasn’t about efficiency, but corruption. James Garfield’s assassination was over his refusal to give a patronage jo

The creation of the civil service in the US wasn’t about efficiency, but corruption. James Garfield’s assassination was over his refusal to give a patronage job. That lead to a backlash against patronage in general. Jobs as patronage continued at the lower level for a long time. In many states, the most powerful political official was the Postmaster General because he controlled the jobs. At the federal level it still continues in various forms: appointments to military academies require congressional sponsorship, Supreme Court justices hand out clerkships based on ideology, etc. When people talk about the civil services reforms being inspired by efficiency, they usually are talking about the British civil service (Northcoat-Trevelian report) or Chinese civil service. But those are very different things than the American civil service. America never really had a civilian civil service in the “Yes, Minister” sense of the phrase.