What is a Political Hire? - by Albert Cory

Life Since the Baby Boom

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What is a Political Hire?<br>And how to prove you're not one

Albert Cory<br>Jun 03, 2026

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The Administrative State: words that motivate the second Trump Presidency. His administration aims to get rid of all those unelected bureaucrats who feel they’re permanent and don’t need to follow directions from any President, who after all is just temporary.<br>How these bureaucrats get chosen has evolved. A Civil Service exam was instituted in 1883, but isn’t used much anymore, except in some state and local governments. You’ll find the 1885 questions below highly amusing, and I’ll bet you’d fail most of them. Finally, I will suggest some interview questions now that the entire government is consumed with politics.<br>Sir Humphrey in this classic BBC series, Yes, Prime Minister, is the quintessential civil servant, explaining to the hapless Bernard why local governments cannot be given any power.

That’s the Administrative State’s attitude: we know what’s best for you. The ministers or governors or Presidents are merely elected and they’ll be gone soon, but we’ll still be here. This sounded fine when the Civil Service acts were first passed. These people supposedly were experts, not political hacks getting a job in exchange for supporting the party.<br>The Beginning of Civil Service

It seems only fair to mention that the Chinese got there first. Starting with the Sui and Yang dynasties (581 - 609 AD) applicants were tested on Confucian classics, poetry, law, and history, and wrote policy essays. The aim was to hire people based on merit, rather than wealth, politics, or family connections. This system had a profound influence on Britain, America, and other countries.<br>Prior to 1883, civil servants in the US were hired based on the political leadership’s preferences. George Washington tended to hire based on merit, but Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson began identifying the party that the applicant belonged to. Jackson, especially, was outspoken about “to the victor belongs the spoils,” which begot the term “the spoils system.” Jackson believed that if you got elected, you had the right to fire people from the other party and appoint your own supporters. It was more than that: they didn’t just get a job, they had to keep working for him. And they might even have to donate a portion of their salaries!<br>There were about 10,000 federal employees when Jackson took office. He ended up firing about 20% of them, concentrating on the higher-level, politically sensitive positions. Lower level postal clerks or customs officials were not usually removed.<br>No one disputes that the President gets to fire the cabinet secretaries and appoint his own. The issue comes when we go below the level of political decision-making. We’ll come back to this.<br>When President James Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker,

public pressure, which had been building for decades, culminated in the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created a civil service exam and mandated competitive hiring.<br>Before we get deeper into that, let’s take a look at a more recent example of a more complete spoils system: the Chicago Democratic Machine under Mayor Daley.<br>The Chicago Machine Worked, Sort Of

Starting in the 1970’s, the Machine was largely dismantled by a series of court decisions, but when I was growing up there, it was just assumed that if you had a job with the city, you were a precinct captain and your job included bringing in the Democratic votes. Michelle Obama’s father, Fraser Robinson, was one of those precinct captains in her affluent South Shore neighborhood.<br>I lived in a somewhat independent ward, and my Dad was a registered Republican, so our captain mostly left us alone. I do recall once that he knocked on our door, handed us a leaflet, said, “Democratic Party!” and left. He did his job, I guess.

There were thousands of these patronage jobs. No Republican stood a chance against this paid army. We all grew up thinking Daley’s first name was “Mayor.” Here he is in his most infamous role at the 1968 Democratic Convention, yelling anti-Semitic insults at Sen. Abraham Ribicoff:

Was the Machine a terrible system? Well, the streets got cleaned, the garbage was picked up, and if you needed a pothole fixed or a job for your son, you went to your ward committeeman, not the official city department. Recent immigrants from Poland or Italy or Lithuania had a path to the middle class. It was old-style, Third World politics.<br>On the other hand, white people were favored over blacks, which caused tensions that exploded into riots in the 60’s. The black neighborhoods were kept in line by compliant Machine politicians, and what were the citizens going to do, anyway — vote Republican?<br>It was also incredibly inefficient, deeply corrupt, and it bred cynicism about the government, which is never a good thing. Since city employees could be fired for not bringing in the...