The Capacity to Act

The Apparatus That Was Built

The American federal civil service, as a structurally professional and substantially merit-based apparatus, dates from the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.¹ The Act, passed in response to the assassination of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau (a disappointed office-seeker who had expected to be appointed to a federal position under the prior spoils-system framework), established the principle that federal employment should be based on demonstrated qualification rather than on partisan political loyalty. The Act’s coverage was initially modest — approximately ten percent of federal positions — but expanded progressively across the subsequent decades through both statutory expansion and executive-branch determination, reaching approximately ninety percent of federal civilian employment by the mid-twentieth century.

The professional civil service that emerged from the Pendleton framework was, by the mid-twentieth century, the operational mechanism through which the federal government’s substantial expansion across the New Deal and Great Society periods was implemented. The Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the broader categorical regulatory apparatus that the federal-government expansion produced — all operated on the framework of the professional civil service that the Pendleton tradition had institutionalized. The framework’s structural assumptions were that federal employees would be selected on the basis of demonstrated qualification, would be substantially insulated from partisan political pressure on their performance of regulatory duties, and would have substantial professional careers within the federal apparatus.

The civil-service framework’s principal subsequent statutory development was the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, signed by President Carter, which established the Office of Personnel Management as the principal federal civil-service-management agency, established the Senior Executive Service as a senior-management track distinct from the broader civil service, and modified the broader procedural framework for federal employment.² The 1978 Act was, in operational terms, the most substantial reform of the federal civil-service framework since the Pendleton Act and remains the operational framework under which the contemporary federal civil service operates.

The Apparatus That Was Eroded

The post-1980 erosion of the federal civil-service framework has occurred through multiple mechanisms across multiple administrations of both parties. The mechanisms have, in cumulative effect, substantially reduced the institutional capacity that the contemporary federal apparatus operates with.

The first mechanism is the substantial reduction in federal civilian employment as a share of the broader American workforce. Federal civilian employment, which had peaked at approximately three point one million across the late 1960s, has declined to approximately two point two million across the contemporary period — a substantial reduction in absolute terms and a more substantial reduction relative to the broader American workforce that has substantially grown across the same period.³ The reduction has been concentrated in the categories that the post-1980 administration framework treated as discretionary: regulatory enforcement personnel, scientific and analytical personnel, the broader categories of federal capacity that the political-administration framework considered the substantive output of the federal apparatus rather than the support structure for the broader economy.

The second mechanism is the substantial replacement of federal civil-service positions with contractor positions. The federal contractor workforce, which the Office of Management and Budget has estimated at approximately two to three times the size of the federal civil service, performs substantial portions of the work that the federal apparatus formally directs but that the federal civil service does not directly execute.⁴ The contractor framework has produced the operational outcome that the federal apparatus’s effective institutional capacity is substantially distributed across the contractor population that operates under different employment, accountability, and continuity conditions than the federal civil service operates under.

The third mechanism is the substantial constraint on federal-employee compensation and advancement. The federal civil-service compensation framework, which has been substantially constrained by the broader political-administration framework’s commitments to controlling federal-employee compensation, has produced the operational outcome that federal compensation has, across many specialty categories, fallen substantially behind the comparable private-sector compensation. The compensation differential has produced the operational outcome that the federal apparatus has substantial difficulty recruiting and retaining the specialty-category personnel — technologists, scientists, financial analysts, attorneys with substantial private-sector alternatives — that the contemporary regulatory apparatus structurally requires.

The fourth mechanism is the substantial politicization pressure that the post-1980 administration framework has applied to the federal civil service. The Schedule F executive order of October 2020, which would have converted substantial portions of the federal civil service to at-will employment that could be terminated for political reasons, was rescinded by the Biden administration in January 2021 but was substantially reinstated by the second Trump administration in 2025.⁵ The Schedule F framework has, in operational effect, produced substantial federal-employee uncertainty about the structural protections that the post-Pendleton civil-service framework had been understood to provide. The cumulative effect across the post-2020 period has been the substantial pressure on federal employees to align their professional performance with the political administration’s preferences, in operational terms that the post-Pendleton framework had structurally assumed would not occur.

The fifth mechanism is the post-2024 reversal of the Chevron doctrine. The Supreme Court’s June 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo overruled the Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) doctrine that had, across the post-1984 period, been the structural foundation of the federal regulatory framework’s operational authority.⁶ Chevron had established that, where a federal statute was ambiguous on a specific question, the federal courts would defer to the implementing agency’s reasonable interpretation of the statute, on the framework that the agency had the technical expertise and the statutory mandate to interpret the ambiguous provisions. Loper Bright substituted the framework that federal courts would interpret the statutes themselves, without deference to the implementing agency’s interpretation. The structural effect across the post-2024 period has been the substantial constraint on federal-agency regulatory authority, with substantial portions of the existing regulatory framework now subject to judicial reinterpretation that may produce substantially different operational outcomes than the prior framework had produced.

The cumulative effect of the five mechanisms across the post-1980 period is the federal administrative apparatus that the contemporary American government operates with. The apparatus is, in operational terms, substantially smaller relative to the broader economy than the post-Great-Society apparatus had been; substantially more dependent on contractor labor than the prior framework had assumed; substantially constrained in its compensation and advancement frameworks; substantially exposed to political-pressure mechanisms that the post-Pendleton framework had structurally constrained; and substantially constrained in its regulatory authority by the Loper Bright reversal of Chevron. The apparatus is, in operational terms, substantially less capable of executing complex policy initiatives at scale than the apparatus the post-1965 framework had constructed.

The Capacity Question

The structural significance of the administrative-capacity question, in the broader fourth-settlement framework, is that the framework’s other components depend on the administrative apparatus to execute them at scale. The healthcare framework of The Accidental System requires substantial federal capacity to negotiate cross-payer pricing, to establish and operate the catastrophic-coverage floor, and to manage the fifteen-year transition from employer-tied insurance.⁷ The housing framework of The Quiet Foreclosure requires substantial federal capacity to operate the assessment-cap framework, the catastrophe reinsurance backstop, the institutional-ownership constraints, and the broader regulatory framework that the framework would establish.⁸ The education framework of The Credential and the Debt requires substantial federal capacity to administer the federal-as-buyer framework, the cost-containment requirements on participating institutions, and the broader restructuring of the higher-education-financing apparatus.⁹ The campaign-finance framework of The Donor Class requires substantial federal capacity to administer the public-financing program, the disclosure framework, and the broader regulatory framework that the post-Citizens-United reform would establish.¹⁰ The climate framework of The Transition That Was Refused requires substantial federal capacity to administer the carbon-pricing framework, the catastrophe reinsurance backstop, and the broader infrastructure investment that the transition would require.¹¹

The administrative-capacity question is, in this respect, the structural prerequisite for the broader framework. A federal apparatus that lacks the institutional capacity to execute the framework cannot, in operational terms, deliver the framework’s substantive outcomes regardless of the framework’s policy design quality. The contemporary American federal apparatus is, on the trajectory the previous sections described, substantially less capable than the apparatus the framework would require. The structural reform of the apparatus is the operational complement to the broader framework’s substantive components.

The reform’s principal structural features would include: the substantial expansion of federal civilian employment in the categories the regulatory apparatus structurally requires (technologists, scientists, financial analysts, attorneys, regulatory specialists); the substantial restoration of the post-Pendleton civil-service-protection framework against the Schedule F-type politicization pressures; the substantial increase in federal-employee compensation in the specialty categories where the contemporary differential against private-sector compensation has produced recruitment and retention difficulties; the substantial reduction of contractor-dependence in the operational categories that the federal apparatus should be performing directly; the substantial restoration of regulatory authority through legislative codification of the Chevron-equivalent deference framework that the Loper Bright decision substantially constrained; and the broader institutional reform that the contemporary federal apparatus structurally requires.

What’s at Stake

A platform position on the administrative state — proposed for addition to The Intelligent Party’s positions framework — would, on the framework the previous sections have described, address the structural prerequisite that the broader fourth-settlement framework’s other components depend on. The component would have approximately the structural features the previous section described: civil-service-capacity expansion, post-Pendleton-protection restoration, compensation-and-recruitment reform, contractor-dependence reduction, and the legislative restoration of regulatory authority that the Loper Bright decision constrained.

The political coalition required to enact the framework does not currently exist. The conditions under which it might assemble are the conditions the broader fourth-settlement framework requires. The framework’s principal political constraint is the structural feature that the federal-administration framework is, in operational terms, the principal mechanism through which the substantive policy outputs the broader framework would establish would be delivered, and that the political coalitions whose support the broader framework would require are substantially the same coalitions that have, across the post-1980 period, contributed to the erosion of the apparatus the framework would restore.

The realism the broader series has called for, applied to administrative capacity, is the realism that the structural reform is achievable on the framework the post-Pendleton tradition has substantially established; that the framework’s operational application requires the legislative and institutional capacity that the framework itself would establish; that the principal obstacles to its enactment are the broader structural features the broader fourth-settlement framework would address.

The capacity to act is the structural prerequisite the broader framework requires. The structural restoration of the apparatus that historically performed the function is the assembly the broader fourth-settlement framework requires. The reconstruction is the assembly the next decade will determine.

Notes