President-elect Trump’s vow to fire the Justice Department lawyers pursuing the prosecution of him certainly puts into sharp relief the question of civil service reform. It’s part of a gathering storm over whether he, or any, president can tame the entrenched Washington bureaucracy. It sets the stage for a confrontation over the thicket of laws that shield federal civil servants from being fired. These laws, some of which date from the 19th century, are ripe for reappraisal.

The New York Sun is all for it. We, and no doubt many others, watched in horror at the emergence during Trump’s first term of a self-declared “resistance” to the elected administration. The Times actually published an op-ed piece by “Anonymous,” an administration aid, vowing to frustrate parts of the agenda of the elected government in which “Anonymous” was serving. Secretary Clinton at one point declared herself part of the resistance.

That’s something to bear in mind as President Trump seeks to redeem his new mandate to confront not only political appointees but Beltway bureaucrats who have a protected status. Their immunity from termination, purportedly to insulate personnel decisions from politics, instead serves to empower the federal leviathan and clip the wings of, in the president, the sole person in whom the executive powers are constitutionally vested. 

The first 20 presidents of America used to clear the decks of executive branch employees and fill them with their own picks. “To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy,” is how Senator Marcy summed it up. The assassination in 1881 of President Garfield by a disappointed office-seeker, though, amplified calls to replace the so-called “Spoils System” with one based on what good-government activists called merit, making it harder to fire bureaucrats. 

Impetus came in 1882 after the GOP lost control of the House and sought to shield their own party’s executive branch employees. So it was that the rhetoric behind civil service reform cloaked a last gasp of partisanship. Enter the Pendleton Act, signed into law in 1883 by President Arthur. “The Pendleton Sham” was how the Sun derided the “so-called reform” in an editorial. Of 125,000 federal employees, the Sun noted, but 10,000 would be subject to the law’s new exams.

Merit tests for these low-level positions, the Sun said, missed the point. It was the “active partisans in office,” who “were appointed in nine cases of ten on account of their political dexterity,” who were “the most dangerous.” The Sun pointed to the more pressing issue: Absenteeism. Federal employees were allowed “a month’s absence every year without loss of pay,” plus “ten days or more to attend election,” testament to the role they played in politics. 

The Sun, too, spotted a constitutional defect in the scheme: The officer set under the Pendleton Act to conduct the merit exams would be named by a new Civil Service Commission. That, though, impinged on the president’s power of appointment, the Sun contended. This bolstering of bureaucracy at the president’s expense is a reason why the law paved the way for what historian Williamjames Hoffer calls a “fully developed regulatory state.”

That regulatory state would only grow in the decades to come, especially after the Democrats used the New Deal to expand the bureaucracy and regulate nearly every aspect of American economic life. Bureaucrats gained yet more job security under President Carter, who signed into law measures making it almost impossible to fire federal employees without going through the procedural hoops of the misnamed Merit Systems Protection Board.

Which brings us back to Trump. In 2016 Speaker Gingrich warned him that civil service reform would be key to his success as president. “The quagmire is so bad,” Mr. Gingrich said then. “It’s got to be a straight-out war,” he added. “You can’t fix it unless you change the civil service laws.” Yet that reform eluded Trump in his first term, even as events proved the prescience of Mr. Gingrich. The President-elect, it seems, aims to avoid repeating that error.