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Sidney Shapiro, Wake Forest University and Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati
(THE CONVERSATION) If elected to serve a second term, Donald Trump says he supports a plan that would give him the authority to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with members of his political party loyal to him. Under this plan, if he eventually deemed those new employees disloyal, he claims he could fire them too.
The United States has tried such a plan before.
As we write in our book “How Government Built America,” newly elected President Andrew Jackson, after he took office in 1828, fired about half the country’s civil servants and replaced them with loyal members of his political party.
The result was not only an utterly incompetent administration, but widespread corruption.
Swearing allegiance
Jackson’s actions that rewarded political loyalists and punished enemies were a dramatic departure from what the founders had envisioned by establishing an independent civil service whose members were literally pledged...
