This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 29th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As Donald Trump seeks a second term, there is an effort underway to make it easier for the president to fire

rank and file executive agency employees. The idea is that the former Trump

administration had a hard time executing on its agenda because of career bureaucrats.

Tom Fiery is a managing editor at Regulation magazine.

He explains why Team Trump will probably have a rude awakening about how regulation gets done if they do indeed get the power to easily fire more bureaucrats.

Years ago I read a very slim book called Plunkett of Tammany Hall, and it sort of details the patronage system in sort of

really raw form. It explains, look, you got to get their guys out and after you win the election you get your guys in and maybe they don't

know everything they need to know about geothermal energy or whatever whatever job you're putting them into in government, but by Gar, they're your people.

And that's how you pay them back. They call it patronage or spoils and it seemed like a really clear explanation of this is how it works.

And at first blush you might think that former President Donald Trump pushing an agenda that would

give him as president the authority to simply fire a swath of federal bureaucrats on a whim not being

protected by federal civil service protections that would be an attempt to reimpose that kind of system.

There is a romantic notion, believe it or not, of the old spoils system that like you said push the other people out get my people in

committed to my agenda that I was elected on that the voters said they want and make

it happen the downside is usually when you bring all those people in

there are people who you have political debts to or there are people who

don't really know what they're doing, either they don't really understand the policies

they're implementing or the government machinery that they're operating, or they don't care

about the laws and the policies.

And they just do what the political chieftain says.

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