Washingtons bureaucrats make a sham of democracy time for reform is now under Trump

Here’s a dirty secret about the federal government many Americans are just learning: It’s always run by Democrats, even when voters elect Republicans.Presidents come and go, but the permanent federal bureaucracy remains the same, and it has a distinct partisan tilt.When Americans send a Republican to the Oval Office, they get a government still administered mostly by the other party.Yes, that makes a sham of democracy.But no president before Donald Trump was prepared to confront the problem.Because the bias in the federal civilian workforce of more than 2 million employees favors their side, the likes of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were never going to fix it.And earlier, when the parties were less ideologically polarized and there were still quite a few conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, it wasn’t as obvious as today that the bureaucracy’s partisan slant meant a workforce opposed to the duly elected president — when he’s not a Democrat.But from Ronald Reagan onwards, it’s become clear that a Republican who tries to get the bureaucracy to carry out a conservative agenda will face a revolt from inside.The Constitution’s separation of powers doesn’t provide for an executive branch divided against itself — it’s the one branch that’s meant to be united within and checked from the outside.Originally, the partisan makeup of the federal workforce depended almost entirely on who won the White House: Once the modern parties had formed, Republicans would hire Republicans, Democrats hired Democrats, and every federal employee knew he stood to lose his job if the party in power changed.Politicians on both sides saw government jobs as rewards to give their supporters, even if this meant hiring people who weren’t the best qualified.A nonpartisan, meritocratic civil service seemed like the solution to the inefficiency and you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours corruption of this system.Yet like many well-intended reforms, this ...