Pendleton Civil Service Act

Impact

The Pendleton Act provided a way to “reduce the costs of patronage by improving the quality of federal workers and to constrain competition among politicians over the control of federal positions” (Johnson and Libecap, p. 14). The passage of the Pendleton Act had an immediate impact on American politics. Civil service reform stayed on the minds of the American public. In future presidential elections, voters tended to elect the candidate who had not risen up through the spoils system, opting instead to vote for the candidate who advocated for civil service reform and the merit system. Congressmen themselves even acted in opposition to the Civil Service Commission, introducing no fewer than seven bills to repeal the Pendleton Act during President Grover Cleveland's first term in office. The bills never passed, however, and by 1904, just twenty-one years after the Pendleton Act went into effect, more than 50 percent of civil service jobs were based on merit examinations.

In 1883 the Pendleton Act placed just over thirteen thousand positions, and only 11 percent were categorized as classified. Hoogenboom writes that “from its start, the new system included places close to policymaking positions, perhaps even encroached upon them, and subsequently moved downward to include progressively minor positions” (1961, p. 304). While the Pendleton Act also protected employees from being removed from their positions based on political or religious beliefs, many politicians found ways around the commission's rules, transferring an employee from one job to another and creating temporary positions. As Hoogenboom notes, “the smaller the office and the more remote it was from Washington, the greater were the chances for evasion of the rules” (1961, p. 309). In 1888 President Cleveland even altered the rules of the Pendleton Act, waiving the requirement that incumbent employees must take the merit exams. Along those lines, presidents also had the authority to assist patronage employees by reclassifying the positions. By the 1890s, however, the Pendleton Act was generally followed, and in 1900 more than 40 percent of the civil service was classified.

One of the major impacts of the Pendleton Act was that it forbade giving campaign contributions in return for a job. Before the Pendleton Act, these types of campaign contributions, called political assessments, made up 75 percent of all campaign contributions. Sean Theriault points out that before the Pendleton Act, between the beginning of the Civil War and 1881, the number of political appointees rose by 173 percent. Following the passage of the Pendleton Act, ten states and more than four hundred cities, as well as the Philippines and Puerto Rico, adhered to the merit system. Presidents William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, and Theodore Roosevelt worked to expand the Pendleton Act, requiring political neutrality from all government employees and establishing job tenure and appeals processes. In 1923 Congress passed the Classification Act, establishing the standard of equal pay for equal work.