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When victory is its own worst enemy

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A prospective second Trump administration has plans to strip perhaps as many as 50,000 federal civil servants of employment protection, claims an analysis by the nonprofit Protect Democracy.

On its website, Protect Democracy quotes the American Enterprise Institute, which says a Trump administration plans to bend or break “the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

Trump and his men, an Associated Press story surmises, intend to “take a wrecking ball to what they call the deep-state bureaucracy…. Conservatives view the federal workforce as overstepping its role to become a power center that can thwart a president’s agenda.”

There are about 2.2 million federal workers. Since the 1883 Pendleton Act, the federal workforce has been increasingly shielded from arbitrary dismissal whenever the party in power is thrown out by voters and the opposition party is installed in the White House.

“To the victor belongs the spoils” goes an old saying. Those days may largely return if Donald Trump is voted back into the Oval Office.

It will not be pretty, whatever else it is. We know this because the “spoils system” was a hot mess. It not only helped produce, in 1881, a presidential assassination – the deluded Charles Guiteau shot James Garfield – but governmental waste, not to mention disrupted lives and hard feelings. The bad vibes were as evident on the winning side as the losing one.

What was true at the federal level was also true for states and localities. Some years ago a nephew of the late Edward Dumbauld of Uniontown gave me a treasure trove of political letters to both “Eddie” and Eddie’s father, Horatio Dumbauld. The elder Dumbauld was the chairman of the Fayette County Democratic party in the early 1930s. His son succeeded him.

Edward Dumbauld, barely 30-years-old at the time and a graduate of Harvard Law, was beset by disappointed job seekers, angling politicians, and calls for his ouster when he failed to deliver, as he inevitably did, the right job to the right person at the right time.

Vexed by the whole experience of the chairmanship, Dumbauld the younger eventually escaped to the Justice Department in Washington, where, thanks to the patronage of the Roosevelt administration, he became a top lawyer in the DOJ’s antitrust division.

Here’s a sampling of the letters.

Charley Franks of Connellsville asked the Dumbaulds to “push” his application to become a deputy secretary of mines in the administration of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor George Earle. On February 3, 1936, Horatio replied, “I tried to make it very plain … that I could not go along with your appointment without [these] endorsements…. Eddie advises me … you have done nothing toward getting [the] endorsement(s).”

That same month the Dumbaulds heard from Frank Canistra, whose complaint was that three Republicans had recently gotten jobs with the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) that should have gone to three Democrats. Canistra declared, “THERE CERTAINLY IS A WAY TO STOP THIS MISCONDUCT.”

Horatio wrote to the local Democratic congressman, J. Bell Synder, about the affair, “There [are] hundreds of telephone calls of like import, in addition to string of personal protestations.”

During this time, a political operative named Frank Pisula of Everson represented the interests of the county Democratic party in Harrisburg. The problem of getting people into jobs, he wrote the Dumbaulds, involved “paperwork” becoming “buried in the various departments” of government.

Still, jobs were distributed.

Pisula wrote the Dumbaulds that those “notified to come to work” soon in Harrisburg included Jane McIntyre, “senior typist” in the Department of Revenue, Dorothy Sproat, typist in Labor and Industry, and Ann Logan, flagged as a “personnel clerk.”

Pisula’s efforts to obtain a state government job for himself hit a snag when an aide to Governor Earle wrote to Eddie that the governor was “very much upset” to learn that the applicant, “endorsed by you,” had a criminal background. The governor “wishes you to report … how Mr. Pisula came to be appointed.”

An anonymous correspondent wrote to Horatio that Eddie was a “joke” as party leader. “Give a few jobs to Democrats…. Joe Angle controls six votes.” Nobody wants Joe Angle for postmaster.

If elected in November, it seems clear the Trump crowd hopes to install a partial MAGA workforce. By clearing out experienced government employees, however, they may get more than they bargained for in confusion and round after round of internal political conflict.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbine@gmail.com.

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