Here's a number that should stop you cold. Every four to eight years, a new President is handed a to-do list of roughly 4,000 political jobs to fill — and more than 1,200 of those require Senate confirmation. That's the machinery of the U.S. government changing hands, and it's far larger than anything you'll find in Britain, Canada, Germany, or any other advanced democracy. We think that sprawling patronage layer is one of the quiet root causes of a lot of what people hate about Washington — and we drafted a bill to cut it down to size. You can read the whole thing on our new action page. Here's the case.
What a "Political Appointment" Actually Is
Most of the federal government is run by career civil servants — the people who inspect the food, audit the books, run the labs, forecast the weather, and process the claims. They stay from one administration to the next, and they're hired for competence. Good.
But sitting on top of them is a layer of political appointees — people the President (and his team) get to install. Some of these are the household names: Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, ambassadors. Most are not. The list runs deep into every agency: assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, agency counsels, board members, and hundreds of slots whose real qualification is often that the person helped win the election. The bipartisan 2024 "Plum Book" — the official roster — lists about 4,000 of them. (Partnership for Public Service)
Four Problems, and They Feed Each Other
1. It rewards politics over expertise. When a job is a political prize, the people filling it think first about loyalty, donations, and campaign service — and only second, if at all, about who can run the place. This isn't a partisan jab; it's structural. The bipartisan Volcker Commission — the National Commission on the Public Service, chaired by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker — found that agencies run by political appointees too often suffer from poor management, because those appointees frequently lack "the management skills, policy expertise, agency experience, or working networks" the job requires. Its recommendation, more than twenty years ago: cut the number of appointees roughly in half, to around 2,000, and let professionals run the agencies. (Washington Post)
2. It has broken the Senate. With more than 1,200 jobs needing confirmation, the process has collapsed under its own weight. Nominees now wait an average of about 170 days to be confirmed — roughly three times longer than under President Reagan. Dozens of critical positions have sat vacant more than half the time for years, run by "acting" officials whose shaky authority invites lawsuits and blurs who's actually accountable. When the seats sit empty, agencies stall — they wait for a confirmed boss before making big calls on national security, public health, and everything else. (Partnership for Public Service; Government Executive)
3. It throws away institutional memory every four years. When the White House changes hands, close to 3,000 senior leaders walk out the door — nearly all of the prior administration's appointees leave before the new President is even sworn in — and the typical appointee stays under two years anyway. Imagine a company that fired its entire management layer every four years and replaced it with people who'd never worked there. That's our government. (Oxford / Journal of Public Administration Research)
4. It raises the temperature. This is the part that ties back to everything else we work on. Because so many powerful jobs are up for grabs every four years, every election becomes winner-take-all, and the Senate turns into a permanent confirmation battlefield. Fights over hundreds of nominees eat the calendar, poison relationships, and turn ordinary staffing into partisan trench warfare. Shrink the number of political jobs, and you shrink the size of the prize — and with it, a real chunk of the reason Washington fights the way it does.
The Rest of the World Already Figured This Out
Here's what's striking: the United States is the outlier. In most peer democracies, an election can change the government overnight, but the professional civil service stays in place. In Britain, the day after an election the ministers change and the civil service does not; senior turnover after an election runs around 1–2 percent, not our near-total wipeout. Those governments still change direction — the elected leaders set the policy — but the machinery keeps running, staffed by people chosen for competence and kept across administrations. (The Conversation)
We're not proposing to copy any one country. We're pointing out a simple truth the rest of the developed world already lives by: steering a government and staffing it with 4,000 political hires are two very different things.
What Our Bill Does
It caps total political appointees at about 2,000 — the Volcker number — phased in at the next transition so no one is fired mid-stream. It keeps Senate confirmation for the genuinely top jobs (Cabinet, agency heads, deputies, general counsels, ambassadors, U.S. Attorneys and Marshals, inspectors general, the major boards) and converts the hundreds of "assistant-to-the-assistant" posts beneath them into career or non-confirmed roles. It protects the operational, technical, scientific, financial, and watchdog positions as career civil service, chosen and kept on merit. And — this is the guardrail that makes it honest — it keeps the President firmly in charge: the President still names the leadership team that sets direction and answers to the voters. We're trimming the bloat beneath that team, not the President's power to lead.
The Honest Part
We always try to name the hard trade-off. A President does need enough appointees to actually govern — a mandate means little if the new administration can't put its own leaders in charge. That's exactly why we keep the full leadership team and cut only the layer below it. And giving career staff more permanence raises a fair worry about an entrenched bureaucracy resisting an elected President. The answer is the one that works everywhere else: pair permanence with strong management authority and real accountability for performance, while keeping hiring and firing based on merit rather than politics. Permanence and accountability aren't opposites. The one thing we won't defend is the status quo — 4,000 political jobs, a jammed Senate, and a government that forgets how to do its job every four years.
What You Can Do
This is a bill, not a constitutional amendment — Congress can pass it and the President can sign it. On our action page you'll find the full bill text, a plain-language explainer, and a one-page summary as downloadable Word documents, plus a ready-to-send letter for your Representative and Senators. Read it, download it, and ask your members of Congress a simple question: will you back cutting the spoils system down to an essential core and letting professionals run the rest? The people who benefit from the current setup will fight it. Everyone else should want it.
Sources
• ~4,000 political positions, 1,200+ Senate-confirmed — Center for Presidential Transition / Partnership for Public Service
• Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act / Plum Book context — Congress.gov
• Confirmation delays now average ~170 days — Federal News Network / Partnership for Public Service
• Why confirmations take longer; persistent vacancies — Government Executive
• Volcker Commission: reduce appointees to ~2,000 — Washington Post
• Turnover of ~3,000 top executives per transition — Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (Oxford)
• UK / peer-democracy civil-service continuity — The Conversation