Let a President Lead—Without Handing Out 4,000 Jobs to Do It
Every new President is now expected to fill roughly 4,000 political jobs—more than 1,200 of which require Senate confirmation. That's far more than any other advanced democracy hands out, and most Americans have no idea the patronage layer sitting on top of the career civil service has grown this large. It rewards politics and loyalty over expertise, jams the Senate for months on end, and wipes out the government's institutional memory every four years.
This doesn't take a constitutional amendment—it's a bill Congress could pass tomorrow. Our bill cuts the number of political appointments down to an essential core and lets career professionals run the rest, the way most stable democracies already do—and the way a bipartisan federal commission recommended more than twenty years ago.
The sprawling appointment system isn't just big—it's self-defeating, in four connected ways:
The United States is a genuine outlier. In Britain, Canada, Germany, and most peer democracies, an election can change the government overnight—but the professional civil service stays in place. In the British system, 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 the near-total wipeout we see here. 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.
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.
We'll be straight about the hard part. A mandate from voters means little if a new administration can't put its own leaders in charge—so a President does need enough appointees to actually steer the ship. That's exactly why our bill keeps the full leadership team intact and cuts only the bloated layer below it. And yes, giving career staff more permanence raises the fair worry about an entrenched bureaucracy resisting an elected President. The answer is the one that works in every peer democracy: pair that permanence with strong management authority and real accountability for performance—while keeping hiring and firing based on merit, not politics. Permanence and accountability are not opposites.
The line between "essential leadership" and "patronage padding" is a real judgment call, so the bill draws it with clear criteria and a transparent, published schedule—not a backroom.
This is a discussion draft prepared for review by legislative counsel and for presentation to Members of Congress—proposed statutory language, not final legislative text. The authors are not attorneys.
Read the full bill, share it, and—most importantly—send it to your Representative. All three are formatted Word documents you can print or attach to an email.
This is a bill, so it can pass Congress and be signed into law—no state ratification required. The people to contact are your U.S. Representative and your two U.S. Senators. Not sure who they are?
A short, specific message from a constituent carries real weight—far more than a mass-produced form letter. Personal calls to a district office count even more.
Here's a letter you can use as a starting point. Make it your own—add a sentence about a vacancy or a bungled agency you've read about. Fill in the bracketed pieces, then paste it into your Representative's contact form or print and mail it.
Consider attaching the one-page summary or the full bill text (above) so your Representative's office has the actual language in hand.
Almost no one will stand up in public and argue that the government should be run by campaign donors instead of experts, or that it's good for the Senate to spend the year fighting over 1,200 confirmations. This reform makes government more competent, more stable, and less partisan all at once—and it doesn't tilt the field toward either party. It simply says: fill the essential jobs with the President's team, and let professionals do the rest.