The US Abandoned Meritocracy and Got Bureaucratic Bloat

The Return of Merit: Why the Civil Service Exam Must Be Reinstated

The health of a republic depends not merely on the virtue of its leaders but on the competence of its administrators. A functioning government requires that those entrusted with the machinery of state be capable, informed, and accountable. That, in essence, was the animating ideal behind the federal civil service exam: to protect the American people from the twin perils of incompetence and corruption by ensuring a government staffed by merit. Yet over the past half-century, this ideal has been eroded, then discarded, not because it failed but because it succeeded too well in measuring ability, much to the discomfort of the politically fashionable.

The modern federal workforce was born out of the Pendleton Act of 1883, a legislative rebuke to the grotesque excesses of the patronage system. No longer would positions in the federal government be handed out like party favors to the politically loyal or the well-connected. A professional class would rise, chosen not by whom they knew but by what they knew. And for nearly a century, that principle held. The civil service exam functioned as a leveling mechanism, a barrier against cronyism and a gateway for the able.

But by the 1970s, a new orthodoxy emerged, one less interested in capability than in demography. The Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE), itself a refined instrument for identifying administrative talent, fell under attack for producing racially disparate outcomes. The case of Luevano v. Campbell marked a turning point. The plaintiffs did not allege that the exam was unfair in design or malicious in purpose. Rather, they contended that because different racial groups performed differently, the test must, ipso facto, be discriminatory. It was an argument of correlation over causation, but it carried the day.

The Carter administration, confronted with this challenge, might have defended the constitutional imperative for equal treatment, the statutory demand for merit-based hiring, and the moral obligation to hire the best-qualified. Instead, it capitulated. PACE was abandoned. Objective testing, the gold standard of fair evaluation, was replaced with subjective assessments: resumes, interviews, and "diversity-enhancing" hiring programs. Where once the federal government had demanded proof of ability, it now sought proxies. The result was a quiet revolution in hiring—a regression masked in the language of progress.

This abandonment of testing was not isolated. In 2010, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13562 (still in effect today), further distancing federal hiring from meritocratic principles. The rationale was revealing: written essays and similar assessments were said to disadvantage applicants from underrepresented backgrounds, particularly those whose written communication skills were not deemed sufficient. But to concede that writing proficiency is a disqualifier is not to justify removing the barrier, it is to highlight a deficiency that the job itself may require. In any reasonable domain, poor writing is a cause for concern, not a credential to be protected.

Critics of standardized testing often assert that exams are an insufficient predictor of job performance. This is a red herring. No test is perfect, but the proper question is comparative: Are structured, objective assessments superior to opaque, informal, and potentially biased evaluations? The answer, again and again, has been yes. A 2002 study by Schmidt and Hunter, published in Psychological Bulletin, reviewed 85 years of research and concluded that general cognitive ability tests are among the best predictors of job performance, outperforming unstructured interviews and resume reviews. In a government that administers everything from cyber defense to public health policy, the ability to reason, write, and analyze should be baseline qualifications, not optional enhancements.

Moreover, the move away from standardized testing has not made the hiring process more fair. It has simply made it more obscure. Informal interviews and resume screenings are fertile ground for implicit bias, favoritism, and credentialism. At least an exam can be audited. A panel interview cannot. At least a written test applies the same standard to everyone. A "holistic" hiring process applies no standard at all.

Some will argue that the disparities in test outcomes are too large to ignore, that such differences in performance indicate systemic barriers. Perhaps. But if the goal is equality of opportunity, then the proper remedy lies upstream, in education, in preparation, in mentorship. Lowering the bar of entry is not compassion, it is condescension. It assumes that certain groups cannot meet standards and therefore must be exempted from them. That is not equity. It is a quiet form of surrender.

Defenders of the status quo claim that modern hiring tools are more flexible, more "person-centered," more conducive to creating a diverse workforce. But a diverse bureaucracy is not a competent one unless diversity aligns with ability. The federal government is not a social engineering project. It is a system of authority, enforcement, regulation, and service. It must be staffed by those who can perform these functions with precision and integrity. To suggest otherwise is to mistake the civil service for a campus diversity office.

Furthermore, the legal justification for abandoning standardized exams is tenuous. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment practices that have a disparate impact unless the employer can show the practice is job-related and consistent with business necessity. The courts have recognized that general ability tests can satisfy this requirement. In Washington v. Davis (1976), the Supreme Court ruled that a police entrance exam that disproportionately excluded black applicants did not violate the Constitution, as there was no discriminatory intent and the exam measured relevant job skills. The Luevano settlement, by contrast, was a political compromise, not a constitutional necessity.

President Trump, if he wishes to drain the bureaucratic swamp in more than metaphor, must begin with reforming how the swamp is staffed. The restoration of the civil service exam would do more than elevate standards. It would restore trust. Americans rightly suspect that their government is staffed not by the best and brightest but by the best connected, the most ideologically aligned, or the most demographically favored. An exam does not care what you look like, whom you voted for, or where you went to school. It cares only whether you can do the job.

This logic must apply not only to future hires but to current employees. The federal workforce is vast, powerful, and deeply entrenched. If we are serious about accountability, then every current federal employee should be required to pass a reformed civil service exam appropriate to their position. The goal is not to purge but to affirm. Those who are competent will have nothing to fear. Those who are not should not be on the public payroll.

It is time to end the experiment in subjective hiring. It has failed. It has produced neither a more competent government nor a more just one. It has diluted standards under the guise of equity and eroded public faith in institutions once deemed apolitical. We must reverse course. We must affirm once again that public service is not a birthright or a diversity quota. It is a trust, to be earned, not granted.

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