The “global spoils system,” or the way in which top posts at multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), regional development banks, and UN agencies are ...

The federal government’s core civilian workforce has long been known for its professionalism. About 2.1 million nonpartisan career officials provide essential public services in such diverse areas as ...

"To the victor belong the spoils." For decades in the 1800s, that phrase was more than a slogan; it was the official hiring policy of the U.S. government. "You win the election, you're entitled to put ...

Donald Trump wants to bring back the spoils system. Death by Lightning is an entertaining tale of why we should never do that.

After one term as president in which his promise to remake the massive federal government mostly came up short, Donald Trump again is raining fury on the “deep state,” pledging if elected in November ...

Back in the 1990s while working for the Clinton administrations U.S. Office of Personnel Management, I wrote articles in prominent scholarly journals with titles like "Thinking the Unthinkable in ...

Donald Trump is, for a second time, trying to revive the political spoils system, this time with a new Schedule F executive order in which he is attempting to reclassify tens of thousands of federal ...

A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. We will not know the extent or the success of President Donald Trump’s purge of the ...

Throughout most of the 19th century, the lion’s share of appointments to federal jobs was rewarded to the faithful supporters of the winning candidate of the presidential elections. During that era, ...