These reforms do not fix government. They rebuild the system that got a president killed. In 1881, James Garfield was shot by a disappointed office-seeker who wanted a patronage job, did not get one, and decided the president had to die. The Pendleton Civil Service Act that followed ended the spoils system, the old arrangement in which every election meant firing the government and hiring the winner’s friends.

John Fund of National Review is now celebrating twenty states quietly dismantling that settlement. In “Where Bipartisan Reform Is Actually Working”, Fund argues that government is inefficient, bad performers are nearly impossible to fire, and public employees should face easier termination, weaker collective bargaining, and more performance pay. West Virginia stripped civil-service and grievance protections from more than 9,000 workers. North Carolina made firing simpler. The federal government ended collective bargaining with several unions by executive order. Fund presents all of this as overdue modernization and asks why every state has not followed suit.

The answer is that “bipartisan reform” describes who agreed, not whether the agreement is good. Both parties can agree to make firing people easier. That may simply mean the reform is popular with the people doing the firing.

Some civil-service rules are genuinely cumbersome. Government hiring can be glacial. A process that takes months to fill a position the private sector fills in days is a real problem. Some bad performers are genuinely hard to fire. A government that cannot manage its own workforce has a real problem, and I am not here to defend a system that protects incompetence.

That is on the table.

Now look at what the op-ed is actually selling. Calling it “efficiency” is a magic trick. Watch the right hand while the left one rewrites the terms.

North Carolina fired 13 of its 70,000 employees last year for poor performance. The op-ed calls that unacceptable. Do the arithmetic: about two hundredths of one percent. But a well-run organization does not measure its health by how many people it fires. A hospital does not brag about its mortality rate.

The real question is whether those 13 were the right 13, whether managers had the tools they needed, and whether the process distinguished incompetence from retaliation. Fund skips those questions. He waves the number around as if more firings automatically produce better government. That claim sounds obvious until you have worked somewhere that uses the threat of firing to silence the person pointing out what is actually broken.

The low firing rate is not necessarily the bug. It is part of the design.

Before Pendleton, every election meant a purge. The post office, the customs house, the courts — all staffed by the winner’s friends. Competence was optional. Loyalty was everything. Government jobs were distributed as political spoils: you got the position because you backed the right candidate, not because you could do the work.

The civil service was the reform that ended that. It made firing harder on purpose. It forced a manager to show cause. It made public employment less dependent on the president’s gratitude and more dependent on demonstrated competence.

You can argue that the protections overcorrected. You cannot pretend they were invented by bureaucrats who simply did not feel like working.

Strip them away, and the power to fire the bad performer also becomes the power to fire the whistleblower who found the corruption, the inspector who flagged the safety violation, the organizer who asked for a raise, or the teacher who refused to endorse the right candidate. A boiler breaks. A worker files a report. A supervisor who wants that worker gone no longer needs a case — just a story and a signature.

That is not a performance standard. It is a hiring desk where the question is who you know, not what you know.

Patronage with a performance-review form.

Fund’s private-sector comparison deserves the same literal treatment. Private-sector at-will employment, where you can be fired for any reason or no reason, is not an efficiency paradise. It brings higher turnover, weaker worker investment, more room for discrimination, and quiet wage suppression when workers have nobody to negotiate with. It is a different set of tradeoffs. Fund mentions the freedom to fire and leaves the consequences in the hallway.

And the union? A union is a thousand people negotiating the price of their work together. That is a market, not a manifesto. It is a farmers’ co-op with a different product, and no one calls the farmers Bolsheviks when they bargain collectively with a grain elevator.

Public-sector unions are not an alien power floating above government. They are often the one institution standing between a state employee and the full power of the state — the power to fire someone for the wrong reason and call it performance. Strip away the union and the protections, and the only thing left is the boss’s word.

In this case, the boss is a politician.

West Virginia shows the mechanism clearly. Last April, Governor Patrick Morrisey stripped civil-service and grievance protections from more than 9,000 state employees. The op-ed calls that efficiency. What it actually does is remove the machinery by which workers can negotiate wages, contest unfair discipline, and challenge arbitrary management decisions.

That is not a side effect of the reform.

That is the reform.

The cost does not disappear because the editorial calls it flexibility. It moves. The worker pays in job security, voice, and the quiet fear that the wrong sentence will end a career. The public pays when a workforce becomes more loyal than competent, more afraid than skilled. When firing is easy and political, the people who survive are the people who are good at surviving, not necessarily the people who are good at the job.

That is the opposite of efficiency.

Denmark makes it easy to fire public employees too. That is the part American reformers like Fund remember. The Danes then wrap that flexibility in substantial income support and active retraining, so losing a job does not mean losing your life. That is the Danish flexicurity bargain: protect the worker, not the job.

The American proposal copies the trap door and removes the net.

No guaranteed income. No serious retraining pipeline. No institution ensuring that a displaced worker can reach the next job before the mortgage, health insurance, and grocery bill arrive. Just flexibility for management and exposure for everyone else.

The Nordic public sector manages a better balance: strong worker voice, flexible hiring, real performance expectations, and public services that function. It treats the people doing the work as partners in designing the system, not obstacles to be overridden. Denmark did not discover a magical national personality. It built institutions that make risk survivable and management answerable.

America could build a version of that. Not by protecting the incompetent. Train people. Pay them decently. Set clear performance standards with workers rather than imposing vague targets from above. Give managers the authority to act, but require evidence, review, and an appeal. Reward quality without turning pay systems into weapons against anyone who complains. Make hiring faster without making dismissal arbitrary. Strengthen worker voice instead of treating it as an administrative nuisance.

North Carolina’s Democratic governor signed the reform. The Republican legislature passed it unanimously. Fine. A bipartisan agreement can still be a bipartisan surrender to the people who hold the levers. The relevant question is not who voted for it. The relevant question is who gains the power to decide, who loses the ability to contest that decision, and who pays when the new arrangement fails.

The people who run the DMV, process unemployment claims, teach children, inspect workplaces, staff prisons, and fix the road to your house are not the problem. They are the people who deliver the government.

Someone chose to strip grievance protections from 9,000 workers in West Virginia. Someone chose to end collective bargaining for federal unions by executive order. Those are not weather events. They are institutional choices with winners and losers.

Fund would have you believe the only possible losers are bureaucrats who do not feel like working. The actual losers are the workers who now have one fewer way to tell the system it is failing — and the public that depends on them to say so.

A government that respects its workers gets a government that works. That is the reform worth having. It does not require firing anyone to prove it.