Hacker News Reader

Comment by parineum | Hacker News Reader

> Because republicans continue to fight each other over how much they can lick authority boot

Because Americans think everything is a partisan issue, despite things like this happening under multiple federal administrations of differing parties and in States that are, effectively, single party of both major parties.

View on HN

Just because a party is in power doesn't mean that party hasn't worked towards reform or correcting an issue. Lot's of arguments of "it happens under both parties" completely ignore corrective actions taken under one party and subverted by the other. Police in particular have an insane amount of political power and it would take decades to clean out the rot.

So, by this logic, it wouldn't make sense if programs like this hadn't been _started_ under administrations of both parties, right?

I'm looking for what evidence it would take to convince you that this isn't a partisan issue.

Republican Chester Arthur signed the Pendleton Act / civil service reform, which arguably virtually assured the way to gain power in the civil service was to add people or resources, meaning each president after had to grow the apparatus in order to implement their campaign promises or favors rather than just shit-canning all the previous people and regrowing it to the old size.

Before that the "spoils" system was able to check size of the executive branch as the people were allowed to elect someone to shit-can the previous servants. As it stands now the people have been essentially ripped of their previous voting power to elect an executive to make significant reductions of the civil service.

So I'd argue the Republicans did start it.

And Democrats are fighting against it, right?

https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2025/10/newsom-vet...

I think at this point both parties love the effects of civil service reform. Any handwaving about DOGE notwithstanding. It assures that the size of government can really only ratchet up, at least without stars aligning in congress, and bigger civil service means more executive power.

To get the party nomination you need to promise lots of things to lots of people, "I'm going to bankrupt the party favors to those who get me into power in order to help the little guy" might be a decent campaign slogan but you damn well better be pushing to put the peasants in debt/inflation as fast as possible if you actually want to get into office -- or else someone else will and snatch the nomination from you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com