The Pendleton Act started with a small share of federal jobs, but the proportions grew substantially over time, ultimately encompassing the vast majority of federal employees. Another reform, 1939's Hatch Act, enacted after a series of scandals involving the Works Progress Administration for involving employees in the 1938 congressional elections, provided additional protections against the involvement of most government employees in partisan political activities, as much to protect employees from undue pressure from their political superiors as to curtail political influence by government employees with power over citizens.

Why this basic history? I write it in part as reform of the Veterans Affairs Department moves through Congress, with as great a chance of successful enactment this year as any piece of legislation (of course, given the pathetic record of this Congress, that makes it no sure thing). The reform, which will likely resemble the Senate bill cosponsored by Bernie Sanders and John McCain, does some important, urgent, and necessary things, especially making sure that veterans who have waited for months or longer to see a VA doctor will have other immediate options in the private sector.

The reform also addresses what is clearly a pattern of gross mismanagement at the VA, both on the health-delivery side and on the side of processing disability claims. Therein lies the rub. The House bill, written by Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, did so by wiping out entirely any protection from firing or demotion for VA employees, instead treating them like congressional employees, who have political jobs and no civil-service protection. The Sanders/McCain bill is better, but not by much. It would give a fired employee seven days to file an appeal after getting a termination notice and having his or her pay stopped, and give an appeals board a deadline of three weeks after that to render a decision. The bill allows VA executives to stop paying employees they want to fire before the employees can find out what the reasons are or file an appeal.

In almost all cases, an appeal would be complex enough to require the employee to hire a lawyer, who would then have to talk to the client, get evidence together, write an appeal, and appear before the board. Lawyers who know anything about this field are in short supply—simply getting one within a week would be tough. Getting one who would drop everything to focus on a case would be nearly impossible (not to mention very expensive for the canned employee whose paychecks have already stopped.) And if the appeals board had to deal with large numbers of cases, it would be overtaxed and overwhelmed, and the appeals would not be heard in anything resembling a fair and thorough fashion.

At the same time, what we know of VA mismanagement is that higher-level executives devised the system of concealing long wait times, and prodded underlings to go along and abet the corruption or face retribution. There is a chance that this new streamlined firing process would actually give more power to miscreants over their inferiors, making the problem worse.