@sickburnbro I listened to the Auron McIntyre bit where they discussed this as, I guess, Moldbug had gone over it. The TDLR is that the civil service laws are an unconstitutional usurpation of Executive powers. From Wikipedia it looks like (of all people) W. Bush made a half-hearted stab at reforms which (obviously) stopped when he left office.

It's interesting as the original implementation used strict civil service exams to appoint/hire D.C. mandarins but since those have been gone for decades we basically have all the ills of the pre-1870 system but with only one side legally able to appoint their own people.