Political appointments in the United States
Under Section 102 of Executive Order 12674, political appointees who are appointed by the president are not allowed to receive any income from outside employment or activities.
This practice, known as "burrowing in", is desired by employees due to increased pay and job security, as career positions do not end when a presidential administration changes.
Though it is commonly assumed that the patronage system in the United States first came into general use during Andrew Jackson's presidency, it actually has an older history.
This meant that when the incumbent political party lost a presidential election, the federal government underwent wholesale turnover.
On July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau, a disaffected and mentally unstable political office seeker, assassinated President James Garfield.
[20] In addition, passage of the Hatch Act of 1939 forbade the intimidation or bribery of voters and restricted political campaign activities by federal employees.
Big-city political machines in places such as New York City, Boston, and Chicago thrived in the late nineteenth century.
[21] In October 2020, in the final months of his administration, President Donald Trump issued an executive order creating a new Schedule F category within the excepted service for employees "in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making and policy-advocating positions" and instructed agencies to identify and transfer competitive service employees that meet that description into the new job classification.
[22] Trump's successor, President Joe Biden, rescinded this executive order in January 2021, shortly after taking office, repealing the "Schedule F" plan.
"[6] A study by Matthew Auer, published in January 2008 in Public Administration Review, found that "Top-tier environmental appointees tend to stay longer in their appointed positions than do presidential appointees generally, and more than 40 percent have prior federal government management experience" but that "White House expectations for appointees' political loyalty" varies depending on the administration, with the Reagan and first-term G. W. Bush administrations having "the highest demands for political loyalty, with consequences for the policy–administration dichotomy in environmental agencies.
[29] Pay for political appointees is generally lower than pay for positions of equivalent responsibility in the private sector; Jeffrey Neal, the former chief human capital officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, noted in an article for the Partnership for Public Service that a U.S. government official "may run a multi-billion-dollar program with thousands of employees and make less (sometimes much less) than $200,000 per year.
