Definition
Civil-service reform was the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century campaign to replace the spoils system — by which winning a political race meant filling government offices with one's supporters — with a merit-based bureaucracy hired by competitive examination, evaluated on performance, and protected from political dismissal. The federal Pendleton Act of 1883 was its founding statute; state and city equivalents followed in waves over the next half-century.
Robert Moses, as a young Bureau of Municipal Research analyst, wrote a 1,000-page draft civil-service reorganization plan for New York that was rejected outright by Tammany's mayor and almost ended his career before it began. He absorbed the lesson — not that reform was wrong, but that reform without political backing is wasted effort.
Why it matters
How it works
A civil-service system rests on three procedural foundations: a competitive examination open to any qualified candidate, defined job classifications with attached pay scales, and protection against arbitrary dismissal once hired. The combination makes it harder to use government employment as currency for political loyalty.
The reform's limit is that patronage can always find a new home. When jobs become merit-based, the same political-loyalty function migrates to contracts (consulting, legal, insurance, construction) where the rules of competition are more easily bent. The full meaning of The Power Broker is partly that Moses built a patronage empire that operated entirely outside the civil-service rules — through contracts, consultancies, and authority appointments that the reform statutes did not reach.