> In January 1981, the Jimmy Carter administration settled the court case Luévano v. Campbell, which alleged the Professional and Administrative Careers Examination (PACE) was racially discriminatory as a result of the lower average scores and pass rates achieved by Black and Hispanic test takers. As a result of this settlement agreement, PACE, the main entry-level test for candidates seeking positions in the federal government’s executive branch, was scrapped.[36] It has not been replaced by a similar general exam, although attempts at replacement exams have been made. The system which replaced the general PACE exam has been criticized...
People couldn't agree what merit was, and sued over it. Now it's not only [still] unclear what merit is, but it's also unclear how aligned federal hiring practices are with any platonic ideal of "merit".
Trump and Elon taking a blowtorch to a lot of agencies isn't better, or even good. It looks to me like a different kind of bad that can't be quantified at the moment. Some of the worst of this will be temporary, since various resources are offline so that federal agencies can be compliant with Trump's EOs while they figure out how to change the resources and their databases, or wait for lawsuits to clarify before changing much or putting it back online.
Hiring through a merit system does not imply that the employees' work is meritful.
Congress had over 140 years (1883 to 2024) to carefully balance the rights of civil service workers against the need for top-down executive authority to ensure agencies are effective, in a way that would survive judicial review. Unfortunately, Congress is inept at almost everything. The Pendleton Act, followed by the CSRA, don't seem to have very well addressed the original patronage-based exec-branch staffing issue; as the article describes it, they've only ensured that replacing high-level staff is delayed by a term. Have they also made it too difficult to dismiss lower-level staff if agencies are ever in need of scaling back?