For years now this magazine has been arguing that civil service reform is a necessary condition for fixing a myriad of America’s problems. When the IRS starts politically targeting people and the VA’s incompetence is killing veterans, and both are almost entirely resistant to the efforts by Congress to fire anyone, bureaucrats have, in effect, become our masters.

Now, Philip K. Howard, whose 1994 book The Death of Common Sense proved instrumental in encouraging reform of the legal profession, is sounding the alarm about the federal bureaucracy. In fact, he makes the case in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that the civil service system as we know it is unconstitutional: