Establishment of the Federal Employees Loyalty Program

The Establishment of the Federal Employees Loyalty Program was Harry S. Truman’s 1947 creation of a peacetime system for investigating the loyalty of federal workers. Issued amid mounting political pressure over alleged Communist influence in government, the order sought to answer accusations that the administration was doing too little while defining a sweeping investigative process that Truman himself regarded with misgivings. Its reach was broad; its standard for dismissal was imprecise; and the later record showed that extensive investigation yielded few dismissals and no evidence of espionage.

Political Pressure and the Wartime Precedent

By early 1947, the question of Communist influence had become a contentious domestic issue. Republicans on Capitol Hill repeatedly alleged that the New Deal government had been penetrated by Communists. In his first speech as Speaker of the House, Joe Martin declared that people who preferred the Communist system had no place in government. J. Edgar Hoover argued for authority to remove public employees whose views he considered politically suspect, warning that they might shape foreign policy in favor of another country. The State Department was often singled out as the supposed center of the problem, while suspicion of the department and anxiety about Soviet power spread through political debate.

Truman was especially concerned about the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the direction it might take under its Republican chairman, J. Parnell Thomas. Acting through an executive order, he hoped to forestall more extreme congressional action. He also wanted to prevent critics from portraying his administration as soft on communism at home while he advocated a firmer policy abroad. These calculations placed the loyalty issue at the intersection of national security and domestic politics: the administration was responding to fears of subversion, but also to the pressure those fears exerted on its political standing.

The order had a wartime precedent, but the timing marked a significant change. In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt had empowered the Civil Service to disqualify government applicants and employees when there was reasonable doubt about their loyalty; a later executive order assigned the Justice Department and FBI responsibility for checking government workers. Those measures had been adopted during wartime. Until Truman acted, the federal government had not taken a comparable step in peacetime. On March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to Congress, he signed Executive Order No. 9835, establishing the Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program.

Scope and Investigative Rules

The program applied to federal employees in every job, rather than limiting scrutiny to particular departments or sensitive posts. Investigators could consult FBI files and the files of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Attorney General was also authorized to compile a list of organizations considered subversive. An employee could lose a government job on reasonable grounds for believing that the person was disloyal, although the order did not define disloyalty.

The process offered those accused little ability to answer the case against them. They could not confront the people making accusations, and might not learn their identities or the precise charges. The combination of a government-wide investigation, an undefined standard, and restricted access to allegations made the program more than a narrow safeguard against proven espionage. It exposed ordinary federal employment to a loyalty judgment whose grounds could remain obscure to the person being judged.

Truman nevertheless described the purpose as twofold: to guard against disloyal employees and to protect loyal workers from unfounded charges. To signal that the system should not become a partisan instrument, he appointed Seth Richardson, a conservative Republican and prominent Washington lawyer, to lead its Review Board. That appointment addressed the question of political balance in the review structure, but it did not remove the procedural limitations built into the order or supply a definition of disloyalty.

Investigations, Results, and Political Effect

The investigative undertaking expanded rapidly. The FBI began running name checks on all two million people on the federal payrolls, a task described as both costly and immense. By 1951, the Civil Service Commission had investigated and cleared three million employees, while the FBI had investigated another 14,000. Several thousand employees resigned. Only 212 were dismissed as being of questionable loyalty; none was indicted, and investigators found no evidence of espionage.

The figures sharpened the contrast between the scale of scrutiny and its limited results. The program subjected a very large workforce to investigation, yet the record described no espionage evidence and only a small number of dismissals. It also showed why the stated aim of protecting innocent employees sat uneasily beside procedures that denied accused workers the opportunity to confront their accusers or know exactly what they faced.

Politically, the order had an immediate effect. A confidential report to the editors of Time said that Republicans were beginning to take Truman seriously: the order had struck a responsive note in Congress and weakened a favored criticism that the administration was doing nothing about Communists in government. The measure thus served both as a security policy and as a conspicuous answer to political attack. Its announcement helped blunt one accusation even as its operation raised a separate question about what protection government employees could expect from the process itself.

Truman’s Reservations and Later Judgment

Truman’s support for a loyalty program did not mean that he welcomed every possible expansion of surveillance. His concern about Hoover persisted. In a private letter to Bess, he warned that Hoover’s organization could become the beginning of a citizen spy system and said he did not want that outcome. The concern reflected a boundary in his thinking: investigating federal employees was, in his view, distinct from permitting an unchecked apparatus of political surveillance to grow.

His later defense emphasized the climate of opinion in which the order had been established and the intention to make the system as fair as possible. In private conversation, however, he conceded that it had been a bad mistake. Clark Clifford later characterized the program as a response to the temper of the times and doubted that Truman could readily have acted otherwise. David Lilienthal, who understood the danger that self-appointed anti-Communist investigators could pose to loyal employees, considered the arrangement ominous: in practice, he wrote, it reversed the presumption that a person was innocent until proved guilty. The New York Post, by contrast, regarded the program as a logical response to subversion.

The program therefore emerged from both political pressure and a peacetime extension of wartime loyalty checks. Its design sought to reassure the public and protect the government, while its vague grounds for dismissal and barriers to answering accusations left employees vulnerable to uncertain judgments. The subsequent totals, and Truman’s own private acknowledgment that the policy had gone badly, made the tension between security, political reassurance, and procedural fairness central to its legacy.