United States Civil Service Commission

The United States Civil Service Commission became a central institution in the federal government’s peacetime loyalty reviews, carrying out investigations and clearing employees under a program established by Harry S. Truman in 1947. Its role linked the ordinary machinery of federal employment to a broad national-security effort whose reach was extensive but whose documented results included few dismissals and no evidence of espionage.

Background and Federal Loyalty Reviews

During the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt empowered the Civil Service to disqualify federal employees when there was reasonable doubt about their loyalty. Roosevelt later assigned the Justice Department and the FBI to check government workers. The book distinguishes this wartime arrangement from the policy that followed: until Truman’s order, no comparable loyalty-screening step had been taken in peacetime.

On March 21, 1947, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing a Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. The order subjected federal employees across job categories to investigations drawing on FBI files and records from the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Civil Service Commission was part of the resulting review system, in which findings of disloyalty could cost an employee a government job.

Scale and Outcomes

The investigations expanded rapidly. In the months after the order, the FBI began running name checks on all two million people on the federal payroll, a task the account describes as costly and immense. By 1951, over four years, the Civil Service Commission had investigated and cleared three million employees; the FBI investigated another 14,000.

The final figures set the breadth of the program against its limited number of dismissals. Several thousand employees resigned, but only 212 were dismissed as being of questionable loyalty. None was indicted, and investigators found no evidence of espionage. These outcomes show the Commission’s substantial administrative reach while also underscoring the gap between the program’s sweeping investigations and the cases that led to dismissal.