While federal civil service reform is generally dated from the post–Civil War period, the political roots of the reform effort go back much earlier—to the beginning of the republic. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to face the problem of a philosophically hostile bureaucracy. While sorely pressed by his supporters to remove Federalist officeholders and replace them with Republican par-tisans, Jefferson was determined not to remove officials for political reasons alone. He maintained in a letter in 1801 to William Findley that “Malconduct is a just ground of removal, mere difference of political opinion is not.