We take it for granted. Historically, though, the phenomenon of the neutral civil service — apolitical government employees, chosen and promoted on merit, working on behalf of the state rather than a person or party — is vanishingly rare. Take a step back from the other crises of this summer and think about it.
In Europe, the idea of a professional civil service appeared relatively late, around the 18th century. The United States didn't have a federal civil service for most of its first hundred years. The British seized on the idea of civil service exams only when they faced a sudden need to administer an empire; they may well have been influenced by China, which had been administering such exams for two millennia, and which was widely admired for that reason at the time.