Under the leadership of President Donald Trump, we have a chance to make civil service great again.
In many ways, the Founding Fathers were the original civil servants. They were the start-up founders who inspired generations to work on behalf of the American dream long before there was an institutionalized civil service – later formalized by the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 and bolstered by Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership as commissioner of the U.S. Civil Service Commission (the modern predecessor of today’s Office of Personnel Management, which I have the privilege to lead).
Across two and a half centuries since our nation’s founding, public servants have heeded the clarion call of the noblest of missions: from forming our nation after the American Revolution to ultimately cementing our supremacy during the Cold War by literally shooting for the moon via the Apollo program. These bold entreaties inspired the nation’s best and brightest to embrace public service.
For over 50 years since the Apollo landing, however, the public’s interest in civil service has plummeted back down to earth. Many Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were polymaths who chose to focus their genius on creating the best government the world had ever seen. But if Alexander Hamilton, our first Treasury secretary, were alive today, he likely would be working in Silicon Valley or Wall Street, instead of in the federal government.
First, the mission – since the days of moonshots, the federal workforce has not been asked to “dream big” or innovate. Instead, they have been tasked with managing small problems, preserving the status quo and protecting against the downside at all costs.
Second, incentives – power and prestige derive from the size of an agency’s headcount and budget. In all cases, more is better.
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Third, the lack of a high-performance culture – a focus on equity over merit and job stability over accountability.
Fourth, treating technology as a second-class citizen – instead, the answer to most problems has been more headcount.
Fifth, an arms-length relationship with the private sector that fails to create partnership, particularly when it comes to attracting talent in critical areas.
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First, Trump has no shortage of moonshots to transform America’s economic future – winning in artificial intelligence, unleashing American energy, revolutionizing financial technology with cryptocurrencies, reindustrializing the heartland, making America healthy again, and the list goes on. Inspiring missions inspire great minds who want to be a part of something truly transformational.
Second, changing the incentives that ultimately drive civil service behavior. If we give employees permission to take “measured” risks, to think from first principles, to be willing to pilot new ideas with the understanding that we won’t score a 100%, to make operational efficiency and stewardship of taxpayer dollars a first-class citizen, we can change behavior. Let’s reward creativity, continuous improvement and doing more with less; power should no longer derive from organizational bloat, but rather from financially sound outcomes.
Third, we can create a high-performance culture. We must disproportionately reward those who create the most value for the taxpayer and remove employees from the organization who aren’t able to respond to performance improvement guidance. No more “peanut buttering” of annual evaluations and bonuses to achieve equity goals; we should instead demand excellence.
Fourth, make the adoption of technology a key tenet of success. The government should be a leading testing ground for new technologies, rather than the last bastion of mainframe computers. Eliminate the “not invented here” bias that pervades government adoption of technology; we don’t need to build bespoke applications when third parties have superior solutions.
Lastly, embrace the private sector to partner on talent. We can build out public-private exchanges, secondment opportunities, and higher education pathways to ensure that the government gets access to the best and brightest. Of course, many people may ultimately choose to spend the majority of their careers in the private sector, but they can still contribute to success in the public sector.
President Trump is ushering in a Golden Age for America by reforming the government bureaucracy to work for the American people. We will make the civil service great again. The future of our nation depends on it.