“By any historical measure, the new data … by the ‘Partnership for Public Service’ is documenting the worst employee engagement and workforce sentiment I’ve seen for the federal government. To put things in perspective, in a typical year, agencies work hard to get their scores from the high 60s to the mid-70s, or even the 80s. This year the average is 32. No federal agency is the ‘best place to work’ at this point.”

                     Elizabeth Linos        

                     Harvard University

……………………………………………

On occasion, I have commented on the systemic erosion respecting the very notion of public service in government. For example, there had been a time when the best and the brightest vied for positions within America’s foreign service elite. In addition, from the 1930s through the 1960s, top college grads from the best schools migrated to Washington to contribute their skills toward solving society’s challenges. During that final decade (the 1960s), agencies like the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and the Peace Corps attracted top academic talent. It was seen as an honor and privilege to confront the nation’s issues.

Even in the late 1970s, federal agencies boasted highly skilled personnel. NASA traditionally was a bright star in the federal constellation. The top planning entity in the Department of Health and Human Services, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), was another. It was said that ASPE’s technical staff in the late 1970s could rival a top 10 university’s economics faculty in quality.

The concept of an exemplary public service began to decline when President Reagan asserted that government was not the solution to our problems. Rather, it was the problem. Republican orthodoxy routinely associated the civil service with inefficiency and waste. Nothing exemplified that trope more than Trump’s unleashing of Elon Musk and his DOGE team. They promised $2 trillion in savings. After mindlessly ravaging through the bureaucracy, and then silently backtracking on most cuts, few dollars were ‘saved’ but any remaining staff morale was utterly devastated. Musk’s rampage surely left remaining staff with the impression that their work was unimportant at best, perhaps even incompetent or utterly useless.

Data from the most recent Partnership for Public Service annual survey is revealing. The average score for staff engagement and positive sentiment fell by over 40 percentage points during the first year of the ‘second’ Trump era. That is a galactic decline in morale. Almost three-in-five survey respondents asserted that they are less engaged than in the previous year, another tectonic shift.

Part of the problem could be assigned to political indifference or even interference. Only 7.5 percent of respondents said that high-level agency political leaders generate supportive motivational sentiments among staff. All agencies are bad but some are incomprehensibly abysmal. Less than 3 percent of survey respondents say that Robert Kennedy’s political staff at HHS provide them with any positive motivation.

Ideological loyalty, not agency mission, dominates institutional culture today across federal agencies. Some one-in-four report being afraid to report wrongdoing. Fear and job insecurity are rampant. Few wish stand out, or take chances, or innovate. Staff are tolerated at best, not encouraged to be innovative nor inventive. An aura  of authoritarian rule, and top-down control, now permeates institutional life. People merely want to survive, not serve a larger purpose.

The result is a radical decline in service quality. Some 37 percent claim that their working unit now provides services of lesser quality. Try getting help from Social Security, the IRS, or the Center for Disease Control these days. In a recent blog, I mentioned chatting with a former NASA consultant. He confirmed that recent NASA mishaps widely are being attributed to a degraded quality of management.

But the decline of our public service ideal obviously did not start with Trump, nor is it entirely the fault of Republicans. Back in the 1970s, my late wife was appointed to a high level Wisconsin Gubernatorial panel (aka The Stevens- Offner Commission) that was devoted to overhauling the State’s civil service system. She had recently managed a large study of ‘women in state government and thus was considered an expert in personnel matters.

At the time, Wisconsin was still considered a positive outlier in terms of good government performance. When I worked in Wisconsin’s state government during the early 1970s, federal officials and outside consultants routinely observed how extraordinarily high was the quality of the state’s bureaucracy. Wisconsin had long been thought of as a laboratory for democracy. My experience in Wisconsin’s civil service generally supported the kudos being received.

I considered that fact on numerous occasions. One contributing factor, it seemed to me, was the manner in which the civil service was organized at that time. Politics were separated from the execution of policy by an organizational framework that depended on civilian boards to oversee agency operations. These citizen boards were structured in a way to minimize political interference into agency operations. Politicians set policy but technical experts executed it. Governors eventually could reappoint these citizen boards but it took time. (Note: the University still functions this way.)

Anyway, I recall my spouse coming home from one of her high-powered Civil Service committee sessions with the news that they would recommend dismantling this semi– independent governing board concept to give the governor much more control over the bureacracy. She argued that the top political executive was elected by the people and therefore should exercise more control over the execution of his or her policies.

I smiled to her pronouncement before predicting that, in about a decade, Wisconsin would lose its preeminent reputation for excellence in government. It might not happen immediately, but the state eventually would forfeit its reputation as a well-run state. Alas, Wisconsin soon would come to look like all its’ other peer jurisdictions.

My spouse and I debated the issue for some time, a discourse I cannot detail here. In the end, sadly, Wisconsin did go the way of other states … beginning when the governor was given more control of the state bureaucracy. By the way, it was a decade later that she surprised me one day by stating that I had been right on that issue, and the panel (including herself) had been wrong. I believe that was the one and only time during our 50 years together that she said I was right about something … about anything. I think it took me a week to recover.

Of course, once given some control, politicians want more. Political appointments extend further and further into the bureacracy. Merit is replaced with loyalty. Ideas increasingly flow down, not up. Experience and expertise are replaced by unthinking obedience. I had enjoyed my time working in Wisconsin government (1971 to 1975). But I was grateful that I escaped to the University when I did, before the shining light that had been Wisconsin’s concept of public service had faded into mediocrity.

I also had an opportunity to spend a year working at the top planning entity (ASPE) for the federal Department of Health and Human Services. This was in the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration was working on Welfare and Healthcare reform. As I suggested earlier, the staff at ASPE were yet bright and hard working. Still, they could no longer attract the top talent they once did. Few of the permanent staff had doctorates by this time. Former members of ASPE from the late 70s were now ensconced in think tanks like The Brookings Institute or were on the faculties of R-1 research universities.

Later, while I was Assistant Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Director Barbara Wolfe and I worked with ASPE management to develop a pipeline for newly minted Ph.D.s to accept ASPE staff positions. We had some success but could not reverse the longer-term trend.

How can we revitalize public service? Some things are obvious … stop villifying public servants would be a start. But at the heart of the matter lies the corrupting connection between politics and the execution of policy. Deciding what direction to take is one thing. But having the best people possible executing policy is equally important. Let us not forget that some of our most important decisions should be disconnected from political control … justice being one and managing our economy (via the Federal Reserve) being another. We should do the same with conducting our elections and, I might suggest, with attracting and retaining the best people in public service. Some aspects of governance simply are too important to be left to the politicians.