Elon Musk arrives at Arnold Hall for the Ira C. Eaker Distinguished Speaker Presentation on April 7, 2022, at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. (Trevor Cokley/U.S. Air Force Academy)
America has elected a president who has empowered two businessmen with no experience in public service or governing to effectively rule over the federal government, in part by promising to “delete” assorted agencies as part of a plan to cut spending by $2 trillion. Both have an affinity for mass layoffs, Elon Musk at his various companies and Vivek Ramaswamy of federal employees as part of a campaign promise.
Whether these men, who will lead President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will have any actual authority, remains to be seen.
If nothing else, their impossible-to-fill promises to slash spending and fire workers has put a spotlight on government employees in terms of who they are, the functions they perform and their motivations for working in the public sector.
Although we don’t yet know what DOGE has in store, an improvement in job quality, wages and working conditions is unlikely. Just last week, Trump threatened to fire federal employees who don’t come back to the office and said he would go to court to challenge a Biden administration labor contract that locked in remote work arrangements for thousands of them.
So, if you are a federal worker, should you quit and avoid the (potential) wrath of DOGE? In some ways, the answer reveals what is wrong with government.
Paul Volcker was a lifelong advocate for improving public service. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve who is credited with breaking inflation in the early 1980s spearheaded the first National Commission on Public Service report in 1989 and the follow-up in 2003. He liked to point out that the casual bashing of federal employees that politicians love to do was destructive. The more public service is denigrated, the less appreciated civil servants are and the harder it is to recruit high-quality employees.
Both commissions concluded that biggest problems with public service was not the workers, but how they were led and organized. The first report emphasized that civil servants report to political appointees and that the number of appointees had swelled. They now total about 4,000, helping to choke off promotion and career advancement.
In other words, at some point, success based on performance ends and political connections take over. The second report made the same point but focused on the organizational structure of the government, an outdated holdover with duplicative responsibilities under rules that carry the power of law. It concluded that the agencies needed to be made anew based on tasks and mission. (To their credit, the commission guessed that such a task would take a decade.)
It was as if the system was designed to discourage workers. But which workers? Let’s go back to original question. Should you, as a federal employee, quit?
Say the answer is yes. If Trump — your boss’ boss — does not appreciate the work of government employees and agrees that many, if not most, should be laid off, then quitting is a way to signal your dissatisfaction in a manner Volcker would have predicted as well as signal that a lack of respect is costing America valuable civil servants. But quitting can be interpreted as a political statement. Trump has long claimed that federal employees comprise a “deep state” that he’s vowed to dismantle. To quit just as he is reelected plays into his belief that public employees are politically motivated.
Say the answer is no. After all, from the perspective of civil servants, politicians and their appointees are like short-lived mayflies. Staying sends a powerful signal that whatever the political noise, civil servants are above it. Your job is to serve the people and the people elect new bosses every four years. But staying the course has its own risks, namely by perpetuating the perception that civil servants don’t have the skills for private-sector jobs, and if they could leave, they would.
Whatever they do, federal workers risk either being viewed as political or incompetent — or both.
Quiet technocrats drawn to the mission of public service will choose to stay every time. That’s not to say that they never quit, get frustrated nor leave to go to the private sector (or never come back, for that matter). But politics don’t dictate what they do, and they serve both parties equally.
And that’s the real problem. The people best poised to punish politicians for their poor leadership, mismanagement or byzantine organizational structure are inclined to stay quiet. Aside from quitting, there’s not much civil servants can do in protest. The Hatch Act strictly limits what political behavior is allowed. They can’t endorse a candidate, a policy or a commission’s recommendations, and they can’t make political donations or campaign for a person or party.
Civil servants are a convenient punching bag to distract from the failures of leadership promulgated by successive administrations to improve the structure or performance of the federal government. The solutions offered in 1989 and again in 2003 make just as much sense now as they did then.
Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist and independent policy consultant. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
