OPINION: We Need a Civil Service That Can Do Its Best Work

Unlikely as it seems, U.S. government bureaucrats have been having a bit of a boomlet. For the last 23 years, the Partnership for Public Service has run an annual award, known as the “Sammies,” for civil servants who, in their words, “have helped our government innovate, save lives and deliver critical services to the public.” The awards have mostly flown far under the radar, but not this year; recently, they were featured in a New Yorker article by Casey Cep, who calls them, tongue firmly in cheek, “the Oscars for the deep state.” At roughly the same time, The Washington Post has launched an extraordinary series of articles focusing on individual bureaucrats and agencies. It’s overseen by best-selling writer Michael Lewis, whose 2018 book, “The Fifth Risk,” highlighted the crucial and terribly underappreciated work done by federal civil servants. Lewis contributed the first article in the Post series, about Chris Mark, who works in the Pittsburgh office of the Mine Safety and Health Administration and, more than anyone, is responsible for a steep decline in coal miners’ deaths from roof collapses. The series is also looking at the VA, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, the IRS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and more. I don’t think there’s a huge mystery about why this is happening now. At the moment, the civil service also figures in a heated presidential campaign in which one of the candidates — Donald Trump — stands foursquare behind, essentially, demolishing it by removing current protections for civil servants so that political appointees and people committed to his goals can replace them. At a Texas rally last year, he told his audience, “Either the Deep State destroys America or we destroy the Deep State.” As it happens, those awards I mentioned above, the Sammies — officially, they’re called the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals — were handed out on Sept. 11. So, let’s take a look at how members of the Deep State are “destroying” America. The employees of the year, for instance, are Labor Department employees who discovered and investigated child-labor violations at meatpacking plants in eight states, where 102 children ages 13 to 17 were working illegally. An award went to Amira Boland, who used to work at the Office of Management and Budget, who over several years found ways to ease the Medicare-enrollment process, created a program for online passport renewal that has just gone into effect, and simplified disaster-assistance applications. Another award went to two USDA employees whose work “revolutionized bee disease diagnosis and treatment,” making it possible to develop medicines aimed at improving bee health and preventing colony collapse — vital to American farmers across a broad swath of the country. Over the course of my life, I have spent a lot of time talking to federal bureaucrats. And yes, there are duds, as there are in pretty much any private-sector business. But the vast majority of civil servants I have encountered over the years are dedicated to making America better and stronger, using every tool at their disposal — and sometimes inventing them when they don’t exist — to improve life for ordinary Americans, regardless of where they live, what they look like, or what they believe. They don’t talk about this much — and certainly not to the people in the press who could help Americans understand better what they actually do. “People who work in the government know you can get into a lot of trouble talking to a reporter,” the longtime journalist Timothy Noah wrote recently. “Civil servants are supposed to be invisible.” That’s too bad. Because as Noah also points out, “Government is a tool that can be used for good or ill — depending to a great degree, yes, on who is president but depending also on the invisible people who work well below, most of them (in my experience) are smarter and more public-spirited than you’ll find most other places.” As the Sammies make clear, many of the people who serve us have the knowledge and skill to do extraordinary work. They need our support — and the backing of the people we elect — to do it.              

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Lee Hamilton, 93, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana.