Trump wanted to slash the federal government. But federal agencies are doing just fine.

October 22, 2021

In the fall of 2020, I cooperated with colleagues at Princeton and Georgetown universities and the Partnership for Public Service to conduct a nonpartisan assessment of the health of the departments and agencies of government at the end of the Trump administration. We wanted to benchmark their performance against comparable private-sector organizations. To do this, we surveyed more than 1,500 appointed and career federal executives. We included questions that corporate survey firm Mercer Sirota regularly uses in surveys of comparable private-sector executives to provide the benchmark.