We all encounter the federal government many times a day, often without even knowing it. It’s the federal government that protects our food and water supply, ensures planes reach their destinations safely, responds to natural disasters and more.
The public rightfully expects that these services work effectively—after all, they are funded by taxpayer dollars. Yet none of these services would exist without skilled federal employees—dedicated Americans who serve the public interest. They carry out the policies of our elected leaders, enforce our laws, protect our rights, and promote our safety and security.
Unfortunately, proposals by former President Donald Trump and his political allies would give a president and political appointees the power to arbitrarily fire thousands of professional, nonpartisan civil servants who are afforded due process rights and replace them with individuals considered loyal to the White House.
The plans would undermine our government’s ability to deliver fair and responsive services. A federal workforce filled with employees hired for their political beliefs rather than their skills and qualifications would move us further away from the type of government the public deserves. It would strip federal agencies of expertise and hamper their ability to provide good service to everyone, not just to those who support the president of the day.
Our government is not perfect, but we need to modernize it rather than burn it down. Based on more than 20 years of expertise in government reform, the Partnership for Public Service has homed in on the five most important priorities to improve how our government serves the people:
These reforms would provide our government with what it needs most: a way to offer the public simple and timely access to services like Social Security, veterans benefits and health care; modern, secure IT systems that help keep our country safe and secure; and highly qualified federal leaders and employees who are committed to the public trust and are good stewards of taxpayer dollars. As a result, the improvements we propose should be the basis for any discussion about enhancing our government’s ability to better serve the public—a goal supported by political leaders on both sides of the aisle, even in this era of increased polarization.
These priorities also are critical to solving the crisis of public trust in government. Today, too many people believe our government is wasteful, lacking in transparency and accountability, and indifferent to public needs. Changing public perceptions of government requires constructive solutions and a dedication to changing the status quo so government works—for all of us, regardless of political beliefs.
A nonpartisan federal workforce and well-managed agencies are fundamental to this vision. Hiring federal employees for political loyalty over merit and competence is not. Congress and the president must prioritize this reform agenda to support the federal workforce and promote practical ways to improve our government’s performance and accountability. Only then will our government keep up with the pressing challenges facing our nation and regain the public’s trust.
Placing competent people in leadership roles at federal departments and agencies is the most critical factor for our government’s success and impact. Individuals appointed by a president, and federal employees who have risen through the ranks to positions of authority, hold great responsibility. They must develop innovative solutions to complex problems, motivate their workforce and hold their teams accountable for delivering critical services to the public. At a time of declining faith in American institutions, these leaders—including the president and members of Congress—can rebuild trust in government by meeting the public’s needs effectively. However, our government is facing a leadership crisis.
No unified standard for public service leadership
Unlike organizations within the private sector and the military, the executive branch does not have a systematic, deliberate approach to developing and supporting leaders. Many senior government officials have been moved into top positions for their expertise on a particular issue but lack fundamental knowledge on how to manage an organization. Yet they may have tens of thousands of employees in their chain of command.
Too many political appointees require Senate confirmation
Between the November election and Inauguration Day, incoming presidents must prepare to fill over 4,000 political appointments. More than 1,300 of these positions require Senate confirmation—an increase of more than 60% since 1960—making it difficult for a new president to get a full team in place quickly.
Outdated strategies for identifying and hiring senior executives
Members of the Senior Executive Service, which is composed of the highest level of nonpolitical professional employees, work alongside political appointees who are hired for their political beliefs or loyalty to a particular president. Yet the government has not updated methods for hiring and recruiting these top people in decades. Nor has there been improvement in ongoing skills development for SES members. These issues often discourage current federal employees, as well as top people from outside government, from applying for these positions.
All federal executives and managers, including political appointees, need to meet a standard for leadership that holds them accountable for running healthy and high-performing agencies. The government should adopt a framework, similar to the one developed by the Partnership for Public Service, that requires leaders to prioritize and demonstrate skills essential to effective federal service, including the foundational value of being a steward of the public good.
The number of positions subject to confirmation is simply more than the Senate can handle. The Senate also needs to fix the arduous and lengthy confirmation process to make it easier for agencies to fill critical leadership vacancies, while still preserving its role in reviewing nominees’ qualifications. Congress also should update the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to clarify who may serve temporarily in a position until a political appointee steps into a role.
The criteria used to vet potential senior career leaders has not been updated for more than 20 years, while the skills needed to lead in a complex, digital world have changed drastically. Government needs to alter the way it recruits, identifies and hires people to be federal leaders, including ensuring they have a diversity of experience within the public, private or nonprofit sectors. Additionally, agencies need to spend time developing employees earlier in their careers to help them gain skills to move up the leadership ranks in their agencies.
The backbone of our federal government is the more than 2 million career employees who work across the country to serve the public. Hired based on their qualifications and skills, they design, develop and deliver services that connect agencies with the people they serve and ensure our government fulfills its mission to make our country safer, healthier and more prosperous.
However, the federal government struggles to recruit, hire and retain this talent, hamstringing agencies’ ability to meet public needs.
Slow hiring process
It takes the government an average of roughly 101 days to hire someone—more than twice the time it takes in the private sector. This keeps applicants in limbo, increasing the likelihood they will accept other job offers, and leaves agencies with key talent gaps.
Lack of opportunities for young people
Agencies tend not to prioritize internships and also overlook entry-level talent as a long-term strategy, despite some reports of progress in the most recent President’s Management Agenda. Today, just 7.5% of the full-time federal workforce is younger than 30 and 42% of federal workers are older than 50, compared with 20% and 33% in the broader labor market, respectively.
Ineffective hiring assessments
Agencies initially assess applicants based on how they rank their own skills and abilities. As a result, job candidates must portray themselves as experts at everything—even when they are not—to advance in the application process. This setup requires human resources managers, who move strong applications to the next hiring stage, to spend extra time sifting through potentially unqualified applicants, slowing the time it takes to hire an employee and giving hiring managers lists of unqualified candidates to consider.
People are the most important part of an organization—and this should be reflected in strategic planning efforts and agency performance evaluations. Leaders should make fixing the broken hiring process a top priority and agencies should evaluate current hiring processes to discover where they are not working for applicants, hiring managers and human resources specialists.
Agency leaders, human resources offices and managers should view student interns and applicants early in their careers as a key to hiring and developing employees. Congress also should create a new hiring mechanism that permits high-performing interns from qualified third-party internship providers, the external organizations that place students in federal internships, to be easily converted to full-time government employees, a practice that is currently prohibited.
Agencies should evaluate applicants using skills assessments, including those developed by experts in given subject areas. Minimum job qualifications should be based on the skills needed for the job. Moreover, agencies should be allowed to share their best-qualified job candidates with one another. This practice would enable more hiring managers at a wider spread of agencies to consider those candidates for roles in government.
When a company’s services or products do not work well or an employee does something wrong in the workplace, people generally expect the problem to be dealt with quickly. These same expectations hold true for our federal government—and the bar is even higher because the public has a vested interest in ensuring its tax dollars are put to good use.
Yet the current process for addressing poor performers in government is difficult for managers and confusing for workers, leading to a lack of accountability for government employees who do not carry out their roles and responsibilities effectively. It is important to ensure that federal employees cannot be fired for politically motivated or unjust reasons, but there are ways to update and simplify the current system that would make it easier to remove poor performers.
Reluctance to deal with poor performers
More than 40% of respondents to the 2023 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, the annual nationwide survey of federal employees, reported that poor performers usually remain in their work unit and continue to underperform.
No evaluation of employees during their first year of employment
The probationary period for new employees is meant to assess whether someone is a good fit for the job. It’s typically one year long and is designed to be the final assessment in the hiring process. However, supervisors often do not use this period to ensure new employees have the skills they need to thrive in their new role.
The appeals process takes too long
Federal employees can generally appeal a suspension, demotion or removal, but the process is complicated. In fiscal year 2023, it took agencies an average of 102 days to process an employee’s initial appeal, according to the Merit Systems Protection Board that adjudicates some employment cases.
Managers should be familiar with how to fairly address performance issues and be trained and provided with support on using disciplinary and removal procedures.
Supervisors should be required to determine whether employees are qualified, unqualified or the right fit during their first year on the job. If an employee is not performing well, agencies should have a process to provide them with additional training, move them to a different position or terminate them before the probationary period ends. New hires should not be automatically advanced to full-time employment if their supervisor does not formally decide whether they are qualified or unqualified. Rather, supervisors should have to evaluate these new employees and conclude that they meet the expectations of the job to move them to full-time status.
If an employee is disciplined or terminated for poor performance or misconduct, there needs to be a quick and streamlined review and appeals system, one that provides due process protections and ensures decisions are not politically motivated.
To meet public expectations of the digital era, agencies need to upgrade old IT systems so they can use emerging technology, including artificial intelligence, to make sense of customer data, analyze how government is performing, and deliver accessible and efficient services that meet the needs of a diverse public.
While the government has made progress in recent years toward modernizing its services, it still lacks the technology and tech experts to keep up with a fast-paced world.
Outdated technology
According to the 2023 Government Accountability Office’s High Risk List, the government spends 80% of its annual $100 billion IT budget on operating and maintaining existing IT investments, including old and outdated systems, not on new investments in leading-edge technologies.
Inadequate use of data to improve government services
Agencies collect a lot of data, but it often goes unused to improve federal programs and is housed in systems that cannot communicate with each other, hampering data sharing and data analytics. Data on how the federal government is performing is not widely accessible for agency leaders, members of Congress and the public. This lack of transparency limits agency efforts to improve federal services and drives public distrust of government more broadly.
The federal government is behind on emerging tech
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how the world works, but government systems are outdated and unprepared to use this evolving technology. This technology also comes with significant concerns over privacy, bias and misuse. Agencies lack the guidelines and processes needed to mitigate these concerns before implementing and scaling AI.
Congress must work with federal agencies to implement a long-term funding strategy to modernize badly outdated technology systems and strategically plan for future technological needs. Federal agencies and Congress should also collaborate to develop uniform rules around the responsible use of AI and other emerging technologies.
Top-performing organizations use data to improve results. For federal agencies and Congress to do so, they need high-quality data that can be processed by new AI tools and machine-readable formats. That data must then be used to make informed policy decisions.
AI is a rapidly evolving technology, so it’s important that government use it thoughtfully. To do that, Congress and agencies must first develop guidelines for use that are fair and transparent. Agencies also need to train and hire experts in this field to ensure AI tools are safe and meet their intended goals.
Providing the public with a good customer experience means making sure our government has the best technology, websites and systems available to easily determine what each customer needs and to inform the public how and where to go for help. While the government has pockets of excellence, it falls short of what the public expects and deserves. Negative interactions with federal agencies that do not meet customer needs can be a major obstacle to rebuilding trust in government.
Not an organizational priority
Agency efforts to provide a first-rate customer experience—if efforts are being made at all—are often disjointed, underfunded and disconnected from the organization’s strategy. Too often, these efforts do not fall under the explicit purview of a senior leader or senior leaders. This lack of strong institutional support for creating a better customer experience means agencies often fail to deliver high-quality services to the public.
Lack of expertise
The broken federal hiring process has deprived our government of the talent it needs to keep pace with customer experience requirements and technological advances, particularly when compared to the private sector.
Lack of customer feedback
Government services work best when they are designed with the customer in mind. This is best done by testing products and services with the public and gathering feedback to inform changes. But legislative barriers make it difficult for agencies to get valuable user feedback. They typically are required by law to go through a specific, often convoluted, approval process.
Agency staffs, from the highest levels of leadership to nonpolitical career employees, should be held accountable for providing a first-rate customer experience. Agencies should identify senior officials to lead customer experience work, fund and staff customer experience teams, and encourage the adoption of best practices across the organization.
It is critical for agencies to recruit and hire qualified individuals with skills in customer experience, data and technology to significantly improve service delivery.
Congress should consider legislation and agencies should develop processes for government to more easily collect, exchange and use customer data to deliver better public services. Using this data to improve the customer experience while protecting people’s privacy requires agencies to develop secure and flexible data-sharing systems.
