As the Trump administration widened its campaign against the civil service, my mind kept turning to an old source, Max Stier, who has earnestly devoted his life to making government work better. Like his great passion, the bureaucracy, he’s relatively anonymous. In 2001, he founded an outfit called the Partnership for Public Service, a name that suggests an almost lyrical devotion to the gritty stuff of government. His organization is a font of ideas for making bureaucracy more effective. Over the years, it has trained thousands of government employees and helped agencies devise modernization plans.
Hoping to understand the damage that President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have managed to inflict, I called Stier this past weekend. What was he telling the civil servants who were calling him in a state of panic? Because he is levelheaded and committed to a nonpartisan agenda, I trusted him to deliver a measured assessment. That he seemed so profoundly alarmed was itself terrifying. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Franklin Foer: I’m sure your phone is constantly buzzing. What are you hearing?
Max Stier: I’ve fielded calls from Forest Service workers in Idaho and health-care workers in Georgia. It’s important that people know that the bulk of civil servants are not in D.C. Eighty percent of the feds are outside of D.C. They’re in every community in our country—and they used to be in a lot of communities globally too. Some people have been chased away. Some people have been directly fired, largely illegally, or put on administrative leave or sidelined. But there is no part of the workforce that is immune from this profound distraction and fear.
Foer: Okay, survey the totality of the wreckage for me.
Stier: There is just a series of hammer blows that have been wielded against the civil service. The so-called deferred-resignation offer is their attempt to create a stampede out the door, to make it easier for them to get rid of the apolitical expert civil service. And then, on the other end, they’re creating a system that enables them to politicize the hiring and the management of the workforce. Certainly there are parts of our government—and most obvious ones, like USAID and the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that are taking it on the chin even harder. Some of the most frightening things are happening at the FBI.
Right now, we’re seeing the destruction of infrastructure, but also a culture that focuses on the public good and the commitment to the rule of law. What we are going to see next is the use of government authority that is possible because that culture has been eradicated—the use of government authority for improper purposes. And so when you think about what’s happening, for example, with prosecutors who were fired because they investigated or prosecuted January 6 rioters or the president himself, these events foretell the use of government authority to pursue a personal agenda and to go after perceived enemies.
One other point: Sometimes even the media describes this as an effort to cut costs. This is not an effort to cut costs. This is going to cost the American taxpayer and the American public in huge ways.
Foer: Wait, explain that to me.
Stier: If you really wanted to reshape the federal workforce, you would start with an actual investigation of all the talent that you have—and then all the talent that you need. You would develop a plan. But what they’ve done is a random exercise. They are going after people without any sense about whether they’re the best performers or the poor performers. It’s probably a little worse than that: The people who may be the most talented have a larger propensity to leave, because they’ll have more options.
And the administration is creating liabilities. It will now owe money to people who are put on the sideline for no reason, and it will have to fill gaps that are created that they don’t even understand, which will mean eventually going out to hire contractors. There will be lawsuits—and lawsuits that are meritorious. Guess who pays for that? The American taxpayer is going to be funding the defense in those cases and will pay the payoff. If your intent were to shrink the workplace in a cost-effective way, this is a crazy way to do it.
Foer: But that’s the Silicon Valley way—moving fast and breaking stuff.
Stier: That may or may not be a smart strategy in Silicon Valley. It is not in the government, because there are real consequences. People get hurt in a different way when public capability is broken. One of the challenges in our government is that when it tries to modernize technology, it has to build up a new system alongside the legacy system. That’s how it manages to keep functioning.
Our government is about creating good outcomes; it’s not about throughput. So the objective is wrong here. The public sector has accountability, transparency, reliability issues that are simply not the same as in the private sector.
Foer: All the focus has been on DOGE, understandably. But what does the focus on Musk leave out?
Stier: Most democracies count their political appointees in the tens, not the thousands. We have a government where there are 4,000 political appointees that a president makes. That’s a vestige of the spoils system that actually creates a lot of grief. Only 1,300 of them require Senate confirmation. The remaining appointees are a bit invisible. The public isn’t seeing that they are the ones doing a lot of the damage right now.
Foer: Trump’s are qualitatively different from the appointees who show up in every administration?
Stier: It is qualitatively different. In modern times, there’s never [before] been a collection of political appointees where personal loyalty to the president has been the paramount value that has been used to select them. They swear an oath of office, when they take these jobs, to defend the Constitution. So they should be following the policy direction of the president within those constraints, but that is not how they were selected and not how they have begun to operate so far.
Foer: What do you make of DOGE’s efforts to gain access to government databases?
Stier: I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with the community of chief information-security officers. They’ve never seen anything like this, and it terrorizes every bone in their body. These are not just people who are trying to protect the status quo. These are people who would have been good allies for reform.
Foer: What are some of the scariest risks that you’ve heard described that these actual practitioners see as plausible?
Stier: Chinese control over vital assets of our government and our country, because DOGE has opened the door for that to happen. Selective attacks on enemies lists. Breakage of systems that have consequences for vulnerable Americans. And it’s not like, Oh, here’s a mistake. They are engaging in the same practice everywhere—and they are not asking for advice or help from people who know what those risks are.
Foer: What would a responsible government-reform agenda look like now?
Stier: Ask Americans what they think about our federal government, and they think about bickering politicians in Washington. They don’t actually think about civil service. And that’s part of the challenge here. The opportunity is hopefully they will begin to understand who those folks are and appreciate what they have, even if we can do better.
But a place to begin is tapping into the very best technologists in Silicon Valley to modernize government systems. We need to have a reorientation toward the customer. In the private sector, we’ve seen improved customer service that is created by the digital universe we live in. Our government needs to be much more customer-focused.
And at the end of the day, we need to see the reform of leadership. We have too many political appointees. The folks chosen for these jobs are chosen and rewarded for a policy announcement, not actual policy execution. We have short-term leaders aligned to long-term organizations. Take the Veterans Health Administration, which is a hospital system run by a political appointee. Much of the time, there’s no one in that job. And when they’re there, they’re there for two years. And you can’t run an operationally complex system with short-term leaders.
Interestingly, every career civil servant has a performance plan that they have to commit to. We need to hold political leaders responsible for real performance.
Foer: When civil servants ask you for advice about staying or going, what do you tell them?
Stier: The first thing I say is, this is a personal choice. No judgment from me.
A third of the civil service are veterans. Coming out of the military, they want to continue to serve. That is the dominant ethos in our government. So I say: Remember the sense of purpose that you carried into government. The longer you can stick it out, the longer you will continue to be able to help the American people. Systemically, we need the civil service committed to stay as much as possible—to ensure that the rule of law and the Constitution are actually followed.
Our government is the only tool for collective action that we have as a society. We live in a phenomenally dangerous world that has gotten scarier. Harms have metastasized. Our government needs to actually get better at meeting the set of risks that we face. Civil servants are the best tool we have for actually making our government better.
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