Even President Donald Trump seems less than thrilled with the tenure of Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who oversaw the catastrophic Minneapolis operation that resulted in the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
“Bovino is very good,” Trump told Fox News, “but he’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy. And in some cases, that’s good. Maybe it wasn’t good here.”
The president has learned — or at least neatly illustrated — a vital lesson that eludes many Americans: Personnel is policy.
Bovino, a longtime law enforcement official with a penchant for theatrics, answers to a boss who shares that weakness: Kristi L. Noem, the secretary of homeland security, whose self-dramatizing gestures frequently backfire. This appeals to our reality-star-in-chief for obvious reasons, but at least Trump has some political cunning and a keen sense of what audiences like. Noem, by contrast, believed she could somehow appeal to the American public by reminiscing about shooting her own dog. Instead it may well have knocked her off Trump’s vice president shortlist.
Putting theater kids in charge of a sensitive law enforcement operation was a mistake. That error was compounded by who was sent to carry out their orders. As Peter Moskos, a former police officer and criminology professor at John Jay College, has pointed out, urban cops have more training and experience with urban policing than Border Patrol — including dealing with rowdy protesters.
Contrast that with Randy Clarke, who runs the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. WMATA has had problems for decades: underfunding, deferred maintenance, safety disasters, reduced hours and angry riders. The pandemic tipped a troubled agency into full-blown crisis. In 2022, when Clarke took over, bus ridership was down by one-third from pre-pandemic levels, Metro ridership by almost two-thirds.
With all of Metro’s structural problems, and the work-from-home revolution, I wondered if WMATA could recover. Then Clarke made it work. Bus ridership now approximates its 2019 average, and Metro ridership, having steadily improved every year, finished 2025 at two-thirds the old level. Back-to-office mandates helped, but ask any Washingtonian (including me) and you’ll hear that they’re back on Metro because it suddenly got good again. As snow and bitter cold shut the city down this week, WMATA was one of the few parts of the government that seemed to function properly.
Yet when the “Statecraft” podcast interviewed Clarke last year, nothing he said sounded like rocket science. His superpowers are clear: sensible priorities and relentless execution. Clarke cracked down on fare evasion and prioritized safety and frequency, the things riders care about most. “The reality is, the basic stuff is the most important stuff, all the time,” he told host Santi Ruiz.
That’s similar to what I heard on my podcast a couple of weeks ago when I interviewed the legendary police commissioner William Bratton, who turned around New York’s sky-high crime rate in the 1990s. His secret sauce? Believing police could meaningfully reduce crime, finding ways for them to do it and surrounding himself with innovative thinkers who were committed to the mission.
Put that way, these leadership triumphs sound stupidly easy. But in government, they are unconscionably hard. American politics doesn’t select for able administrators; it selects for charismatic people who look good on television while making grandiose promises of policy transformation. Even when their grand ideas are good, they tend to fall apart in the execution.
That failure happens at all levels. Political appointees are frequently chosen for coalition management — or media visibility — rather than the ability to get things done. The civil service, meanwhile, is simply not built for excellence. Its hiring system is an archaic, byzantine mess that seems almost designed to filter out extraordinary candidates. The chief benefits of working for the government — great benefits and job security — attract risk-averse rule followers more than superstars and visionaries.
Even when superstars with a thirst for public service manage to jump through the required hoops, they find that once inside, they are encased in decades’ worth of procedural sludge, designed on the assumption that bureaucrats are malevolent idiots who can’t be trusted to change a printer cartridge without a 60-page manual governing their every move. A sufficiently creative and motivated person can manage to clear away enough of the sludge to make things happen, as Bratton and Clarke demonstrate. But of course, many creative and motivated people decide they have better things to do with their time than sludge clearance.
This problem is at the root of many of our other political challenges. Americans just don’t trust their government to work well, and that distrust breeds all manner of dysfunctions. Unfortunately, our theories about how to fix this problem are often backward. We talk endlessly about what government should do but seldom about who should do it. Yet the who frequently matters more than all the rest.
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