President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly portrayed the federal civil service as a sinister “deep state,” a bureaucracy that he believes obstructed his first-term agenda and that he promises to upend when he takes office on Jan. 20.
Part of Trump’s plan calls for arbitrarily firing tens of thousands of nonpartisan career civil servants who were hired based on merit and expertise, and replacing them with political appointees loyal to the White House.
Trump also has named billionaire Elon Musk and financier Vivek Ramaswamy to head an advisory group on government spending that he has said will pave the way for his administration to “dismantle the government bureaucracy.” This initiative could further undermine the career workforce and make the government less efficient.
There is no doubt that the federal government needs to be modernized. It must hire faster, remove poor performers more easily, use technology better, and deliver services more effectively to the people it serves.
Yet firing thousands of expert and apolitical civil servants and replacing some of them with political loyalists will not achieve a better and more accountable government. In fact, it will return us to a failed 19th-century model of government called the “spoils system,” in which blind political fealty was the chief qualification for federal employment.
Today, more than two million career public servants work in communities across the country to make our nation stronger, safer, healthier, and more prosperous. They ensure that our food and water are safe, help veterans and seniors access their benefits, assist small businesses, find cures for diseases, conduct important scientific research, carry out the nation’s foreign policy, respond to natural disasters, and maintain the rule of law.
They do not do it for personal gain, for notoriety, or to advance a personal agenda; they do it to serve the public. There are countless examples of the accomplishments of federal employees that fly under the radar and defy the stereotypes, stories that my organization, the Partnership for Public Service, highlights each year through its Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal awards.
Protecting children
One such example involves three Department of Labor investigators in the Midwest who last year were horrified to discover that 102 children, ages 13 to 17, were working on overnight shifts at 13 meat slaughterhouses in eight states illegally cleaning bone saws, skull splitters, and other dangerous machinery.
A wide-ranging child labor investigation led by Nancy Alcantara, Shannon Rebolledo, and Justin Uphold resulted in a nationwide injunction, a consent decree, and one of the largest civil monetary penalties in the Labor Department’s history — $1.5 million against Packers Sanitation Services, a leading food sanitation service provider.
The inquiry brought investigators to meatpacking plants in Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Texas. And it prompted sweeping changes in how the Department of Labor conducts child labor law enforcement, resulting in a major national initiative that has since brought many wrongdoers to justice.
Rebolledo says she “will never forget the faces of these kids whose lives and safety were in danger working under such horrendous conditions.” Alcantara says, “It was traumatic walking through these slaughterhouses with animal parts on the floor and blood flowing, and just horrific to know 13-year-olds were working there overnight.” She continues, “We understood this investigation would be challenging, but we could not stop. We had to work together, get the resources, and develop a strategy to include as many plants as possible to have a nationwide impact.”
Protecting life and property
The storm surge from tropical hurricanes ordinarily causes most of the storm-related deaths in the United States, yet the National Weather Service had long used a forecasting system that typically focused on high winds. It fell short at giving the public reliable predictions and warnings about impending coastal flooding.
Storm surge specialist Jamie Rhome and his National Weather Service team radically changed this dynamic several years ago with the development of a sophisticated model and warning system that more accurately predicts the storm surge two days before a hurricane’s landfall and is updated every six hours. This helps to save lives and property.
Rhome and his team realized that storm surge is a complicated phenomenon dependent on the ocean depth, the landfall location, the shape of the coastline, and the hurricane’s speed and size. Rhome’s prediction model came into play when hurricanes Helene and Milton brought huge storm surges and flooding to coastal areas of Florida in September and October of this year. Kenneth Graham, head of the weather service, says the new prediction method helps determine “where to place shelters and when to evacuate hospitals and assisted living centers.”
Better customer service at the IRS
For decades, taxpayers have communicated with the IRS mostly through the mail, resulting in slow service and frustrating delays. That is changing with the agency’s Paperless Processing Initiative, a system that will allow taxpayers to digitally submit all correspondence, non-tax forms, and notice responses to the IRS for the 2024 filing season and offer additional digital enhancements for 2025 and 2026.
Three public servants, Darnita Trower, Wanda Brown, and Gerald Johnson, are driving this digital effort, overseeing a sweeping expansion of the agency’s systems to electronically accept roughly 3,600 different types of forms and letters that taxpayers use to submit information on tax returns, refunds and credits, document verification, identity theft, and more.
The IRS estimates that more than 94 percent of individual taxpayers will no longer need to send mail to the agency and that up to 125 million pieces of correspondence may be submitted digitally each year.
“Taxpayers will not only be able to do things at their fingertips, but now there’s more security in their data and information,” says IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel.
Ken Corbin, the agency’s chief taxpayer experience officer, credits Trower, Brown, and Johnson with enabling a “huge leap in service” that will make it easier for the IRS to resolve issues and, in some cases, process tax refunds. The group is currently expanding the new digital system to small businesses, corporations, and government entities. They also hope to electronically process all paper-filed tax returns, which will cut processing times in half and expedite taxpayer refunds by several weeks.
Trower, Brown, and Johnson say they are proud of the transformation taking place. “It’s what makes me get up every day and come to work to meet the challenges of the day,” Brown says.
Helping people in crisis
Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States, especially among adolescents and adults younger than 35, while mental health crises and drug overdoses have been escalating dramatically.
To help people in suicidal crisis and emotional distress, a team from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration led by Dr. John Palmieri, Richard McKeon, and James Wright in 2022 implemented a new and simplified nationwide three-digit voice and text hotline called 988, providing trained counselors 24/7 for suicide and mental health and drug crises.
This 988 Lifeline replaced the 10-digit national suicide telephone line, expanded the number of available trained counselors, set up call centers in every state, improved response rates, and expanded crisis assistance to individuals with substance use conditions.
Since its launch, counselors nationally have answered more than 10 million calls, texts, and chats from people all over the country. This includes more than 1.2 million calls answered on the veterans crisis line.
“This team focused on the mission, and they also care about people who suffer and understood what this project would mean to the public trust,” says Andrea Palm, deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
These four stories offer windows into the important work of our government and its dedicated civil servants, individuals who provide critical public services and make a huge difference for our country.
At a time when the United States faces so many formidable challenges, the focus should be on supporting the workforce and finding ways to improve the management and performance of the government, not denigrating and firing dedicated public servants, filling the ranks with political acolytes, and weakening or dismantling federal agencies.
Max Stier is president and CEO of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, an organization focused on building a better government and a stronger democracy.