Things that are happening
It’s hard to know where to start.
We’re six weeks into a new US government administration. The scale of deliberate and gleeful destruction of US state capacity on the part of the Trump administration is hard to process. As someone who writes about public service excellence it’s heartbreaking to hear so many stories of people’s careers, teams, and accomplishments being ripped apart. And to appreciate the immediate and longer-term impact of these changes: people losing access to lifesaving medicines, the abrupt halting of clinical trials and medical research, forcing out women and people of colour from US civil service leadership positions, eliminating protections for Americans with disabilities, dismantling weather forecasting, and more. Not to mention, picking fights with long-time international allies, celebrating authoritarianism, and generally flaunting the rule of law.
This isn’t a blog about US politics and it isn’t about to become one. I’m a non-partisan Canadian public servant and a very slow writer, which is two reasons why that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. But this is a blog about what it means to be a public servant in a changing world, and on that specific front, the past month has filled me with persistent sadness.
The deliberate destruction of care
I joined the public service because I want to make people’s lives better. It sounds trite but for so many public servants, their motivation is similar: to contribute to the well-being of their neighbours and communities and country.
Whether it’s research scientists or aid workers or forestry staff, the public servants being fired in the United States represent people who chose the work they do out of care for others and out of passion for the work. That’s what’s now being punished. Anne Helen Petersen wrote about this a week ago:
These cuts don’t just signal the end of public works as public good. They also signal the twilight of the passion job, better known as the jobs performed by millions of Americans, often at great personal expense and sacrifice, simply because they loved the work that they did. When you read the stories of the forest service employees who lost their jobs, that’s what you hear over and over again: I moved myself and my family across the country. I agreed to be a contingent employee for years. I didn’t make much; I spent weeks and months in the backcountry; I did physically taxing work; I dealt with understaffing and cranky visitors and unspeakable poop splatters. And I did it because I love this work.
Evidently there are downsides (as Petersen writes: work won’t love you back!) but as someone who feels the same way about my public service work, I want there to be jobs like this! I want there to be more of them, not fewer. I want people to be able to do work that is meaningful and helps people and isn’t focused on making a profit. It feels simplistic and childish to write that down, but it’s a choice we could collectively make. (And of course, “helping people” is often a cover for harm, well-intentioned or not.) But the opposite – where government services are hollowed out and replaced with for-profit and exclusionary services – is also a choice.
The loss of truly excellent public service teams
In my specific field of government tech, it was jaw-dropping to learn this past week that the US’s best digital government teams are being fired. The United States Digital Service (USDS) was folded into the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and almost all of its existing staff subsequently resigned in protest.
18F, the digital service team within the General Services Administration, was shut down and all of its staff were fired on March 1. Don Moynihan has a detailed recap of what happened, and Lucas Cherkewski wrote more about it from a Canadian perspective here.
These teams were absolutely world-class, made up of some of the brightest minds in the technology field. These are people that left prominent tech firms and took pay cuts to make government services work better for people. (If you’re curious about 18F and USDS’s origins, this 2015 post from Ben Balter is a good introduction.)
As former 18F staff described it:
Just yesterday we were working on important projects, including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels.
Ethan Marcotte (a long time hero of mine) left 18F a few weeks before it was shut down. He writes,
Leaving was the right call for me, but I’ll never feel good about the decision. I mean, there’s the grief angle: up until about a month ago, I was working on projects that felt like they mattered, and working alongside people who cared about helping government services work better for the public. A few months ago, I would’ve told you I’d like to stay there for years, which is not something I’ve said about any other place I’ve ever worked. I am incredibly sad to leave this job.
And look, being able to leave is, flatly, a privileged option: I can’t not work forever, but I can not work for a little bit. Most of my coworkers didn’t have that option. Some had just bought a house; some returned from parental leave, only to learn they might be losing the jobs they’d counted on to support their families.
I’m also angry at what was taken from me. At what’s being taken from all of us. I’ve watched a wonderful job, a wonderful place to work, a wonderful team get pulled apart by rich men in ill-fitting suits, each of them parroting the same talking points around “realignment” and “right-sizing”.
Far beyond their immediate projects, 18F and USDS staff leave behind a profound legacy of learning and inspiration for all of us that work in this field. Everyone that I met from both teams, without exception, was happy to share insights and ideas and resources. These are humble, kind, and brilliant people, and the very best of what the civic tech community represented.
What does the United States get instead? Degraded IT security, the loss of privacy and protection of sensitive information, and a free hand for corruption, grift, and replacing in-house talent with expensive contractors and management consultants. What a choice.
A poisoned well for public sector reform
It’s a small piece of all of this, but what’s especially painful on a personal note is how these decisions are being framed around “government efficiency” and reducing government waste.
For those of us who have been advocating for a better public service for years – one with less process and more capacity – it’s distressing to see the same language we used be applied in such a deliberately cruel and wanton way.
A year and a half ago I called for a “revolution” in public service delivery in Canada. (Who else was calling for a revolution, months later? That guy.) Back in 2017 I made my own “Move fast and break things” poster (yes, it aged poorly). The glacial rate at which public service institutions typically change felt so incompatible with a quickly changing world, one that clearly needed public service teams who were nimble, able to pivot when needed, empowered with good tools and responsive to robust feedback loops.
In the lead-up to the Trump inauguration, public service reformers like Jennifer Pahlka were hopeful that this could be the moment for change that a public service held back by “procedure fetish” needed.
What hurts is that I can see a part of myself in the young and inexperienced staffers now forming these (clearly harmful) “government efficiency” teams. I too was naive and optimistic about the potential for technology to improve outdated and clunky government services. I too had simplistic ideas of how decisions are made and how things should change. I would have loved to roam from department to department, learning how things work and how much things cost and what procedures and policies were slowing things down.
But would I have wanted root access to production systems storing millions of citizens’ data? Would I have wanted to fire senior public servants standing in the way of damage to critical national infrastructure? I don’t want either of those things now, when I’m years into a government technology career, let alone when I was right at the start of working in government. I’m happy to find creative workarounds for counterproductive policies, but I am very keen on following the law. And, I say this having worked on this a lot, on double-checking the math in your procurement data!
More fundamentally, I guess: I want to change the public service to make it better at doing what it does, not to make it not exist.
“Poisoning the well for public sector reform” is how a UK friend once described the fact that, for a brief time, the most prominent advocate for changing how the UK public service works was Dominic Cummings, the advisor to Boris Johnson more famous for having flaunted COVID-19 lockdown requirements that he helped draft. That combination made any other conversations about public service reform in the UK a non-starter.
I worry that the past month or so will have had the same effect on public service reform conversations here in Canada. Who is the current face of government efficiency? That guy, again. That’s not great, when we desperately do need changes to make the Canadian public service more effective, and when all of our noteworthy recent changes (looking at you, return-to-office policies) have made the federal public service worse instead of better.
Where do we go from here? I’m not sure. At the least, hold tight to your colleagues and friends, and look out for one another. Find what your work is now, as Mandy Brown describes it. Bear witness to things that are changing, and push for as much government transparency as you can – it’s the only way to know, down the road, how things subsequently change.
And if you’re in a political or senior public service role, recognize that public service delivery matters, and that poor-quality implementation has political costs. Because by the time unelected billionaires are dismantling government services at scale, it’s too late.
For more on the shuttering of 18F, read this reflection from Hillary Hartley, this thread from Dan Hon, or this post from Lindsay Young. You can also read 18F’s excellent guides for digital service delivery, archived here.