A Civil Service In Crisis
Americans are counting on public servants. But who’d want to be one?
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With new executive actions targeting the federal workforce emanating from the White House or DOGE almost daily, it may seem premature to cast an eye ahead on the impact on rising public servants who have not yet taken their oaths. I can’t avoid it in my role at The Volcker Alliance, where I sit between such rising leaders and the public agencies who need their skills. I have been thinking daily about a question from a colleague as we discussed the talent situation at federal agencies: “With everything going on, would you want to take a job there?”
How many thousands of others are thinking the same?
To be fair, shortcomings in federal talent acquisition long predate January 20, 2025. In the year I was born, my employer’s namesake Paul Volcker led a national commission that trumpeted the “quiet crisis” of the federal workforce’s inability to recruit, hire, and manage talent. Since 2001, the Government Accountability Office has included strategic human capital planning on its annual high-risk list, and by 2023 more than half of its recommendations zeroed in on critical skills gaps in roles like technology, acquisition, health care, and sciences. Throughout, the unwieldy and sluggish hiring process has frustrated and deterred applicants even as it infuriates current feds trying gamely to build their bench. Much reform, mostly practical and non-ideological, is needed to enhance the government’s positioning as an employer.
Starting from this deficit, personnel actions in the first month of the Trump administration have further diminished the government’s ability to attract and hire public servants. Unless there is a change of course, this will intensify in ways not easily reversed in this or future administrations. Some may not know it yet, but Americans are counting on the next wave of public servants not yet hired to deliver services and meet our shared challenges as a nation. We should grapple honestly with the cascading damage to that goal.
Public Disservice
Where and how is this happening? A first contributor is the ongoing, generalized attacks on public servants from the White House on down that are poisoning agencies’ profiles as employers. Criticisms of bureaucrats are nothing new, but the ceaseless and indiscriminate broadsides against the “deep state”—in rhetoric and policy—are sure to be internalized by future would-be civil servants. Some will take attacks literally and conclude that the government is composed entirely of incompetents, fraudsters, and ideologues. Others will take them seriously and conclude that talented, driven people will be attacked rather than empowered to contribute. In either case, the situation is neatly reflected in DOGE’s deferred resignation offer that encourages moving “from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” Senior government leaders regarding their workforce so contemptuously is a powerful signal.
Downstream, a new degree of instability will attach itself to federal service. The hiring freeze and rescinded offers are alienating thousands of people at the doorstep of service careers. The extraordinarily expansive claims of executive authority undergirding the administration’s attempts to shutter USAID and other agencies send a message of career precarity to millions more potential public servants, inverting a previous area of strength (comparative stability) in the federal “pitch.” With brand damage like this, professionals with alternatives—nurses, cybersecurity professionals, accountants, research scientists—are likely to take them.
Pipeline Politicization
A second dimension is the administration’s promise to push politicization far beyond the more than 4,000 appointments presidents already fill. The potential reclassification of thousands of career roles into the Schedule Policy/Career (formally Schedule F) and actions targeting the Senior Executive Service will infuse a new degree of political valence far deeper into agencies. They send the corrosive message to aspiring public servants that partisan alignment with the president is a precondition of service, and that disagreement carries risks. Not only does this impression undermine merit by excising perhaps half of a potential hiring pool at any given time, but it deters job seekers whose financial situations or family commitments will not abide quadrennial dislocation from partisan turnabout.
Worse still, elevating political loyalty will inevitably come at the expense of mission. Mission is the competitive advantage that the public sector possesses relative to other sectors, and it is potent. As a North Star, the mission—serving veterans, ensuring clean air and water, upholding the law—ennobles and elevates often difficult work and offsets some of the federal government’s shortcomings as an employer. Political loyalty rings hollow by comparison, and substituting it for mission is a body blow to reaching the talent we need.
Breaking the Chain
Finally, attacks on current public servants will have spillover effects on recruiting future ones. In part due to the rarity of dedicated civilian federal recruiters, agencies rely on current civil servants to carry the flag, often on their own volition, for careers of service at their alma maters, to peers in their professional disciplines, and in day-to-day engagement in their communities. Unfortunately, those most inclined and effective at doing so are those likeliest to have departed through a form of DOGE-driven adverse selection.
If attacks persist, the civil servants with the readiest career alternatives—those in the highest-demand roles with the strongest professional networks and the most go-getter attitudes—will be those most likely to leave, taking with them their ability to draw in future feds like them. The widespread dismissals of probationary employees will not only remove perhaps an entire generation of future leaders, but will cause reverberations through their peer networks of impressionable, just-starting-out jobseekers. High-flyer programs like the U.S. Digital Service (recast as the U.S. DOGE Service), GSA’s 18-F (which Elon Musk claims to have “deleted”), the U.S. Digital Corps (which dismissed most of its Fellows), and the DOJ’s Honors Program (which rescinded its offers for 2025) have been especially effective onramps for hard-to-hire talent. Perhaps most shocking, the administration has disbanded the Presidential Management Fellowship, which for nearly a half century has attracted the very best rising leaders. No longer.
Looking Ahead
Taken together, the attacks on the federal workforce will leave our government with significantly diminished appeal to the “best and the brightest” throughout this administration and beyond it. The departure of incumbents paired with atrophied talent pipelines and a sluggish hiring system is a recipe for low-capacity lock-in.
In recognizing this dour litany, friends of our civil service should not despair, but should be clear-eyed about what will be required to respond and rebuild. The months ahead will reveal opportunities more fully, but we should begin by speaking forthrightly in support of public service at its best and working to preserve what we can. We must advance a vision of workforce reform to fix underlying problems, and engage Congress to place reforms in law and reclaim its Constitutional role in this (and other) arenas. We must educate the public on the role of career public servants in our democracy. And we must work harder than ever to cultivate in the next generation of Americans a reverence for service and an appetite to pursue it even in times of uncertainty and doubt. Despite the message from our leaders, the rewards and impact are great. We need to help Americans see it.
Peter Morrissey is the Senior Director for Talent and Strategy at The Volcker Alliance. He has served in local and federal government.
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Excellent and wise piece. Not only are current Federal employees having their hearts broken, and their livelihoods and, in some instances, their personal desires to help America, being shattered. Also no one with a good alternative will choose federal employment in this kind of environment! These moves are mean, ignorant and counterproductive!