US civil servants: Do we love them or hate them? Or just thank them? 

If the current celebrations in Washington, D.C.—like Public Service Recognition Week and the Partnership for Public Service’s annual Sammies awards—have reminded us of anything, it’s that we should be thanking our public servants (both present, and yes, former) all year long, not just now...when it’s fashionable, and we can all get our pictures taken in our tuxes and formal gowns doing so. 

You see, we Americans traditionally have a “love-hate” relationship with our national government, and so too do the public servants who work for us, whether in uniform and otherwise. They actually personify that relationship...and are stuck in the middle of all that. On the one hand, we (and they) treasure the individual freedoms that are guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and many of us may just want our government to leave us alone. However, paradoxically, we also want our government to protect us from harm, especially in times of extraordinary crisis...like now.  

Our individual freedoms have to be balanced by the greater public good, and frontline public servants are stuck with doing the balancing. And in that regard, they don’t get to be as “empowered” as their counterparts in the private sector, as motivating as that may be. Instead, they are duty-bound to do the bidding of “We the People.” That makes the jobs of civil servants very, very hard, and it’s something we should never, ever forget! 

And that’s not an easy balance to strike, especially during things like the attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, but it is one that is also playing out invisibly every day on the far less dramatic front lines of public service, where individual, largely unsung public servants — everybody from intelligence analysts, park rangers and nurses, to doctors, ICE officers and even building and food inspectors—have to choose between their (and their fellow citizens’) individual freedoms and the broader public interests that they are sworn to protect and preserve.  

Indeed, these days it applies to almost every civil servant, and nothing brings their difficulty into sharper focus than the events of these past few weeks and months. 

To be sure, one could argue that the same is true for American citizens of all stripes, not just public servants. They too have to choose between their personal safety (and that of their fellow citizens) and their individual liberties. And it’s further complicated by social media, including the nefarious Russian kind, that deliberately clouds what’s real and what isn’t. 

That is not an easy choice to make these days, whether you’re a civil servant or not, and as our fellow citizens struggle with it, they personify and operationalize this “love-hate” relationship with our government. They too worry about that “government” infringing on their rights (perceived, editorialized or otherwise) and their freedoms. 

But that paradox, that “love-hate” relationship, is even more relevant on the frontlines of public service, insofar as it affects the thankless day-to-day work of our public servants. First, while it may be “the government” that our fellow citizens both love and hate, that gestalt manifests itself in the interactions, infrequent or otherwise, that they have with those front-line public servants, including (these days) those who are virtual. Given the financial and economic pressures that every American faces these days, those interactions can be testy and tense—just think about those who call “the government” to demand to know the status of their still-not-received tax refunds, Social Security checks or FEMA help and get what they perceive to be the runaround. 

That testiness may be endemic, a paradoxical product of just being an American, and that my friends is what makes American public servants different. They may not be as “empowered” as their private sector peers, but they still have the privilege of serving the public. Almost without exception, they have responded to that paradoxical call, sometimes at great personal risk, and in so doing, they’ve given us yet another reason for expressing our appreciation to them, not just during Public Service Recognition Week or after the Sammies, but always! For their task is an unenviable one, and it is also unending. 

This paradox goes back to our founding, when Publius debated the nature of our fledgling democracy in the Federalist papers. Those Founders understood that the acts of individual citizens, all perfectly and personally rational, could still have a deleterious affect collectively, and that led them to create a system of checks and balances designed to curb and channel the inherent excesses of those individual interests and their factions. They also predicted tension between the individual and the collective, albeit normally a healthy one, but as we fast forward to today—what with the “No Kings” rallies and the like—we see that tension playing out more violently on our very streets. 

Thus, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the United States was created in part to strike a sometimes-tense balance between individual freedoms on one hand, and the greater public good on the other. After all, freedom is never free; it requires compromise, something we learned (at least in theory) in high school civics classes. However, unfortunately, “compromise” has become a dirty word, so much so that I was once accused of seeking one (by a staffer for a legislator) as if it were a pejorative. 

That has to stop. But more importantly, our front-line public servants—those who find themselves in the middle of that debate, trying to strike that lofty balance whether they know (or like) it or not—are the government, and that is a part of their jobs that remains especially unsung and unappreciated.

So, in addition to thanking public employees for all the often-distasteful things that they do all the time, I think we also need to thank them for trying to help us find that balance…between our ingrained American antipathy towards “government” on one hand, and the need, sometimes grudgingly acknowledged, for what it does on the other.

I saw that first-hand way back in the late 1990’s, when I was the first Chief HR Officer for the IRS. Trying to overcome a history (indeed, a mindset) of taxpayer intimidation, the Service was under a congressional mandate to become more customer friendly. That’s not easy for a tax collection agency, but it’s all about balance, and led by then-Commissioner Charles Rossotti and others, providing “service to each, [and] service to all” became our new mantra. 

Intended to strike a balance between the needs of an individual taxpayer—that’s the “service to each” part—with the laws of the many, as reflected in the far more general tax code enacted by their elected representatives in Congress, that is the crucial question. And our IRS employees demanded to know which one was more important. But then, like now, there’s no right answer to that. It’s not either/or but both. It’s a balance, and it can be tense at times. But it’s up to frontline civil servants to find it. 

I saw the same thing play out in our Intelligence Community, with analysts trying to balance our nation’s national security interests with their own self-preservation...as manifested by what they thought their elected superiors and appointees wanted to hear. That’s a choice that no one should have to make, then or now, and we need to do everything we can to protect those individual civil servants from having to make it.   

Then, as now, it comes down to the way each public servant tries to strike that balance between individual freedoms, including their own personal safety, and collective responsibility...as they just try to do their jobs. 

That was not an easy thing to ask of civil servants then, but it seems that it is even harder to ask of them now. But we must...and we must be grateful that they are willing to answer that call. Its importance is underscored by today’s headlines, and it is one that is occurring every day on the front lines of government, where individual public servants have to find that tricky balance between the individual freedoms afforded them and their neighbors (including the freedom from harm), and the public interests that those public servants are also sworn to protect.  

So, the “love-hate” relationship that we Americans have with our governments is especially relevant now, after the “glow” of PSRW and the Sammies have worn off. For our nation’s public servants, that means that they’re all too often “damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” and for that, we owe them an extra dose of appreciation...always!