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Stop pointing fingers and put feds back to work!
COMMENTARY | The budget impasse will continue to hurt Americans as it wears on. It's time for Congress and the White House to come to the negotiating table.
Enough already. It’s time for both parties—especially in the Congress and the Executive Branch—to stop their partisan finger-pointing and end the shutdown. And in so doing, graciously (or otherwise) give up the political “leverage” that both sides to this destructive debate seem to be seeking and for once, think about US!
Why? Because as a former longtime federal civil servant—among other posts, I was the senior career person at the Office of Personnel Management at one time—I can tell you that that leverage is hurting American citizens, whether they know it (yet) or not!
Do we really need to wait to see those citizens harmed by this shutdown? Especially when most of the harm won’t manifest itself until it’s too late, when many of its most adverse effects will only show themselves when citizens desperately need a safety net. That is, when they need federal assistance or federal money.
In other words, when they’re dealing with a crisis. When they’re hurting and most in need.
By the very terms of our Constitution, soon to be 250 years old, our federal government (among other things) is designed to provide a non-partisan safety net for our citizens. But while much of that safety net's impact has been ameliorated by the seemingly never-ending funding dramas we face every year, its remains have been lost in partisan bickering.
And I’m talking about (and to!) both sides. You are talking past one another, something that happens when you limit yourself to your own echo chamber, but neither side seems to be worried about what happens to us, We the People.
Whether it’s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicting a major storm, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency helping victims in its aftermath. Or whether it’s the Environmental Protection Agency or the Labor Department guarding us from the adverse effects of rampant industrial pollution and cutthroat profit seeking. Or the Veterans Affairs Department faithfully (and timely!) serving those who’ve served us. Or even (dare I say it?), the Department of Education or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission protecting citizens and students from unlawful discrimination in the workplace or in school. Or Department of Defense (or is it the Department of War now?) helping to thwart an illegal invasion, sometimes by just being there.
The examples are limitless. But they all have a common denominator: They require a federal government. And like it or not, they also require competent, apolitical civil servants to impartially serve it...and the American people.
That is not to say that the federal government cannot get smaller and more efficient. It can. Indeed, it needs to, and we need to vigorously pursue that end-state. But with a scalpel and NOT a hatchet. Even President Trump has said as much. And it needs to be done collaboratively, with career civil servants at the table...not to stand in the way of fixing things, but just the opposite. Indeed, they took an oath to do so, so we should hold them to it! Because they know where the “bodies are buried” when it comes to fraud, waste, abuse or just plain inefficiency. And yes, it DOES exist.
Who am I to say this? As noted, I am a longtime career civil servant, an HR professional, and 20-plus-year SES member who’s also held a political appointment (in the first Trump administration), and I’ve seen firsthand the adverse effects of a shutdown on recruiting and retaining talent, especially the technical kind.
I am also a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and I hope that we speak for all of those faceless and selfless bureaucrats (and I use that term fondly) who are responsible for carrying out the laws of our land impartially and without regard to politics or party. All too often, those laws—and the regulations that implement them—are deliberately cumbersome and obtuse, intended to stop the worst of us.
In my view, that’s okay, so long as our citizens understand the reasoning. Thus, we public administrators may make them jump through bureaucratic hoops for good reason, assuming that patience is a virtue of an honest citizenry. Most citizens want to do the right thing, even though we may have to write (and administer) those laws in ways that guard against the all-too-easy abuse of that system.
Unfortunately, we bureaucrats cannot assume the best of motives. They cannot ignore even the slightest abuse, real or potential, else they risk being damned for that too. But that means that those laws and regulations are often difficult to navigate, and when they are, too often citizens needlessly blame the bureaucrat.
That is not to say that many of those bureaucrats are blameless. Some may perform poorly. Or they may “lord it” over their fellow citizens, abusing the power that well-meaning legislators have given them just because they can. So, we need a civil service system that rids itself of them quickly and with prejudice (the current one does not!), and we also need one that doesn’t hire them in the first place (again, the current system does not).
But given that both must be operationalized by imperfect human beings, some of those who perform or behave poorly will inevitably escape accountability.
In other words, no system, however well designed, will be perfect, and Americans need to recognize that imperfection and deal with it—with a smile, and most importantly, with patience—even as they press for personal solutions amidst impersonal laws and regulations. They must recognize that those laws and regulations were ultimately to protect them and their hard-earned money against the abuses of the few of their fellow citizens who may be dishonest.
However, there is good news here. In our original Founding, geniuses like James Madison anticipated this venality as naturally occurring—in other words, it’s inherently human nature—and he and his colleagues tried to design a system of checks and balances that mitigated oppressive government actions...at their root intended to preserve our “life, liberty, and [our] and pursuit of happiness.”
However, Madison and those other Founders never anticipated the evils and abuses of social media, and we must learn how to deal with that phenomenon (just as we learned to deal with the extremes of television when it first burst on our body politic). But in so doing, we need to step back and think about why we’re here, why we created this less-than-perfect Union in the first place: At its root, it was designed to fix things. That’s what governments do, and I think we’ve collectively lost sight of that.
Take immigration. That system is broken, and the fix—despite what the partisans among us say—is neither an open border nor mass deportations. Don’t let criminals in, and deport those that are or who commit a crime while here. But don’t deport those immigrants whose only crime is the pursuit of the American dream, who come to this country, perhaps illegaly (at least technically) to escape violence in their home countries and who are willing to work our hardest and dirtiest jobs (too often illegally as well) to achieve it.
That legislative fix is obvious, at least conceptually. Just give those so-called “illegal’ immigrants” a legal path to citizenship, just like our military does...and just like several legislators (including one Sen. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State) proposed two decades ago. But however it's done, our national government should just fix the problem.
That was what it was designed to do, and our politicians should stop pointing partisan fingers and get on with it. Even if it means that their chances of being re-elected are diminished. Just fix it! And if, while they’re working on that fix, they can’t pay civil servants, then they shouldn’t be paid either.
Bottom line: We must all recognize that we are all in this together, and that civil servants are just like the rest of us citizens...the vast majority well intentioned, a few unfortunately not. But we all need to focus on and fix the problems we face. And those fixes require a working U.S. federal government of competent, hardworking, dedicated civil servants who are willing to support the way ahead, no matter how difficult.
But that may be asking too much. I think that the public servants I hope I represent would settle for a reopened and functioning federal government, however imperfect it may be. So, we citizens should demand that the president and the Congress—both parties and both extremes and everyone in between—get back to work. And we should also demand that as a first order of business, they put those blameless, selfless federal civil servants back to work in the process.
Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a federal civil servant for almost 40 years, including over 20 as a member of the Senior Executive Service. In that capacity, he served as director of civilian personnel for the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, associate director for HR strategy at OPM and associate director of National Intelligence for human capital, as well as the chairman of the Federal Salary Council.