The EconomistSeptember 7th 2019 351W
hen donald trumptook office in
January 2017, Joel Clement was enter-
ing his seventh year running the Interior
Department’s Office of Policy Analysis. Mr
Clement worked on climate-change pre-
paredness, particularly for Alaskan Natives
in low-lying coastal villages. He knew that
Mr Trump was a climate-change sceptic,
but, he explains, “I didn’t think there
would be a problem. These were actual
people at risk. It’s not a question of what
caused climate change; it’s what was al-
ready happening. I was naive. They came
out swinging.” In June 2017 Mr Clement—
who has experience in neither accounting
nor the fossil-fuel industry—was reas-
signed to an office that collects royalty
checks from oil, gas and mining firms.
Mr Clement was one of 27 senior offi-
cials reassigned; he resigned soon after-
wards. Perhaps he should not have been
surprised. Different administrations do
things differently. Mr Trump ran as a cli-
mate-change sceptic and made Jeff Ses-
sions his first attorney-general; of coursehis environmental and civil-rights policies
would be different from Barack Obama’s.
Yet even those who wish the federal gov-
ernment were much smaller have an inter-
est in making sure that its bureacracies can
perform the tasks that most Americans
agree are vital, from air-traffic control to
co-ordinating the response to natural di-
sasters. The federal government’s ability to
do these things was in question long before- Then Mr Trump happened.
Criticising the federal government—
which employs around 2.1m civilians,
making it America’s single biggest employ-
er—is the hardiest perennial of American
politics. To many outside Washington, dc,
it is an abstraction and hence easy to cari-
cature, mock or blame. Its most visible bits
(namely, Congress) tend to be unpopular,
while its essential functions often go un-
seen. Americans seldom encounter the sci-
entists ensuring their water stays clean or
that nuclear waste is properly disposed of.
Most people do not think of the men and
women they salute at football games as
employees of the federal government.
Despite many Republican presidents
running on government-shrinking plat-
forms, and many Democrats doing the op-
posite, the size of the federal workforce has
remained relatively constant since the
1960s. Since 1965 the federal government
has added five departments and multiple
agencies that collectively employ hun-
dreds of thousands of people. It has also
endured long hiring freezes. The total
number of workers matters less to effective
governance than what those workers do,
and here alarm bells have been ringing for
some time. Max Stier, who heads the Part-
nership for Public Service, a nonpartisan
group that advocates for an effective civil
service, says that the “legacy government
has not kept up with the world around
it...[and] has not been updated to address
the problems of tomorrow.”
The Government Accountability Office
(gao), which audits the federal govern-
ment, has long warned of problems in re-
cruiting and retaining public-spirited
workers. The compensation system was
designed in 1949 and has barely since been
altered. This can make it hard to offer com-
petitive salaries to, say, cyber-security ex-
perts. Civil-service rules have not been up-
dated since the Civil Service Reform Act of- The government frequently recruits
for positions whose descriptions were
written 40 years ago and do not reflect the
actual work being done. According to Mr
GoverningBureaucratic blight
WASHINGTON, DC
The federal government’s ability to operate effectively was already in question.
Then Donald Trump became its masterUnited States
36 North Carolina’s election
37 The Democratic ideas primary
37 Shootings and gun laws
38 Straight pride
40 War in space
41 Lexington: Trumped by the TalibanAlso in this section