Honoring Public Service
On January 1, 2008, USAID’s John Granville, working to provide radios to support residents in South Sudan so they could participate in elections, was assassinated by five men. On July 10, 2001, U.S. Forest Service firefighters Tom Craven, Devin Weaver, Jessica Johnson, and Karen FitzPatrick were killed battling the Thirtymile Fire in the Okanogan National Forest. On January 20, 2025, Border Patrol Agent David Marland was fatally shot by a German national during a traffic stop near the Canadian border in Vermont. These are among hundreds of federal civil servants across a range of agencies who’ve died in the line of duty in recent years. All of us are in their debt.
I had the privilege of serving the federal government for 38 years. In 1966, after graduating college, I enlisted in the Air Force. I could have gotten a deferment from the draft, being recently married and admitted to graduate school, but I was one of many who responded to JFK’s Inaugural challenge to “ask not what your country can do – ask what you can do for your country.” I took the Oath of Office, was honored to do so. I still recall the immense pride I felt every time the National Anthem was played during the following years.
In 1971, I took the Oath again as a new public servant for the U.S. Office of Education, which in 1979 became the Department of Education. Its mission – to promote access to and excellence in education – appealed to me a noble challenge. Public service is a calling, not just a job. I traveled the country helping local school systems train teachers and improve curricula, always mindful that the content of what is taught is a state and local, not a federal, decision. In 1993, I joined the faculty of the Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Executive Institute. I managed its interagency Leadership for a Democratic Society program that educated senior career federal executives on how to improve their efforts to serve the American people. At the start of every program, we asked all 72 executives why they were working for the federal government. The overwhelming response: “to serve and to make a difference.” At the end of every program, each graduate took the Oath of Office again, a poignant reminder of their calling.
Upon retiring from public service, with the help of others, we succeeded in passing the Civilian Service Recognition Act of 2011. The law enables every federal domestic agency to provide a U.S. burial flag to a worker killed in the line of duty, a measure of appreciation previously only offered to military personnel.
I mention this not to extol my public service. I am no more deserving of thanks than other public servants who work long hours to achieve the public purposes enacted by Congress. They are the people who guard our borders, provide aid to the poor at home and abroad, provide hurricane relief, student loans, ensure the safety of our food and medicines, send out Social Security checks, deliver our mail, keep our bank deposits safe, welcome us to National Parks, clean and manage our waterways – and so much more.
It’s been fashionable for far too long to complain about “bureaucrats,” to act as if public servants are less capable, less deserving of respect that those who work in the private sector. Only now, when they are being fired and services cut back or eliminated are many Americans learning how much we depend on and appreciate civil servants.
I’ve always been mindful of the words of a devoted public servant, Dan Fenn, Jr,, who was President Kennedy’s White House Personnel Director:
“It is unfortunate that those whom we serve, on whose trust we depend, not only fail to understand why we do what we do and how we do it, they do not think what we do is very important. I remember hearing of one woman, in a class of business and public executives, saying proudly that she had spent her life making lemon-scented furniture polish. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that—but where did the American people ever get the idea that figuring how many blue chips to put into laundry powder so it could be called “NEW Swish” and increasing point-of-sale purchases is more important than keeping the nation and our homes safe and mapping the oceans and managing the infrastructure of a free society and providing food and housing and caring for the most vulnerable among us—all the tasks to which public servants devote their minds and hearts?”
The latest salvos against the federal workforce have come from President Trump and Elon Musk. On March 12th, the President said he felt “badly” for fired federal workers then added: “but many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work." On March 14th, Elon Musk reposted a comment that appeared on his social media platform, X: “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did.”
President Trump and Elon Musk are, in fact, public sector workers themselves. They have the responsibility to lead other federal workers. They owe what all good leaders owe their workers - respect and dignity. There’s always a need to improve government, but it’s not necessary to demean civil servants or fire them without cause to do so. You can intimidate and threaten, but that doesn’t produce high performance. It produces resignations or the fear that leads to noncreative compliance and low productivity. It will not produce what all who’ve proudly taken the Oath, who long to serve with excellence and honor, wish to give to our fellow Americans.
Photo Credit: John Granville, Courtesy of fordhamram.com
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