Reinvention Blueprint No. 2: Democracy Works When Government Works

Introduction

The United States civil service has been the crown jewel of American democracy for over 140 years. Though imperfect, a nonpartisan, career civil service based on merit rather than political loyalty has been broadly popular across the political spectrum. But there have been warning signs that cracks in the foundation of our government systems have been limiting the effectiveness of government programs, leaving many communities behind. As a result, the American people’s trust in the government has waned. The Trump administration exploited this opening and has carried out a program of disruption that is without modern precedent. In the process, it has made it impossible to ignore a simple truth: the systems the U.S. federal government uses to recruit, develop, and retain talent were badly outdated long before the current crisis.

Looking ahead, the temptation will be to restore what was dismantled, and government reformers should honor that instinct where protections are essential. But restoration alone recreates a status quo that was coming up short in meeting the needs of all Americans. The reforms that matter are the ones that change what government can do permanently, not patches that make the current system marginally more bearable. This is a blueprint for something better: a civil service rebuilt for the demands of the 21st century, by both Congress and the executive branch, treated at last as the strategic national priority it has never quite been.

The Problem

How We Got Here

The merit-based civil service isn’t a given or self-executing. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 replaced a patronage system (where federal jobs were currency for political loyalty) with one grounded in merit, expertise, and nonpartisanship. For the century that followed, the principle held: whoever won elections, the professional civil service remained. It was one of the quieter but more consequential achievements of American democracy. And it has been broadly popular.

The last major statutory overhaul came in 1978, when a bipartisan Congress enacted the Civil Service Reform Act under President Jimmy Carter. That law restructured how the federal workforce was governed and reflected an ambition about what a professional civil service could be. It was also the last time Congress treated human capital reform as a strategic national priority. In the nearly five decades since, the statutory framework has remained largely frozen while the world around it changed beyond recognition.

There were attempts. The Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Gore, generated serious ideas and real energy but did not fundamentally restructure the civil service system. Reform efforts under President George W. Bush, focused on the Defense Department and the newly created Department of Homeland Security, were ambitious in design and ultimately undone by litigation and congressional resistance. The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service produced extensive, carefully reasoned recommendations, most of which were never implemented. Each effort ran into the same wall: a political environment in which the civil service had become a proxy for deeper ideological battles, making reform nearly impossible to sustain.

The politicization of the civil service, the deliberate effort to frame career public servants as obstacles rather than assets, is the pattern behind that failure. When political leaders cast the federal workforce as working against the public interest, two things happen simultaneously: reform becomes harder, because those who support a merit-based system resist any change that could be weaponized against it; and the workforce itself becomes demoralized, making the very problems reformers cite more likely to appear. It is a self-fulfilling dynamic, and it has been building for decades across administrations of both parties.

The Scale of What’s Been Lost

Through mass firings, forced reorganizations, and the deliberate erosion of civil service protections, the federal government has lost hundreds of thousands of its workers and the institutional knowledge they carried. Whatever one’s views on the size and scope of government, this is not reform: it’s demolition without a blueprint.

More than 430,000 federal workers have left government service since January 2025. Their combined 5 million years of institutional knowledge, technical expertise, and accumulated relationships cannot be rebuilt by executive order. Rebuilding will take years, and it will require getting the design right, not just restoring headcount.

The resource environment for rebuilding will be challenging, but that isn’t a reason to lower ambitions. Rather, it is a reason to be smarter about design — because a reformed civil service multiplies the effectiveness of every person in it. Previous workforce reductions produced damage rather than reform when personnel cuts outpaced the programmatic changes that should have driven them. The task now is not to repeat that mistake.

The System Before Wasn’t Adequate Either

The civil service system that existed before the current disruption was a product of a highly charged political environment that limited its ability to meet the moment. It protected individual employees, imperfectly but meaningfully, while producing organizations that were too often risk-averse, slow to adapt, and disconnected from the people they served. The compliance culture that accumulated over decades was not an accident; it was the rational response of people working in a political environment that punished risk-taking and rewarded invisibility. When oversight systems are wielded as political weapons, when attacking federal workers is cheap and popular, and when the media amplifies every government failure and ignores every quiet success, the sensible career move is to keep your head down, check the boxes, and never do anything that could end up in a congressional hearing. That’s not a failure of the civil service as a concept or a body. It’s what the political system produced, and any reform agenda that doesn’t reckon with that dynamic will keep producing the same result.

Rebuilding the civil service means rebuilding it differently, not just with fresher paint. The instinct, understandable in the wake of deliberate disruption, will be to restore what was dismantled and add new safeguards around it. That instinct must be honored where protections are essential to promoting a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service, and resisted where it would recreate the rigidities that were failing Americans long before the current crisis.

The Goals

First Principles

The career, nonpartisan civil service exists to deliver on the promises made in the Constitution, carrying out the missions of agencies consistent with the rule of law and the will of the people. Civil servants swear an oath to the Constitution and carry out their duties regardless of personal politics. They work to implement the agenda of our elected leaders, within the limits of the law. Everything else, like how the government hires, pays, manages, and organizes, should serve that mission.

Civil servants also have a proud track record that rarely shows up in conversations about reforming it. Career professionals rebuilt the military after Vietnam into the force that won the Gulf War. FDA career scientists made American pharmaceuticals among the safest in the world. NIH program officers and researchers helped reshape what modern medicine can do. These outcomes are the result of a mission-focused civil service made up of experts who are able to devote the years necessary to projects that may be short in generating immediate profit but redound in the long term to the benefit of every American and, indeed, the entire world.

But a merit-based civil service is a floor. The question is more than whether the government hires smartly; it is whether the government it builds is capable of delivering for the American people, now and in the decades ahead. Americans deserve an effective, efficient, and modern federal government that can respond to the public’s needs, implement the lawful priorities of democratically elected leaders, and effectively deliver critical programs and services, including in places where the private sector cannot or will not. Moreover, the United States’ ability to project democratic values, maintain alliances, and lead on shared global challenges, from climate to security to the health of the international economic order, depends on a government that functions. A hollowed-out, chaotic, or politicized federal government doesn’t just fail Americans at home; it weakens the credibility of the democratic model abroad. A renewed civil service is an instrument of American leadership as much as domestic delivery. The measure of success isn’t whether someone successfully navigated a form; it’s whether the country is safer, more prosperous, and more just than it was. Government exists to produce conditions for a good life, and the civil service is how it does that.

What This Moment Demands

Today the government asks civil servants to deliver 21st-century outcomes using outdated systems, eroded protections, and talent pipelines that were never built for the scale, technology, or complexity of the moment. A government that struggles to absorb risk cannot experiment, and a government that cannot experiment won’t improve. Returning to the prior status quo isn’t the goal. This moment demands bold reform, adapting by design instead of by crisis.

Reform of this kind has to be grounded in evidence and shaped by the people who’ve lived the dysfunction firsthand — both the Americans it’s supposed to serve and the federal workers who know exactly where the system breaks. Successful reforms should be measured by their impact on the government’s ability to serve the American people, both immediately and for the future. This means taking seriously the need to identify, deploy, and build capacity quickly to stabilize programs under stress, while simultaneously designing the systems that will outlast any single administration.

Trust Is the Work

Trust is the connective tissue of all of this. A strong, nonpartisan, and well-resourced federal workforce is essential to achieving this vision; but so is the public’s belief that such a workforce exists and is working for them. High trust in government isn’t a “nice to have” — it is a requirement. Low trust produces risk-aversion, compliance culture, and the very rigidity that has made the civil service so vulnerable to the disruptions we are living through. A government Americans cannot trust is a democracy that isn’t fully working. Earning back that trust, and rebuilding what government can actually do, are the same effort.

The Concrete Solutions

The current system was designed to prevent the worst: political patronage, arbitrary firing, corruption. A reformed system must be true to those legitimate purposes, but also must be designed to produce the best. This isn’t about making the current system work better at the margins. It’s about replacing the architecture.

Hiring

Federal hiring should be fast, fair, and flexible, because the government’s ability to attract skilled experts quickly, balance institutional knowledge with fresh perspectives, and draw on America’s full range of talent is what determines whether agencies can deliver. A civil service that takes months to hire and over a year to onboard loses the competition for the people it needs most. Modernizing hiring means treating that competition seriously: building pathways for early-career talent, creating real on-ramps for mid-career professionals with cross-sector expertise, and designing a system where federal service is a meaningful career chapter for some and a lifelong calling for others, rather than an all-or-nothing destination. The design question is more than how to hire faster: it’s whether the system can accommodate different relationships to public service.

Modernizing hiring requires Congress; there is no executive branch workaround that gets at the root. Title 5 of the U.S. Code, which governs how agencies post jobs, assess applicants, and make hires, needs statutory modernization that only Congress can provide. Part of what makes federal hiring so slow and opaque is the accumulation of over 100 distinct special hiring authorities, appointing mechanisms, and exception pathways that were each added for a legitimate reason and together add up to a system nobody can navigate consistently. Congressional reform needs to simplify: fewer paths, more clearly marked, that agencies can use without a specialist to interpret them while ensuring that obstacles that previously led to the creation of special authorities have been addressed. While a range of solutions are worth considering, creating straightforward hiring paths for early career, shorter term hires, veterans hiring, and more standard career hires would relieve significant hiring burden instead of the choose-your-own-adventure avenues no one quite understands today. Congress would also need to resource fundamental HR infrastructure to make this workable (such as high quality assessments); consolidation without resourcing just moves the bottleneck, and authorizing agencies to use assessments without recognizing the start-up costs of this transition will revert to the flaws of today’s system.

In parallel, the executive branch can use existing authorities more aggressively, pushing hiring decisions down to the lowest responsible level, reorienting agency culture toward outcomes rather than compliance, and building infrastructure (such as assessments) once at the enterprise level rather than having every agency commission it independently.

Pay and Classification

Federal pay must reflect competition too: fair, transparent, market-sensitive, and competitive enough to make federal service a career of choice for top talent across the country.

Today, pay compression at the top of the federal pay scale means that the government’s most complex and consequential roles are among its least competitively compensated; a design that systematically disadvantages the government in the markets where it most needs to compete. The goal is simple: stop losing the people the government needs to do its most complex work, and honor the covenant with the people it already has. Fixing pay compression at the top of the federal pay scale requires Congress to raise statutory caps that haven’t kept pace with the markets the government needs to compete in.

Federal agencies also face obstacles in recruiting early career talent into critical positions, because entry-level pay isn’t competitive. People starting out their careers are conscious of the threshold salaries they need in order to cover costs (like ever-more expensive housing and increasing student debt obligations) and start to build for the future. The federal government needs to address these challenges at the entry-level to finally crack the challenge of recruiting early career talent to government. Programs such as the U.S. Digital Corps made use of existing flexibilities, such as recruitment incentives and special salary rates, to close the gap, but this problem needs to be solved at scale to meet the federal government’s needs.

Further, pay reform without classification reform is incomplete; the job classification system that determines what roles exist and how they’re valued was built for a different economy and constrains what market-competitive pay can even mean in practice. The executive branch’s job is to invest in its own readiness by building the internal capacity, data, and commitment to valuing talent that will determine whether statutory reform succeeds. But pay and classification are linked problems that require a linked legislative solution. Many past efforts to tackle these issues have failed, with a common theme being the lack of adequate engagement of the workers affected by the changes, and their union representatives. The time for that engagement is now, so that any reform proposals account for the perspectives of frontline federal workers.

Finally, any new pay system cannot invite more politicization of the federal workforce through pay. Workers and their representatives have viewed prior reform efforts as an effort to shrink the overall amount of the budget that goes to federal worker pay. In addition, each reform that has introduced more discretion for managers carries a risk that pay decisions will be driven by non-merit reasons.

Any new pay system must insulate pay decisions from improper political influence and must avoid opening a door for federal worker pay to become a pawn in partisan politics.

Performance Management and Accountability

Performance management should empower civil servants to deliver measurable outcomes for the American people throughout their careers. Too many view federal performance management as fostering a culture in which managers perceive the process for addressing poor performance to be so cumbersome it isn’t worth the effort, and in which excellent performers receive the same recognition as everyone else. Civil servants who want to do their best work, and who entered public service to make a difference, are the ones most held back by systems that fail to address poor-performing colleagues and recognize high-performing ones. The shift is from compliance to results; from a system that measures whether the right boxes were checked to one that asks whether the American people are better served. That change requires trust in both directions.

The deeper problem is that the current system has never been clear about what performance management is supposed to do: whether it exists to reward strong performers, develop employees at every level, connect individual work to organizational outcomes, create accountability, or inform pay. The executive branch has significant room to move here to reflect that choice rather than paper over it: the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) can create resources for navigating performance management challenges and OMB can require agencies to actually resource HR teams to guide managers directly, both in developing strong performers and addressing poor performers. Agencies can rebuild and revive manager training instead of treating it like the first line item to cut, with proactive emphasis on leadership pipeline development. Leadership can model a culture of feedback, and development, and accountability; that means leaders who feel empowered to use all tools at their disposal to build strong organizational health and performance and are held accountable for such. The goal is a system where a civil servant who takes a risk, exercises judgment, and delivers results is better off for having done so.

But real reform requires both Congressional action and Congressional change. Congress should provide statutory clarity on what actually counts as poor performance and misconduct, rather than legitimate disagreement, which would give the system something guidance alone can’t provide. But just as critically, a compliance instinct runs deep because the political environment that created it hasn’t changed. Congressional oversight that hunts for failure rather than learning from it, media coverage that treats government mistakes as scandals and government successes as unremarkable, and political leaders who find it useful to cast federal workers as villains — these are the forces that made compliance rational in the first place. A performance management system that asks civil servants to take risks and exercise judgment will fail if the environment punishes them for doing exactly that. Reform of the civil service and reform of how the U.S. political system treats the civil service has to happen together.

Accountability in federal employment has too often meant one thing: protecting employees from arbitrary political interference. That remains vital — indeed, more so now than at any time in the past 50 years — but accountability runs in all directions. Employees owe the public their best work and honest judgment. Leaders owe employees something too: clear direction, the resources to succeed, recognition of their contributions, a commitment to understanding what the workforce makes possible, and the physical and psychological safety to do their jobs without fear. The evidence is clear that fear of arbitrary dismissal doesn’t produce better government; it produces worse information, more risk-aversion, and the silence of people who know what’s wrong but have learned not to say so. These workers deserve oversight systems oriented around a single question: whether the government is delivering for the people it serves, and whether the people who make that possible are being treated and recognized as the asset they are.

Any rebuilt system will also need to earn the trust of the people it asks to serve in it: those who stayed through the disruption and those considering whether public service is worth the risk. That trust isn’t rebuilt by messaging; it’s earned by leaders who demonstrate through concrete action that the covenant runs both ways. A resilient civil service isn’t just one with the right rules on paper; it’s one whose people believe those rules will hold.

Workforce Leadership as Strategy

Senior talent professionals should be strategic leaders, equal partners in agency planning rather than administrators managing compliance paperwork. Workforce strategy should sit at the leadership table, informing how agencies are organized, how they respond to emerging challenges, and how they build capacity to address both immediate and future needs. When workforce planning is treated as an afterthought, agencies lose the capacity to adapt; when it is treated as a core leadership responsibility, they gain the organizational flexibility that 21st-century delivery demands.

This is largely within the executive branch’s control, which makes the chronic failure to get it right harder to excuse. The president sets the tone by who sits at the table and what they expect of agency heads in terms of the organizational health and performance of their agency: senior officials should be expected to leave the capacity, capability and morale of their agency better than they found it. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and OPM set the standard of what they expect from agency workforce leaders in terms of specific outcomes and metrics in health and performance using their cyclical performance tools, embedding organizational health, workforce capacity, and resiliency into traditional measures of performance and experience. And agency heads generate precedent by treating Chief Human Capital Officers as strategic talent advisors vital to every priority rather than compliance officials and expecting career leaders to take ownership of the renewal and performance of their workforce, rather than delegating to HR. Building a cadre of senior career leaders who understand the full arc of workforce lifecycle and the imperatives for reform — and are empowered to sustain it across administrations — matters as much as any single policy change.

Cross-Sector Pathways

The legitimacy of the civil service depends on its connection to the people it serves. Federal workers are already embedded in communities across the country: they are part of their communities, not a distant bureaucratic class. More than 80% live and work outside of the Washington, D.C. area as nurses and IT professionals, data analysts and customer service agents, people who just want to make their communities better. But a civil service that draws from a narrow slice of American life — and offers no real path in or out for everyone else — is a civil service with a weaker claim to democratic legitimacy. Deliberately designed pathways that bring people from industry, academia, nonprofits, and local government into federal service, and allow federal workers to carry their public-service orientation into other sectors, are more than good workforce policy: they are how the government stays connected to the country it serves.

The tools that exist, like intergovernmental details, fellowships, temporary assignments, or special cohorts of talent, are underused and undersupported, but they are also insufficient. The Intergovernmental Personnel Act, the primary vehicle for exchanges between federal government and state, local, university, and nonprofit partners, has existed since 1970 and goes almost entirely unused, because no agency owns the function and every arrangement gets negotiated from scratch. A central IPA program office that facilitates such exchanges is low hanging fruit. Cross-agency movement within the federal government has the same problem in miniature. OPM can streamline and empower such moves so every arrangement isn’t a bespoke negotiation. On re-entry/reinstatement, agencies already have authority to rehire former employees non-competitively and can take into consideration their growth outside government.It just isn’t used well. For each of these tools, OPM should instigate plain language implementation resources, training, and audits to check on progress.

But meaningful mobility requires statutory fixes: provisions that don’t force professionals to choose between public service and financial stability. benefits portability, and re-entry protections that make leaving and returning to federal service a real option rather than a career risk. OPM cannot change the rules around portability of benefits, which penalize workers who leave government employment for work in other sectors. If we are to value the experience that federal workers obtain when they work in jobs in other sectors, Congress should study how to better align federal worker benefits programs so as not to disincentive multi-sector careers. Renewing and making permanent the reemployed annuitant dual-compensation waiver, which lapsed at the end of 2024 would also be a concrete first step. Congress should also put flagship mobility programs into statute rather than leaving them to executive order alone (like the Presidential Management Fellows program). Requiring cross-sector or cross-agency experience as a condition of Senior Executive Service (SES) appointment would do similar work for senior mobility specifically, restoring what the SES was designed for in 1978 and making mobility a normal feature of a senior career rather than an accident of one.

The executive branch can reduce administrative friction and build the culture that makes these pathways attractive; Congress has to build the infrastructure that makes them viable.

Workforce Governance

OPM was designed to serve as the government’s central workforce agency, setting policy, building capacity, and supporting agencies from hire to retirement. OMB has a strong role and interest in the resourcing, health, performance, and innovation of federal agencies. In practice, these roles have never been cleanly sorted, and the result has been chronic confusion about who is responsible for what, persistent gaps between central policy and agency reality, and a workforce governance system that satisfies no one.Part of the problem is structural: agencies are accountable for their workforce outcomes but OPM holds much of the compliance authority over how they get there and OMB holds the resources. This produces the behavior you’d expect: agencies that resent the constraint and a center that mistakes non-compliance for a communication problem rather than a design one. Whatever structural answer emerges, two principles should guide it: the center of government’s role is to build capacity, set standards, and share expertise; and decisions on talent management should be delegated to the lowest responsible level.

Underlying both is a collective action problem the center has never solved: getting agencies to work together on shared workforce infrastructure requires taking agency self-interest seriously as a design constraint. Those conditions have to be built deliberately, and that requires Congress to revisit OPM and OMB’s statutory mandates in addition to resetting how they work together in practice.

Clarifying who is responsible for what requires both branches. The executive branch can reset how OPM, OMB, and agency human capital offices work together in practice, and can delegate talent management decisions to the lowest responsible level without waiting for Congress. But OMB and OPM’s mandates and authorities derive from statute; rethinking them to manage incentives, enterprise solutions, and for capacity-building rather than an underweighted compliance enforcer requires Congress to revisit design.

Labor Relations

Resetting labor relations is non-negotiable. Collective bargaining rights are not inherently an obstacle to reform; they are a democratic value, a protection against arbitrary political interference and a mechanism for giving workers a voice in the conditions of their employment. Those rights must be honored and protected in any serious reform effort. Treating unions as partners in working toward the same end isn’t optional. But honesty also requires acknowledging that the relationship between labor and management in the federal government hasn’t always served workers or the public well. The scope of collective bargaining in the federal sector is so constrained by law that unions are incentivized to bargain hard over the impact on workers of new practices and procedures, because they were not consulted on the substance of those practices themselves. The resulting agreements and practices that accumulated over decades have sometimes contributed to the rigidities that this reform agenda is trying to address. A better approach is a labor-management relationship grounded in shared commitment to public outcomes: one where workers have a voice, managers have the tools to lead, and the American people are the measure of success.

Fixing that requires Congress to rethink how bargaining is structured, at what level, and around what questions. The system should expect agencies to engage frontline workers through their exclusive representatives on the issues with the biggest impact on their working conditions. It should facilitate engagement through efficient procedures that provide for workers to participate in strategic decisions affecting them. It should ensure that agencies share the same information with worker representatives that is shared with managers, so there is no information imbalance at the bargaining table. And, the system should provide for prompt negotiation of terms that ensure fair implementation, with expedited avenues to resolve legal disputes that may arise in the process.

Congress also needs to seriously re-examine its delegation to the president of the ability to wipe out collective bargaining unilaterally in the name of national security. Previously used in limited situations, the current administration has used this exception to cancel collective bargaining agreements covering vast swaths of the federal workforce, cutting off workers from basic workplace protections and depriving unions of the tools and resources needed to represent federal workers effectively.

But the executive branch doesn’t have to wait to signal true partnership: labor-management forums, restored in prior administrations and eliminated in others, are an executive branch choice. Leadership commitment to engaging workers early and meaningfully through their exclusive representatives on the most important matters affecting the workforce is another executive branch choice.

Contractor Workforce

Any reckoning with the federal workforce must also confront the role of the contractor workforce that supports and supplements it. Over decades, government has increasingly outsourced functions that were once performed by civil servants — sometimes for good reasons, often as a way of working around the civil service system itself. The result is a blended workforce whose true cost, accountability structure, and appropriate boundaries nobody is required to reckon with. Contractors can bring specialized expertise and surge capacity. But over-reliance on contractors also hollows out the institutional knowledge and technical expertise that make government a capable actor, and creates accountability gaps that the public doesn’t see and that oversight institutions struggle to close. The question of what government should own, what it should buy, and where the line between public and private responsibility should sit is one of the most consequential and least debated questions in federal management.

The executive branch already has tools here: updating policies that determine which work is “inherently governmental” and therefore must be performed by civil servants, requiring accounting of what the blended workforce costs, and making deliberate decisions about what government should own versus buy. Congress needs to build the transparency and accountability frameworks that make those decisions visible and durable. A first ste could include requiring agencies above a size or spending threshold to report contractor headcount and cost alongside the civil service headcount they already report, broken out by function. Right now a service can be substantially contracted and that fact is invisible in any document Congress sees, even though the civil service side of the same ledger is already public.

Public Trust and Engagement

The current system has never fully delivered accountability to the American people, and that failure is a cultural one. Too often, the government has treated engagement with the public as a risk to manage rather than a resource to draw on. Civil servants have been rewarded for avoiding scrutiny rather than inviting it, and constrained from the kind of direct public engagement that would make government more responsive. When agencies have prioritized public engagement, it has too often been one-sided, with a goal of extracting information for their own purposes rather than creating a two-way dialogue. And the people most affected by government decisions have had the least influence over them, including the federal workers who see the system’s failures most clearly.

A civil service that delivers but doesn’t engage isn’t trusted, and one that engages without delivering doesn’t deserve to be. Civil servants must be empowered to listen, respond, and treat public engagement as a democratic obligation rather than a legal risk — and government must be able to point to outcomes people feel. The executive branch can change the culture here; Congress can adjust or remove the legal and procedural barriers that have made engagement feel too risky to attempt (such as making more express what Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) is meant to restrict), calibrating conflict of interest restrictions in accordance with actual risk, proactively managing FOIA backlogs, agency guidance that treats proactive disclosure as a liability, and incentives that discourage direct civil servant engagement with the communities they serve).

AI and Enabling Conditions

The systems civil servants work within — technology infrastructure, procurement rules, legal frameworks, data environments — either enable or undermine everything else in this agenda. Modernizing them requires both executive action and congressional attention, and neither has treated it as urgent enough. AI in particular demands deliberate governance: used well, it expands what civil servants can do; used as a substitute for capacity, it makes the underlying problems worse.

The procurement systems that govern how the government buys goods and services were designed for a different era and too often slow delivery, limit innovation, and entrench incumbent vendors over better solutions. The legal frameworks that define what agencies can do and how fast they can act have accumulated layers of complexity that can sometimes make even well-intentioned action difficult. Technology infrastructure across the federal government remains fragmented, outdated, and poorly integrated, making it harder for civil servants to do their jobs and harder for agencies to share what they know. Data systems that should enable the government to understand what is working and respond to emerging needs are instead siloed, inconsistent, and underinvested. We are calling for civil service reform to be paired, deliberately and concurrently, with modernization of these systems.

A first step doesn’t mean picking a single procurement rule or technology fix; it means Congress legislating the conditions and accountability that make good decisions possible, rather than prescribing the decisions themselves. Pay for outcomes instead of hours, fund persistent teams working toward those outcomes with flexibility to invest in what works, hold someone accountable for outcomes, and build in triggers that force a review when something isn’t working.

The question should not be whether AI will reshape the federal workforce, but whether that reshaping will be intentional and governed, or accidental and ungoverned. Used well, AI can free civil servants from the most burdensome tasks, creating space for the judgment, relationship-building, and adaptive problem-solving that only people can do. But AI won’t substitute for human capacity and the humanity of public service. It cannot replace the caseworker who understands a community’s particular circumstances, the inspector who knows what a facility looked like six months ago, or the analyst who can tell the difference between a data anomaly and a signal. Designing the future federal workforce means designing it for human-AI collaboration: building the skills, the oversight mechanisms, and the institutional culture to use these tools in service of better outcomes, not as a cover for capacity reductions.

Conclusion

Democracy works when the government works, and right now, neither is working as well as it should. From the current crisis must emerge a reimagined government that better serves us all. The list of challenges is large, due to decades of neglect, and they all need to be tackled together to deliver the transformation that the people of this country deserve. To realize the full breadth of the opportunity will require that all of those who believe that a functioning, efficient, and effective federal government is central to our democracy work together to make comprehensive reform a reality.