Politics and Performance: What Does It Mean for Civil Servants?

If our premise holds, then it follows that, to make the government work more effectively, it is necessary to have and maintain a qualified cadre of career civil servants. If one agrees that government is necessary, then civil servants are also necessary. They will not and cannot go away, but they can be made to work in more or less productive ways. When discussing the bureaucracy, public and political leaders blame civil servants for a variety of problems ranging from policy disputes to bad performance. Such wholesale assignment of blame has created a major morale problem among career civil servants. The actual performance of agencies and individuals has become confused with the debate over agency policy. Unless the debate is clarified to separate performance problems from problems over political consensus, the performance of government may continue to deteriorate. The current situation is a product of the increase in the size and complexity of the government over the past 20 years. Many new federal functions and roles were added during that time span. The points of intersection between government and the public dramatically in-