The Privatization of Public Service
In researching the Social Citizens paper, I was struck by a potential problem in public life. We have been witness to an explosion in interest in volunteerism and nonprofit careers, while interest in government careers has waned. Elected officials and other community leaders regularly laud the importance of the nonprofit sector … but is it time for nonprofit leaders to extol the virtue of government service?
The Social Citizens paper is focused on Millennials (ages 15-29) a super-sized generation in terms of their total number, their passion for causes and their use of social media. Their size and passion are mirrored by the increase in size and relevance of the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. As I say in the paper, young people are marinating in causes as volunteers, nonprofit careerists, and social entrepreneurs.
But, there has been a cost to this explosion in altruism. It can be summed up by one statistic: A study by the International City Manager’s Association in 2006 found that only 13% of professional local government managers today are under 40. In the early 1970s nearly 71% were 40 or younger. (A shout-out to Bethany Henderson for her fascinating paper on this topic.)
I told a friend of mine about this statistic the other day and she said, “Of course, who wants to work for government, it sucks!”
As volunteerism went into schools in the late 1980s, education about government and public policy came out. As a result, “service” today means working for causes and communities larger than oneself, which is laudable and terrific. However, the use of the term service is applied almost entirely to nonprofit activities to the exclusion of government or military service.
Indeed, aside from the Peace Corps and Americorps programs such as Teach for America, two quasi-governmental efforts, public service today means supporting nonprofit work. Compare this to President Kennedy’s call for public service, which invited the best and brightest to come and work for the government.
Please don’t get me wrong; volunteerism is a wonderful, uniquely American approach to community problem solving. However, this new definition of “service” raises two problems; one is scale the other is scope.
As much money and attention is given to voluntary efforts, they still generally pale in light of public funds for the environment, schools, and community infrastructure. For instance, after-school programs are intended supplement public school efforts, with a fraction of the time with students and money that school districts have.
Private voluntary efforts can pick and choose the issues and populations with which to work. Organizations like Volunteers of America choose to work in very distressed communities with people who have significant, sometimes overwhelming, problems. Most groups don’t — and that is their choice, they are private efforts and can choose where and with whom to work.
Through public policy, on the other hand, government is supposed to serve all people and communities. (If you want a refresher of how important this concept was to the Founding Fathers, take a peek at the Federalist papers. You will be taken aback, I think, by their passion over this particular issue.) We know that it often doesn’t, but, this is what government is intended to do, and what idealist young people can press it to do better — to help those least able to help themselves by directing resources to large public problems.
I am not advocating a lifetime of work in the cramped cubicles of government offices. I am suggesting that we include government service as part of the sector hopping between the private and nonprofit sectors that has become the norm for so many people throughout their careers. My friend Marty Kearns calls this the need for greater “churn,” or turnover in public sector leadership positions — not as an afterthought but as a fundamental part of a lifetime of service and social change that has become so important to us, particularly for young people.
Nor am I advocating for the growth of government services. I am not interested in continuing the ping-pong conversation about big versus small government, which is as unproductive as talking about red versus blue states when most states are actually purple, meaning a combination of both. I am interested in a conversation about effective over ineffective government, which we won’t get to until more talented people are attracted to government service.
So, help me out. Does the distinction I am making between public and private service make sense to you? Am I overstating the crisis in government service? Should we care about this?
Comments
Definitely an interesting opinion, but, as a millenial and former AmeriCorps*VISTA member, I can point out a big problem with it: public service jobs are not (or not viewed) as entrepreneurial.
As a rated employee, your job is to do the job competently, not ingeniously. Entrepreneurialism (the exciting part of any job) in the public sector comes from the making of laws, not necessarily the carrying out of them.
AMEN, Allison!!!
You are absolutely right — young people today tend to see public sector work as boring, bureaucratic, and “un-entrepreneurial.” There certainly is a measure of truth in that assessment, but that only makes it MORE important that we bring more top, entrepreneurial, active young people into the public sector. Our country needs our public institutions to work!
You would love to know that a friend of mine and I (we’re both Teach For America alums) have launched an effort to attract a new generation into public service — public sector service, that is. We want to build a “civilian West Point” called the U.S. Public Service Academy. Students would get a free college education in return for a commitment to serve for five years in the civilian public sector.
This simple idea has captured the imagination of young people — one recent poll showed that 88% of Millennials support it. We now have a bill in Congress with 20 senators and 98 representatives as co-sponsors.
You and your readers should get involved! Visit: http://www.uspublicserviceacademy.org.
It’s definitely a real issue. Government serves (or at least funds services) on a scale that nonprofits don’t have to — and generally can’t — match. There are issues and challenges that come with government service that I don’t think come with nonprofit service.
As a millenial (wohoo!), I think there are practical barriers as well as perceptual (although they tend to reinforced the perception).
For starters, it’s a lot harder to enter government service. The process is more bureaucratic, it takes longer, and there is less flexibility. When you’re young, have a short resume, and have mostly enthusiasm to recommend you, small nonprofits are often willing to take a chance on you. Getting someone in government even to return the phone call is hard.
I also think government service jobs tend to be designed for stability, which is not a particularly appealing trait for mobile Millennials who aren’t sure about their long-term career choices.
One reason Teach for America has been successful is that they’ve worked to lower some of those “barriers to entry” in a public service job. They provide a pathway for getting the creditentials you need and the interviews for the position. Then they ask for a shorter commitment.
It’ll be interesting to follow an organization like City Hall Fellows to see if it can take off in making city government appealing.
There’s no question that government needs to reinvent itself — not just because it will be harder hit by boomer retirement due to its older than average employee base and its need to recruit new workers, but because empowering workers in entrepreneurial ways could significantly improve the quality of public service.
As a millennial who works for an innovative nonprofit that facilitates collaboration among local governments, I think quite often about what that reinvention should look like. I think step one is that government must show that it wants emerging leaders in its ranks. As Allison pointed out in Social Citizens, millennials have largely been shut out from public decision-making. Once government can demonstrate that it values the thoughts and ideas of all generations (by engaging them as community members, for example), I think millennials will naturally be more inclined to be involved and pursue a career in public service.
Some good news: there are many local government leaders who are enthusiastic about engaging millennials in meaningful interaction with government, at least in the Detroit area. We’re pulling them together to discuss this issue in a couple of weeks, so thanks for the timely post and the helpful resources!
When I ran VP Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR)from 1997-2001, we spent a lot of time on these workforce issues, especially since over half of the Federal workforce was eligible to retire over the next five years. We came to several conclusions and action steps that may be of interest to readers of this blog:
1. It would be good for the Federal government if as many of those working for it who are eligible to retire did so. While it is important that we capture their wisdom borne of experiences they have had in serving in government over the last 40 years before they leave, their lack of twenty-first century skills, especially when it came to computers and the Net, was actually hamstringing the ability of the government to respond effectively to the demands of its citizens.
2. To replace those workers with new ones would require reinventing the Federal government’s recruitment and hiring processes. The hiring practices at the time, weighted down by obsolete Civil Service requirements and unnecessary restrictions imposed by Congress,left many potential young job seekers waiting far too long in far too complicated a process, causing them to give up and take a job they could at least get started on right away. Under Janice LaChance, the last Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in the Clinton administration, we made real headway in reforming these processes, but with much work left to be done.
3. To completely address the challenge of matching the skills the government needs with the skills available, the Federal government also needed to abandon the assumption of “lifetime” employment and actively seek “short-termers” to fill many of the positions that would be vacated by those retiring. In many cases, this meant doing away with Civil Service job descriptions and pay rates. We started that process in many key agencies and the Bush administration has continued that effort so that now over half of the jobs in the Federal government are no longer covered by Title V of the Civil Service act.
4. We also determined that the Federal government had some powerful incentives with which to attract talent. Recently the Congress enacted into law one of those incentives, which is the ability to forgive student loans, if the money was borrowed directly from the government, after a given number of years of service (under the legislation, ten years are required as well as currency on your student loan payments and the provision applies to “public service” jobs of all types not just government.)But the job content of many Federal jobs is also appealing. There are very few initial jobs in the private sector that offer young people the chance to have as much impact on as many people as do jobs in government.
With the Millennial Generation now graduating from college and looking for a job with “meaning” but burdened with heavy debt loads, these incentives will be even more appealing. Furthermore, the experience of service, which is so prevalent throughout this generation, will also make them prime candidates for making at least their first job one in government.
Senator Obama’s recent speech on service also laid out an ambitious program of civic education which, if enacted, would further elevate Millennial’s interest in government and the key role it plays in assuring economic opportunity and social justice for all Americans. As we enter a “civic” era, dominated by Millennial attitudes and beliefs, America will find a generation ready to go to work to improve the civic institutions of this country and government at all levels needs to change its personnel practices to take advantage of this opportunity.
Morley Winograd
I left a comment over at blogher before I read to the end. (sorry)
I’m Australian, and I think most of your post reflect a particular American focus, but there’s some similarities here.
Our federal government is also facing an aging workforce. It is facing budget cuts as the same time as the number of federal programs increase. These programs require dynamic, inventive solutions to big-picture problems.
Government is always challenged by the need to compete with business for the ‘best and brightest’. Here they do offer security, but where possible, they also offer better conditions (flex-time, paid maternity leave, study leave). This in part makes up for the lack of financial incentive. These benefits also help attract and retain more women.
They are also re-building their graduate programs, and attracting a lot of younger people that way.
There is still a perception that government jobs are boring and bureaucratic, but from the inside, it doesn’t look like that at all. We are helping inform policy decisions, and deciding how policy gets enacted on the ground. I am part of the next generation of dynamic, idealistic, ambitious public servants, and we are working to make the world a better place.
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