Political Appointees and Career Officials in Federal Government Service

A Personal Reflection on the Personnel Aspects of Project 2025

It’s difficult to know whether it’s a slogan, a plan, or an actual plot. Or, given where the political game now stands, whether to care in the first place.  But Project 2025¹ has caused great confusion, if not outright fear and loathing in certain ranks—in particular the proposal to replace thousands of senior career government officials with a new category of political appointee.  What might it mean?

A back-door repeal of the Pendleton Act of 1883 and a return to the Jacksonian spoils system?²  The further penetration of an apolitical federal bureaucracy by political hacks?  Or an understandable push to roll back the encroachments of an expanding “administrative state”?  In view of the hype, those who have waded through the wonkish pages of the actual document (particularly the Taking the Reigns of Government section focused on personnel reform) may at first be struck by its sensible-sounding content and reasonable tone.  What’s wrong with making our federal bureaucracy more responsive to the American people?   Why not reward excellent performance rather than only seniority?  Doesn’t it make sense to separate non-performing, dead-wood career bureaucrats more quickly?  

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

The subtle shift goes almost unnoticed.  Apart from the implicit association with waste, fraud and bloat, the explicit contention that the permanent bureaucracy leans “far left” and is instinctively opposed to “conservative” principles doesn’t quite square.  Nor does the failure to deal with the fact that political appointees already occupy the senior-most positions in any administration, or that their numbers have long been expanding—penetrating deeper into the bureaucracy in both Republican and Democratic administrations. I also couldn’t help thinking about what happens when even a good idea collides with reality and inevitably lurches into unexpected directions (or goes off the rails) in the process of implementation.  Finally there’s the problem of wolf in sheep’s clothing:  A Trump 2.0 bent on removing all institutional constraints from its path has targeted the permanent bureaucracy for good reason.  I’ll try to explain why below.

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A Complementary Relationship

But first, a truism that doubles as heresy: Political appointees and career officials have long worked together in the federal bureaucracy, and always will.  Moreover, their respective roles and incentives are complementary rather than conflicting.  When the relationship works, it is one of balance, cooperation, even healthy tension.  Having only a brief window of opportunity (typically four years or less), political appointees want to make their mark and get important stuff done as fast as they can.  So they often bring a welcome burst of outside energy, not to mention political oomph and the policy orientation of the administration.  For their part, career officials have a longer-term time frame and the institutional knowledge that comes with experience.  Chastened by the memory of past enthusiasms and past disappointments, they tend to be cautious, conservative, more interested in keeping the trains running than in wandering down garden paths.

All told, the presence of political appointees working alongside career officials produces the kinds of results that wouldn’t be possible in the absence of one or the other.  Looking back on my own 30 years of government service, I can safely say that career officials and political appointees enjoy mostly productive, complementary, mutually reinforcing relationships.  (Mostly, not always.)  I remember Walter Mondale as Ambassador to Japan openly acknowledging he would have been helpless without the competent support and subject matter expertise of his superb Deputy Chief of Mission, Rust Deming, and the rest of the country team.  For their part, few career officials enjoy the kind of political leverage reflected in having a direct line to the president, as Ambassador Mondale did.  If this is a noteworthy illustrative example of the relationship working, it is not necessarily an exception.  

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Of course, problems occur on both sides, and the tension can morph into antagonism—or worse.  Political appointees complain of career officials stuck in the rut of past habit, dragging their feet, unimaginative, even lazy.  They may suspect a political motive in the molasses slowness of policy implementation.  They may lament the lack of private sector-type incentives—such as performance pay on one end and firing on the other—to energize those lumpen career staff who are merely putting in time.  (At times they may be right.)  Suspicious, impatient, or frustrated enough to toss up their hands, they may try to move forward without the bureaucracy or by going around it, leaving career officials out of the loop.  Or worse.

Career officials have several complaints of their own.  One is that political appointees use their positions primarily as platforms for their own ambition.  They often care little about the longer-term health of the organization in which they serve, giving it short shrift in pursuit of short-term policy glory or personal advancement.  In my 30 years in the Foreign Service, the only Secretary of State who palpably cared and invested real time, energy, and resources into the State Department as an institution was Secretary Colin Powell—and that was mostly thanks to his background as a career Army Officer.  (In fairness, I know the current Secretary is appreciated by most career officials.)

But a more consequential complaint concerns the role of apolitical judgment as a core duty of career professionals.  And let’s not forget the oath to the US Constitution.  

Professional Judgment

I think back to early 2003 and the run up to the Iraq invasion.  Many career officials harbored real doubts about the wisdom of this action, and did our best to voice them.  Not because we unelected permanent bureaucrats felt we knew better than our elected president or his politically appointed representatives; not because we secretly favored Democrats over Republicans; not because we opposed President Bush personally or politically.  (As mentioned, most of us deeply appreciated Secretary Powell—far more, for example, than we did his Democratic administration predecessor.)  Rather, we were simply doing our jobs—or at least trying to.  We may not have fallen into company line with the blind obedience of automatons, as was seemingly being demanded by the fraught political environment at the time.  We were using our critical judgment—seeking to provide all relevant information and sound professional guidance without filtering our perception of reality for narrow political reasons.  

One small example: Those of us serving in Malaysia (a moderate Muslim-majority nation) at the time had sent a diplomatic cable titled “One Billion Enemies” to Washington.  The report was based on countless conversations with counterparts in government, political parties, the media, Islamic organizations, academia, and civil society across the board.  It reflected a summary view of the likely reaction in the Islamic world to a US invasion.  Similar dispatches were being sent from US embassies all over the world, and not just the Islamic world.  Euphemistically put, the widespread global skepticism concerning what was to come understandably colored the view of the State Department itself in the process of policy formulation, such as it was.  If this hadn’t been the case, the American people should rightly demand to close the place down.

Not coincidentally, it was around this same time that then Congressman Newt Gingrich penned a hit piece in the magazine Foreign Policy called “The Rogue State Department”.  (https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/12/06/fp-flashback-gingrich-on-reforming-the-state-dept-in-2003/)  In it, he accused US diplomats of undermining the Bush administration’s foreign policy and argued that the Department needed to “experience culture shock, a top-to-bottom transformation that will make it a more effective communicator of US values around the world…”  (In case any readers need prodding, this argument should sound eerily familiar.)  I remember feeling deeply frustrated, even infuriated by Mr. Gingrich’s rogue argument.  

What were diplomats supposed to do with the perspectives we were hearing from counterparts abroad?  Pretend we hadn’t heard them? Remain silent?  Muffle our voices and refuse to transmit theirs?  Were we supposed to simply repeat the talking points in the Gingrich-led echo chamber of right wing US politics and media at the time?  Was that our new job description?  Would that not have been an even more colossal dereliction of duty, the very abnegation of the professional judgment we were hired and commissioned to provide?  Forget the grandiose idea of diplomats being the ears and eyes of our country around the world, now we were meant only to serve as its loud mouth.  Try dealing with other people in that way.  Try dealing with the outside world with that level of willful dismissal, all transmission and no reception.  See where it gets you.  If that was the job description, I thought, we diplomats might as well all go home.  

To state it explicitly: the professional judgment of apolitical career officials who are serious about their responsibilities (as most are) represents a healthy check on the potential mistakes or excesses of narrow partisanship or rogue political power, even if democratically elected.  This is not because unelected bureaucrats wish to usurp legitimate democratic authority, but precisely the opposite.  They hope to provide their democratically elected political bosses with the judgment-based guidance that is their primary professional added value—to help prevent avoidable mistakes if no more lofty objective is possible.    

Or am I missing the point?  Is that the kind of value that should no longer be added?  Is the interest being advanced now something else?  Something other?  Something more narrow?  More political?  More personal?

The Constitutional Oath

Which brings me to the all important point about the oath to the US Constitution.  It bears underscoring (and repeating and reaffirming) that all federal government officials—of whatever category, whether political appointee or career professional—swear only one oath.  That oath is to the US Constitution; that is, to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”  The oath is sworn to nothing and nobody else; not to the state, not to the government, and not to the President of the United States. 

So what happens when the President chooses an ethically dubious, legally ambiguous, or constitutionally compromised path (as has been known to happen)?  What then?  Do we exercise apolitical professional judgment or fall into line? Do we get down on the bended knee of the courtier? Practice the deferential grin of the sycophant? Or do we try to speak truth to power?

That is the core question of career professionals concerning Project 2025. 

1. https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

2. The Pendleton Act—aka The Civil Service Reform Act—established the tradition and mechanism of permanent federal employment based on merit rather than on political party affiliation.