“Probationary” Suicide

How to Decimate the Public Sector and Capture the State--Drawing by Genevieve Shapiro

Roughly 15 years ago and a similar number of years into my Foreign Service career, I was serving as political counselor at a US Embassy in South America. For the first time, I had people working with and for me who were less than half my age. It is a familiar wake up call for those of us lucky enough to live longish lives and enjoy longish careers. But I must say the jolt of it was tempered by the fact that, in general, the younger colleagues in question were truly superb—talented and promising. In several cases, they were far more talented and promising than I, and I knew it.

I also knew that, in 15 years time—which is where we are now—these young professionals would occupy the same kinds of “leadership” positions in the State Department and Foreign Service that I had occupied back then (or a rung or two higher). This was as it should be. The system was working. Because today, 15 years later and more than one year after retiring, with the baton handed off to the next generation, I am confident we have the quality and caliber of professionals we need serving in the critical positions we need them. The US government, the State Department, and the Foreign Service are in excellent shape for the long haul. Perfect.

It may be more accurate to say I was confident rather than am.

Because that was before the contemptuous Trump 2.0 wrecking crew came along. To them, public service is plainly a kind of second-class citizenship for people who can’t compete in the more “productive” and “efficient” private sector. When I heard Elon Musk state with his black ball cap and sociopath’s smirk from the Oval Office that if 2.1 million government workers had “two neurons” in their head, then they should be able to answer a Friday night email telling them that their services were no longer needed and to do so by COB Monday, I wanted to leap through the TV screen to strangle him. If only he knew the half of it, or could be bothered to care. For example, that many superb public servants have taken massive pay cuts after leaving successful careers in the private sector, precisely because they wanted to serve something bigger than themselves—the national interest, the public good, people less well off than they are, what have you. It turns out some people, including many who work in government, are intrinsically motivated, driven by interests and values other than money, status, or the possibility of having their own summer house, private plane, and yacht (though as a good American, I have no problem with any one of these beautiful things).

The question is: what promising young professional in their right mind would be contemplating a career in public service in the current circumstances? What about careers in development, diplomacy, or foreign affairs? I don’t even need to answer these questions. Of all the crazy, destructive things I see being done by this regime of apparent grifters, traitors, sycophants, and rogues—and in this post I won’t bother to begin trying to enumerate them—this fact might be the craziest and most destructive among them. Not only that, but so-called “probationary” federal employees—that misleading misnomer for those promising public sector professionals who are just getting started or have just been promoted to more senior positions thanks to their demonstrated past performance and future potential—are being disproportionately targeted for job elimination by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a more grossly misleading misnomer still.

The perversity of it is plain. Destruction, not efficiency, is the aim.

Anyone in any job or profession knows that the most energetic, enthusiastic, and (in the longer term) indispensable employees are those revving their engines and just getting started. They want to prove their potential, show they’ve got the right stuff. So they jump into the trenches and pick up the load of important, necessary, and not always glamorous work of which veteran employees have often seen more than enough. It is the way of the world, and logical and welcome. In the current case, our younger cohorts also bring the kinds of cutting edge 21st century technology and related skills that the government desperately needs, today and for the future. (It is ironic to note that Musk’s DOGE minions, reportedly embedded in different agencies of the federal government, are around the same age as many of their “probationary” employee counterparts, if guided by a slightly different ethic).

For the record, diplomacy—a quintessentially human endeavor focused on cultivating trust among people and peoples—cannot be delegated to AI bots. If so, human life, politics, friendship, conversation and seduction, even love itself may as well be abolished. Many public functions are similarly human-focused, and irreducible to “simple” or fancy technology solutions. Maybe I’m dumb, but people are not automatons—not yet. Because I can’t even begin to imagine any future in which the same eternal political laws that have been in operation in the present and past will be magically suspended by the perfect hum and shimmering gleam of the brave new beautiful world’s fantastical machine.

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Full On State Capture or the Successful Defense of Democracy

To continue my earlier thinking in sequences of time, I now contemplate the state of the world and our government institutions one generation out. Treating public sector employees like losers and suckers is toxic enough, but it’s the future impact of what’s happening today that really freaks me out. If we fire our most promising public servants, what will our federal government, our State Department, our Foreign Service look like in 15 years time? Who will be leading and managing our public institutions? Who will be teaching and mentoring our future generations? Think about the state of affairs after our current daffy dear leader is dead or descended deeper into the fog of distorted thoughts and dementia than he already is! As professional students of public administration have repeatedly emphasized, the fact that it is easier to destroy than to build—or rebuild—applies doubly or triply to government functions, which are unique and not often replicated elsewhere.

I sometimes imagine Elon Musk’s future fate, too, and see it swinging somewhere between two extremes.

One: He will own most of what used to be the federal government apparatus, having successfully guided the transition from free “public” service to “pay to play” private contracting structures for services that used to be free because they used to be public. This is the essence of libertarian, free-market, techno-utopian capitalism! Nettlesome public sector entities focused on “inefficient” public concerns will be either comfortably privatized or out of the picture. No doubt this will be fantastic (and fantastically remunerative) for those in charge of the machine like Musk and his billionaire CEO friends. But (just a guess), less so for the rest of us.

Two: The democratic institutions of our constitutional republic will rise in belated self-defense, and Musk will be driven out of the government before capturing the state or causing irreparable damage. Depending on what (congressional and judicial) inquiries discover about his massive conflicts of interest while leading DOGE, any company he owns—in whole or in part—will be stripped of all government contracts and forbidden from doing business with the public sector into the indefinite future. If there is credible evidence that he tried to undermine the rule of law and related structures of democratic government—which ironically helped launch and sustain his extraordinary success in his adopted country—this will constitute treason. And he will be stripped of his naturalized citizenship, deported back to South Africa, and never allowed to return. (At fraught times such as these, one should be permitted to fantasize).

*****

I’m all for promoting government efficiency, and for making government “of the people, by the people, for the people” more responsive to more people. I support eliminating wasteful and unnecessary redundancies, and getting rid of employees who underperform or are no longer interested in doing their work. But targeting the most promising, the youngest and those recently promoted, makes absolutely no sense. It suggests a department of so-called efficiency interested not in efficiency but in crippling the state over the long term by targeting its future.

This wanton destruction, done under false cover, should be halted before it’s too late.