America’s civil service must remain nonpartisan

The election is just a few days away, and while the presidential nominees are making their closing arguments, we wanted to make one last pitch to the candidates, and to those of you who can do something about it: Find a way to assure the political impartiality of the career civil servants, in uniform and otherwise, who will eventually serve us all.

Who are we to say? We are a small group of former public officials, career and appointed, all of whom have decades of public service under both Republican and Democratic presidents. We have all dedicated ourselves to seeing the ranks of the federal career civil service remain nonpartisan but still accountable to democratically elected leaders. More importantly, we have heard this same concern, almost without exception, from a far broader set of current and former colleagues, as well as those in the private and nonprofit sectors who deal with government, on both sides of the aisle.

All of us clearly want a politically impartial career public service (including our military), but we fear that seemingly obvious goal may be out of reach this election. In that regard, we have been trying — unfortunately, with only limited success — to offer a “third way” to both sides that sits somewhere between today’s anachronistic status quo and a dysfunctional Schedule F “reform.”

No one disagrees with us, but too few are willing to go public. We are not afraid to do so. But we have been criticized by partisans on both sides for daring to offer a compromise, something that is no longer part of the political lexicon for many.

This is an obscure issue for most voters, but we would ask them to just think about it for a moment. What if FEMA or NOAA were driven by partisan politics instead of the law and their statutory missions? Or the Social Security Administration or the IRS? What if politicians put their partisan thumbs on the scale when it comes to tax laws, hurricane forecasts, disaster relief or disability claims? What if the first thing that impartial career civil servants are asked to do is take a loyalty oath in order to have a say in policy?

And it’s even more complicated when it comes to national and homeland security, including our military, diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement corps. We know firsthand that the next president will need talented, independent career public servants who will tell her or him the unvarnished truth, without fear of losing their jobs. They must not be inhibited in giving the president real options, not those blithely offered on the campaign trail. And if upon hearing those options, elected and appointed politicians tell them to do what it is they want anyway, those public servants should understand that they are duty-bound to do so (as long as the actions are lawful, of course).

To Harris, if you win, we think you will find that you can’t really hold accountable career bureaucrats, especially those whose poor performance or behavior merits dismissal — not without lots of lawyers, endless appeals, and timid, inertia-bound agency leaders who just want to avoid conflict. Much of the public thinks career civil servants have a job for life, no matter what they do. You can fix that.

To Candidate Trump, if you win, do not be tempted to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” by making political loyalty to you the litmus test for appointing or retaining career public servants (a la Schedule F and Project 2025). Political appointees are another matter — insisting on their loyalty to shape and carry out your lawful policy priorities is fine. But you want and need career public servants, in uniform and out, to tell you the truth, whether you want to hear it or not. That’s what “speaking truth to power” means, and it is an unwritten but essential cornerstone of our Constitution.

To leaders in Congress, put our country’s need for a nonpartisan but still accountable military and civil service above party and personal loyalty, and pass something to assure it — like requiring congressional action to establish a new Schedule F, or codifying the Office of Personnel Management’s recent merit principles rule, even in a “lame duck” session.

Any set of civil service reforms should be all about policy and not partisan politics, about accountability to the rule of law and regulation, not someone’s personal agenda. It should be about setting clear (and lawful) policy and program goals and reasonable standards of individual performance and behavior, expecting your civil servants to meet them, and evaluating them fairly as they do.

Politics is not a dirty word, especially in a democracy, but it comes with proven (and legal) processes — whether it’s a vote in Congress or the more arcane but just as necessary interagency committees that tackle foreign policy — that are there for a reason. Those processes were designed to keep the necessary but inevitable tension between politics and administration in rough equilibrium. But more importantly, to keep partisanship and loyalties to a personal agenda out of it altogether.

We know because we’ve been there. We have literally decades of experience serving under both Republican and Democratic administrations in various influential capacities. And we know that whoever wins, the country will need a career civil service that follows the Constitution and the rule of law, is duty-bound to tell our president the truth and, thereafter, to follow her or his lawful orders. No more and no less.

Ron Sanders served for almost four decades under both Republican and Democratic presidents as a senior career official and was chair of the Federal Salary Council under President Donald Trump. Robert Shea, the moderator of Gov Navigators, is a former senior OMB official under President George W. Bush. Robert Tobias is the former national president of the National Treasury Employees Union and longtime expert on federal labor-management relations. They are all fellows of the National Academy of Public Administration.