Wayne Turnage
Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services and Director of Department of Health Care Finance, District of Columbia

What Does Public Service Mean to You

Public service incorporates a wide range of disciplines, and the persons who dedicate their careers to this noble pursuit have a diversity of expertise and skill sets befitting of the challenge. But what do we commonly share? To be sure there is a common nexus that binds each of us to one another. And through his binding principle we have an inherited obligation as public servants.

Despite the diversity of our professional roles, we are ennobled by the high ideas and guiding principle that our work as public servants “is for the good of all others, rather than at the expense of others.” This marvelous principle of altruism underpins all that we do, even at a time when the very nature of public service is under attack.

There can be no question about the slow, yet irrepressible erosion in our national public perception concerning the inherent value and virtue of public service. Consider this contrast. When I was but a small child, a young visionary president, John Kennedy, captured the imagination of this nation with a political message ripe with idealism - one that included a clarion call to our young people to a full embrace of public service. Kennedy issued this challenge, less as a simple route to productive employment, but more as an idea that would help propel this country to heights previously unseen or imaginable.

The impact of his soul stirring call to “ask what you could do for your country”, echoed, at that time, through the entire nation. Captured by this infectious mantra, fully 70 percent of Americans reported at that time, that they not only believed in the value of public service, but also the virtue of their government. Today, however, the same Gallup survey reveals that only two in 10 Americans even trust government, most believing that it has little to no value, and even less virtue.

This cynical view and precipitous decline in public opinion has progressively evolved over the past 50 plus years, but it reached an angry apex in November 2016. It was this gradual, though seismic shift in public perception that help lift into the White House, a former president, who freely proffered both derisive and dismissive views about the virtues of government-funded public service, frequently labeling much of the enterprise as a “swamp”.

So, I am excited to join an organization to extend my commitment to public service work if, for no other reason, than to provide a heartfelt counter to these unfortunate views which have gained significant currency across the country.

At a time when the critical policy questions we face require our best thinking, creative solutions, and meaningful collaboration, a coarsened public discourse has short circuited the national policy making process, sacrificing thoughtful debate and cooperation on the altar of cynical and often vicious partisan political gamesmanship.

Now, we have a toxic environment where sharp ideological differences have become like acute political cataracts, effectively blinding some of our leaders to a myopic embrace of political expediency as a substitute for intelligent, common sense public policy designed to address the very real problems that we encounter as public servants.

So, my first internal remember is that this thing called public service, possesses an immense and immutable value that cannot be depreciated by slanderous and demeaning rhetoric, regardless the source. I recognize that my obligation as a public servant is not just to perform to the best of my ability, rather, it is also to defend for posterity, the honor of public service work.

To do this I think past the daily tasks of my job and focus on the macro value of public service. My thoughts about the real virtues of public service were shaped by my experiences growing up in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which was once proudly labeled as the “Cradle of the Confederacy”. And it was through the fiery cauldron of racial and gender injustice, that I was exposed to some of the finest and most courageous public servants of my lifetime.

I often think with great fondness of an old white federal judge named Robert Merhige who -- under the constant threat of death -- had the audacity to rule that women should be allowed to attend UVA, and that if it was ok for black and white young boys to travel 8,000 miles from home to fight and die together in brutal solidarity in the rice patties of Vietnam, then they ought to be able to share a classroom in the prestigious West End of Richmond Virginia.

That is true public service.

I remember a big strapping guy name Linwood Holton, a Republican Governor, newly elected in 1969, who stood on the steps of the State Capitol, in the weakening shadows of this state’s shameful policy of Massive Resistance and, in defiance of his own party, declared that in his administration, the exclusion of race in any matter would not be tolerated. His administration he said, would be “an of aristocracy of ability, regardless of race, color, or creed." Before Governor Holton took office, if you were black and wanted to serve in Virginia government, your best option was to grab a mop or a broom. Now, black men and women capably serve at every level of State Government.

That is public service.

While in Virginia, I had the pleasure of working for Governor Tim Kaine as the Commonwealth’s first African American Chief of Staff. In this role, I frequently encountered these remarkable public employees whose clarifying vision of their work as public servants was so refreshing. It was as if their perspective about their work served as high-octane jet fuel that powered their daily efforts.

I often think about these employees yet today, some 12 years later –

• I think about the staff I meet at the Department of Juvenile Justice and their difficult jobs in working with chronically delinquent children. These staff spend countless hours trying to help imprisoned kids -- not adults -- reclaim their broken lives. To fully understand the difficulty of their task, I need only return to my old neighborhood where festering societal dysfunctions emerged in many blocks of the community that I once called home. These social ills offer ocular and troubling reminders of what the juvenile justice staff face every day in the kids they mentor – broken homes, parental drug abuse, intergenerational crime, seemingly intractable poverty, unbelievably low school attainment levels, and many young children with significant, pervasive, and often untreated mental health issues. Yet these staff spend long hours with these troubled children for a mere fraction of the salaries many of us earn.

This is the true value of public service

Here, in the District of Columbia, this value is found in activities as prosaic as transportation workers who clear snow while we sleep. Likewise, it can be seen in the work of the District’s brave police officers who put their lives on the line every day to make this city safe.

We see this service in the District’s educators who teach the city’s most precious resource, our children.

This noble public service is witnessed in the staff at the Department of Behavioral Health who work every day with District residents who are trapped in the vicious and lethal cycle of substance use addictions that threaten to rob them of a future.

And I see it in the incredible work that my current staff at the Department of Health Care Finance perform nearly every day, extending lifelines to many residents who are perched on an economic precipice, struggling with serious illness and often chronic conditions, as they worry about negotiating a complex health system that no doubt is seen by them as a frightening abyss.

In my mind, their efforts, and the other countless acts of dedication bear witness to the true value of public service.

So, when I become disillusioned with the repellant views routinely expressed about public service, I simply cast my thoughts to the broad reach of the work these servants perform either individually in their own capacity, or collectively as the member of a proud fraternity of public employees, as they embrace the pure and virtuous ethos that defines the very nature of public service.

So, what is my obligation to public service?

I am inestimably proud of the public servants that I have encountered over the 40-year span of my career. And, as I meet the new and young public servants today, I routinely conclude that they, without doubt, have arrived better educated on average than I was at their young ages.

Further, because of advancements in management principles and concepts, complex data management tools, the application of more sophisticated research modeling techniques, and the near exponential growth in computer processing capabilities, the opportunities for richer and more definitive work in public policy analysis abounds.

With these amazing tools, we are all expected to embrace a certain rigor in problem solving, where easy solutions are treated with a relentless skepticism, and employees are driven to lean on sophisticated analytics to inform decision-making, in the process, rejecting viscerally derived positions that are bereft of evidence and clear thinking.

But, perhaps most important, we are expected to assume the role of public service thought leaders where we demonstrate an ability to think strategically about effective change, thus becoming a force multiplier for meaningful reform of public programs. We must be forever mindful that as thought leaders, we will almost certainly be relied upon to shape public policy in ways that “apportion opportunities, circumscribe options, and even inflict punishment”, if necessary.

Moreover, we must use our knowledge, credibility, and integrity as unbiased and thorough public servants, to help build a fairer, better, and more just society – one day leaving this place appreciably better than we found it.