By David Bray, PhD - Chair of the Accelerator & Distinguished Fellow, Stimson Center
Since its establishment in 1979, the Senior Executive Service (SES) has experienced a consistent set of pressures that impacts our nation's ability to respond to crises and disruptive events. A year-long study, using two decades of data sets from the Office of Personnel Management regarding long-term trends in the United States’ government workforce, released its findings in 2019 noting:
- A consistent pattern across *all* U.S. Presidential administrations: a steady increase in political SES appointments coupled with a decrease in non-political career executives. Notably: these shifts didn’t occur under any one political party’s rule.
- A parallel trend where non-partisan SES members increasingly faced heightened scrutiny and criticism, including toxic controversies used as political leverage by opposing parties. This also has been a consistent trend since the 1990s onwards.
From these empirical results, the study authors concluded long-term trends, spanning at least two decades, had significantly diminished the capacity of public sector institutions to respond to a national crisis — or mount an adequate response if multiple domestic or foreign emergencies occurred at the same time. If workplaces continued to be politically charged, and if the relationships between elected and appointed political SES and non-partisan SES members continued to be toxic, this represented a recipe for seismic national disruption.
As such, the study warned in February 2019 that a national crisis-level event could happen in the next year where the U.S. government would not respond well to crisis because it no longer had the talent *and* it had made the workplaces so toxic that the connections and relations needed to respond wouldn't be there.
A year after that study, the COVID-19 pandemic happened. If the response proved suboptimal, it could be in part because of these overall workforce trends that have been growing over a period of at least two decades.
Yet we as a country can turn things around. Here is how:
Recognize the Need for Reform. Leaders from both sides of the political aisle, as well as from the private sector, must recognize that the United States needs a rejuvenation that begins by recognizing that renewed or *new* institutions are required to collaborate, coordinate, and adapt to new and emergent concerns quite differently than the world of 1979 when the Senior Executive Service was created. The post-World War II institutions of the past may not fit our interconnected world of 2025. Our institutions either need to be renewed or new, networked institutions that involve both public and private sector actors to be better prepared for future disruptions ahead.
Focus on Non-Partisan Solutions. The political environment for non-partisan senior executives in public service have become increasingly toxic over the last two decades. Online information that is either inaccurate or out of context can spread faster than the truth, adding to the already demanding work of non-partisan senior executives. To fix this, free societies around the world must strive to pull away from hyper-partisan politics and find value in bipartisan and non-partisan public service for the good of communities starting at local levels, then state levels, and finally nationally.
Foster Shared Public-Private Commitment. Free societies must re-awake shared community importance of a committed public and private sector ethos that supports a functioning set of governance activities for the economic, civic, and community health of towns, the 50 different states, and the nation, regardless of either individual or national politics or partisan media. It is only with functioning public and private sectors that free societies can be strong and resilient to disruptions.
There is no textbook for the future ahead – yet doing nothing is itself a risk of institutions becoming outdated, obsolete, and untrusted by a public that wants more from those who serve.
Onwards and upwards together.
