18F: The necessity of public service
_{2 March 2025}

Back in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan began vilifying the civil service. He joked, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help,'" implying that the government was either inept or corrupt at all times, so people shouldn't trust it.

Reagan hated civil servants. He believed – or, claimed to believe – that private industry would do better. He hated civil servants so much that he issued a hiring freeze immediately after his swearing in on January 20, 1981 – before he'd even left the Capitol. Later that year, when air traffic controllers went on strike for more reasonable hours and reduced stress, he fired them all.

And so he began a campaign that has never stopped, to replace as much of the civil service with contractors as possible. It's been 45 years now. I think it's time to acknowledge that it has failed to save money or provide better service.

The private sector cannot do public service cheaper or better than the public service. Period.

Fundamentally, the private sector is driven by a goal that is best accomplished by providing merely acceptable service at the highest possible price. In the end, you get right where we've gotten: behemoth corporations that only exist to bid on government contracts at inflated costs.

Those companies exist to extract money. So they do a "good enough" job that they can win another contract. And along the way, they nickel-and-dime the government for every possible change that comes along during the execution of the contract. Bluntly, corporations are not good-faith actors in the realm of public service.

To be clear, many of the people working at these companies do care deeply about the missions of the agencies they're working for. And many of them are very skilled. This is not a question of where the workers sit. It's a question of who they're actually working for.

Public service is a government responsibility. Government employees should do it. Then government and the people doing its work have a squarely aligned interest: helping people.