“The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” read a line from an email sent to federal employees from the United States Office of Personnel Management in late January. Seemingly inspired by Elon Musk’s purge of the workforce when he first bought Twitter, now X, the email was chaotically followed by swift action: Tens of thousands of federal workers pressured to take controversial buyout offers. Government departments frozen from operating. With the self-branded Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutting everyone from national park workers to experts at health agencies, the haste of the Trump administration’s effort to reduce the size of the federal workforce has been matched only by its tonal disdain for government institutions and public service.
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Responding to questions about the danger of emptying government offices that safeguard consumers and communities from harm, President Trump declared that, “Everybody is replaceable.” The president added, “We want them to go into the private sector. It’s our dream to have everybody, almost, working in the private sector.”
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The strategy of imploring Americans to“ask not what the private sector can do for you” is a deeply ironic one for the Trump administration to pursue. After all, the wealth inherited by the president came in large part on the back of federal housing subsidies. More directly, as Rogé Karma recently noted in The Atlantic, the single biggest success of President Trump’s first term came by way of the long-serving experts and career bureaucrats who helped turn Operation Warp Speed from an abstract idea into a historic, life-saving development during the pandemic. “The idea for the program,” Karma wrote, “came from Robert Kadlec, an assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Peter Marks, an FDA official—two seasoned public-health experts who had served in top government roles for years before Trump took office.”
Meanwhile, whether it’s government-funded research or billions of dollars in federal subsidies, contracts, or loans, Elon Musk—the grand vizier of the Trump administration’s so-called efficiency campaign—has benefited enormously from the very apparatus he now relishes in dismantling.
Like a psychic itch, it feels momentarily gratifying to scratch at the hypocrisies and lapses of logic in the doings of Trump World. For example, it’s clear that pulling back from America’s good works across the globe in the name of cutting a small fraction of its annual spending will cost the U.S. more in the long term and strengthen the standing of its rivals and enemies. But hidden beneath the administration’s erratic julienning of a devoted workforce is a catastrophic message about the worth and value of public service—and a misguided mantra that the private sector can save us.
The reality, however, is a little different. In recent years, it has become bipartisan wisdom that the kludginess of American bureaucracy is a major problem that needs solving. But that’s not because the work of the public sector itself is unimportant. “It helps to understand the meaning-making of the public sector and why there are some roles that are unique to the public sector that, quite frankly, would never be appropriate in a private sector context,” says Caitlin Lewis, the Executive Director of Work for America, a nonprofit that aims to solve the staffing crisis in government and highlight the impact of public service. ”I’m thinking about teachers and firefighters and public health workers and folks who create long-term economic value that’s not always captured in the way we measure and think about productivity.”
Investments in people and projects that promote interdependence, public trust and public safety, and social cohesion are exactly what the U.S. needs more of at this highly atomized, lonely moment. While reporting on how America’s work culture has degraded its communities, I spoke with General Stanley McChrystal, former leader of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who sounded a similar alarm. “The idea of community as being this knitted-together entity to which we all have responsibility and from which we all derive benefit has been weakened,” he warned. It’s little surprise, then, that McChrystal now spends much of his private life advocating for the adoption of a national service standard in the U.S., which would help repair America’s historic dissatisfaction with democracy and partisan clustering caused by growing social and economic dislocation.
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In other words, it’s the values that don’t appear on quarterly reports or the transcripts of earnings calls that will save us. But in the transactional world of Trump, Musk, and DOGE, the concept of career civil servants taking lower-paying, apolitical work to serve an intangible greater good is naive at best. The problem is that the DOGE outlook also fails to account for all the ways in which an overreliance on the private sector has already weakened American life in very tangible ways. Excessive deference toward the private sector helps explain why Americans rely on Starbucks bathrooms instead of public ones, why Americans spend twice as much as its peer nations on healthcare spending for poorer outcomes, and why wealthy homeowners hired private firefighters to save their property during the Los Angeles fires earlier this January.
Considering the scope of national dysfunction in the U.S., it won’t shock many people to learn that American trust in its government has dipped to record lows. In 2023, Pew Research Center, which has studied the issue since the late 1950s, found that public trust in the federal government had sunk to 16%, a nadir not seen during the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran Hostage Crisis, or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This lack of faith (and outright animus) toward institutions and public servants has allowed grifters, would-be oligarchs, and cynical political opportunists to fill the void.
But these are all also reasons to argue for investing in more effective public service and more responsive institutions, not depriving them of oxygen and leaving essential functions of society to the cold math of the private sector’s bottom line.
