When Government Works Its Magic
09-08-2024Politics, Hannah Arendt writes, is the activity through which a plurality of people come together to pursue a common way of life. Politics is not just about the pursuit of power or about the division of the spoils. For Arendt, politics is the secular form of transcendence, the way people rise above their individual interests and come together for a common goal. That is why political action requires that we act collectively. And it is also why those who serve as public servants—those who rise above their private interests to serve the public interest—are the essential political actors. A functioning public service–indeed, an exceptional and publicly respected civil service—is absolutely core to any meaningful political life.
The poor salaries and low esteem with which we treat public officials today is corrosive of a meaningful and thriving political world. One attempt to raise the status of public servants are the Sammie awards, which are given every year to celebrate extraordinary people inside the federal government. Michael Lewis has written an incredible profile of one such civil servant, Chris Mark. If you want to have your faith in our government restored, at least momentarily, read Lewis’ essay on Chris Mark:
"Each spring, the most interesting organization that no one’s ever heard of collects nominations for the most important awards that most people will never know were handed out. The organization, called the Partnership for Public Service, created the awards, called the Sammies, in 2002 to call out extraordinary deeds inside the federal government. Founded the year before by an entrepreneur named Samuel Heyman, it set out to attract talented and unusual people to the federal workforce. One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about. There was thus little incentive to do something great, and a lot of incentive to hide. The awards were meant to correct that problem. “There’s no culture of recognition in government,” said Max Stier, whom Heyman hired to run the Partnership. “We wanted to create a culture of recognition.”
This was trickier than they first imagined it would be. Basically no one came forward on their own: Civil servants appeared to lack the ability to be recognized. Stier was reduced to calling up the 15 Cabinet secretaries and begging them to look around and see whether any of their underlings had done anything worth mentioning. Nominations trickled in; some awards got handed out. A pair of FBI agents cracked the cold case of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and split one of the prizes. Another went to a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who designed and ran a program that delivered a billion vaccinations and eradicated polio in India. A third was given to a man inside the Energy Department who had been sent to a massive nuclear waste dump outside Denver, containing enough radioactive gunk to fill 90 miles of railroad cars, and told to clean it up. He finished the project $30 billion under budget and 60 years ahead of schedule — and turned the dump into a park.
All these people had done astonishing things. None had much to say about them. The Partnership called the Colorado guy to see if he wanted to explain the miracle he’d performed. “I just managed the project,” he said. End of story. No story.
The Partnership hasn’t given up hope, however. Each year, it flushes out a few more nominees than the year before. Each spring, the list that circulates inside the Partnership is a bit longer than the last. I’ve read through it the past five years or so to remind myself, among other things, how many weird problems the United States government deals with at any one time. On this year’s list is a woman at the Agriculture Department who “found ways to create products from misshapen fruits and vegetables unsuitable for market, which reduces food waste, a $400 billion problem for the United States each year.” A man inside the Environmental Protection Agency conceived and put in place a service called AIRNow that supplies Americans with the best air-quality forecasts in the world. A special agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration led a team that seized (and presumably also counted) 919,088 capsules of especially lethal fentanyl — and prosecuted the people peddling them.
An additional 500 or so entries made it onto this year’s list: pages of single-paragraph descriptions of what some civil servant no one has ever heard of has done. In most cases, what they’ve done is solve some extremely narrow, difficult problem that the U.S. government — in many cases, only the U.S. government — has taken on: locating and disposing of chemical weapons in Syria; delivering high-speed internet to rural America; extracting 15,000 Americans from in and around Gaza on Oct. 8, 2023. The work sometimes rings a bell with me. The people who did it never do.
Each year, I finish reading the list of nominees with the same lingering feeling of futility: Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials. Even the people who win the award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them — and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back. Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work! Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother. Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.” Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it.
They were the carrots in the third-grade play. Our elected officials — the kids who bludgeon the teachers for attention and wind up cast as the play’s lead — use them for their own narrow purposes. They take credit for the good they do. They blame them when things go wrong. The rest of us encourage this dubious behavior. We never ask: Why am I spending another minute of my life reading about and yapping about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris when I know nothing about the 2 million or so federal employees and their possibly lifesaving work that whoever is president will be expected to nurture, or at least not screw up? Even the Partnership seems to sense the futility in trying to present civil servants as characters with voices needing to be heard.
But this year, someone inside the Partnership messed up. Spotting the error, I thought: Some intern must have written this one. It felt like a rookie mistake — to allow a reader of this dutiful list a glimpse of an actual human being. Four little words, at the end of one of the paragraphs.
Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. A former coal miner.
A former coal miner. Those words raised questions. Not about the work but about the man."