Public Service in the Pandemic Era: A COVID Commentary

• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Author: Camilla Stivers
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13350

354Public Administration Review • March | Apri l 202 2

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 82, Iss. 2, pp. 354–358. © 2021 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI:10.1111/puar.13350.

Camilla Stivers

Cleveland State University

Public Service in the Pandemic Era: A COVID Commentary

Abstract: This viewpoint reflects on basic aspects of American public health and politics that are making the COVID

crisis response less effective than it might be. The performance of public service during a crisis depends as much on

self-reflectiveness and hope as on the achievement of measurable results. Anthony Fauci is offered as an exemplar of

authentic public service, understood as “living within the truth.”

Evidence for Practice

• In American public health, a long-standing decentralized institutional structure and individualistic political

traditions are barriers to significant reforms.

• Good “performance” in public service consists not only of achieving measurable results but also of self-

awareness about one’s role as a public servant and a commitment to “living within the truth” according to

one’s conscience.

• Anthony Fauci demonstrates to the rest of us by his performance how scientific truth can be meshed with

truth to one’s own conscience in service to the public.

I give the appearance of being optimistic. But,

deep down, I just do everything I possibly can,

assuming that the worst will happen, and I’ve

got to stop the worst from happening.

Anthony Fauci (Specter2020, 45)

Public space is alive with discussion of the

COVID-19 pandemic. A noteworthy aspect

is the unusual attention the American public

health system is receiving. Public health ordinarily

receives little public scrutiny and is routinely taken

for granted by Americans if they notice it at all. As

a result, it is typically starved for resources and has

had little active political support among citizens

(Fairchild et al.2010; Jennings2003; Morrow2005;

Turner2008). This essay deals with the ways in which

American political attitudes and practices have kept

in place a politically weak public health system and

suggests implications for practice and scholarship

going forward.

It seems important that public servants and public

administration scholars not pass up the opportunity

to learn from what the COVID crisis reveals about

American governance. Given the uphill battle any

U.S. policy faces when it targets community needs

rather than individual beneficiaries, there seems little

chance that the current pandemic will work a sea

change in our public health system. I will suggest that

the political dilemma of public health—its lack of

advocates among the general public—is not fixable

simply by replacing one chief executive or one party

with another. Yet a fresh look at the nature of public

service itself may suggest a worthwhile response short

of regime change. Using the exemplary role played

by public health expert Anthony Fauci on the public

stage, I explore the possibility that Fauci’s performance

offers a model for the practice of American public

health, in its current crisis and beyond, as well

as public service more broadly. The discussion

first documents basic aspects of public health’s

continuing disarray, followed by a brief argument

that individualism, the language of American political

common sense, helps to account for public health’s

perennial weakness. It then offers Anthony Fauci’s

role in the crisis as a concrete example, not of heroism

but of a career official whose performance spotlights

an authentic stance public health and other public

servants can take.

The three-level public health system in the United

States focuses largely on community-wide disease

prevention and control rather than the treatment of

individuals. Many of the nation’s greatest advances in

lowering death and disease rates resulted more than

a century ago from immunization, sanitation, and

other community efforts to slow or stop the spread

Camilla Stivers is a distinguished

professor emerita, Maxine Goodman

Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland

State University. In the mid-1980s, she

served as associate study director for the

Institute of Medicine report,

The Future of

Public Health

. Her latest book, coauthored

with David G. Carnevale, is

Knowledge

and Power in Public Bureaucracies: From

Pyramid to Circle

(Routledge 2020).

She was associate editor of

Public

Administration Review

from 2000 to 2005.

Email: camstivers@gmail.com

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