Uncle Sam doesn't want you; government agencies are a haven for the mediocre because they don't try to get anybody better.

• Author: Heilemann, John
• Position: Cover Story

UNCLE SAM DOESN'T WANT YOU

They were the kind of kids companies fall over each other trying to hire--smart, personable, hardworking, well-groomed. That they went to Harvard didn't hurt, either. So it was no surprise that by April, most of the seniors in the discussion sections I was leading as a graduate student had jobs lined up after graduation. Nor was the roster of firms: Arthur Andersen, IBM, Morgan Stanley, CBS, Aetna . . . the usual suspects. What was strange was that one company--the country's biggest, in fact--didn't make the list: the federal government.

True, one woman was considering Capitol Hill; but she was the lone exception among nearly 20 others. Had they been the normal hodgepodge of art history, literature, and economics majors, I wouldn't have given it a second thought. But these were mostly government majors, enrolled in an upper-level course called "Politics in the Modern American State." And they were hardly apolitical or lacking in public spirit. Several kept full calendars housing the homeless, saving the rain forests, and freeing South Africa (often simultaneously). A couple were major players in student government. All of them took great joy in slogging through hundreds of pages on such burning topics as the evolution of bureaucratic structure at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Washington naturals, right? But when I asked how many of them had thought about working in government, they looked at me as if I'd asked if they had considered becoming botanists.

Even if they had been interested, they said, no one had the faintest idea of how to go about getting a federal job. Did recruiters come to campus? Most thought not. Some said you had to take a test. Others said no. The only thing they could agree on was that they didn't care to find out. Excited as they were by the dynamism of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations--civil rights, the Peace Corps, the War on Poverty--those days were long gone. Said one: "Government isn't like that anymore."

Sadly, the view that "government isn't like that anymore" is far from unique among America's young "best and brightest." According to a survey by the National Commission on the Public Service (better known as the Volcker Commission), nearly 90 percent of college honor students never seriously consider working in government. No wonder: About the same proportion believe that government jobs are not "challenging or intellectually stimulating." Fully half are convinced that such jobs are, in fact, inherently monotonous and futile.

Washington has done remarkably little to counter these perceptions. During the Reagan administration, federal recruiting was actually designed to reinforce them. Reagan's team systematically undermined recruiting efforts just as it systematically ran up the federal deficit, and for precisely the same reason: to cripple the cause of government activism. By making the process of getting a government job as cumbersome, slow, and red-tape-riddled as possible, the administration guaranteed that even the most determined would-be bureaucrats would ultimately go scurrying off to interview at Salomon Brothers or, worse, to apply to law school. That, of course, was exactly the idea.

But what an astoundingly bad one. If government is to meet our basic expectations, let alone go beyond that to better our lives, it needs creative, intelligent, dedicated people to develop and run its programs. Government's greatest triumphs during the past century--the New Deal and the New Frontier--were wrought by the hands of the country's "best and brightest" college graduates. Back then, government work was as seductive as investment banking would become decades later. In the early sixties, eager young honor students lined up to buy train tickets to Washington; by contrast, in the early eighties, they jumped on the shuttle to New York. In Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis described the scene outside Princeton's career services office when Lehman Bros. came to interview in 1982: "[It] resembled the ticket booth at a Michael Jackson concert, with lines of motley students staging all-night vigils to get ahead."

It's that kind of cachet that government has to regain if it's going to work well. And don't let anyone tell you that it can't because of its meager salaries. Outlandish pay may have helped fuel the investment-banking binge, but equally important was the perception that the jobs were hot stuff. Consider Teach for America, a widely heralded new program through which recent college grads work as teachers in disadvantaged neighborhood schools for two years at salaries of $18,000 to $29,000 per year, depending on the district. To attract applicants, Teach for America's founder, Wendy Kopp, touted it around the Ivy League and other top schools as "highly selective" and "extremely competitive." Like magic, Kopp soon had 2,500 applications (for 500 spots) from kids who, a year before, might just as easily have ended up swapping stocks on the trading floor.

George Bush seems to understand this principle somewhat. Unlike his former boss, he values the civil service enough to have talked up its virtues. But despite efforts at improvement by his Office of Personnel Management (OPM)--the government's main headhunter--the recruiting system remains a shambles. Witness my former students. Agency outreach to campuses is still almost nonexistent. The job application process is so confusing that even college career counselors don't understand it. Just laying your hands on information about what positions are out there requires the investigative savvy of Bob Woodward and the patience of Job.

"When a student comes to me with some vague idea he or she might be interested in working for the federal government, I don't even know where to start," explains Anne Stewart, placement director at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs and Citizenship for the past 13 years. "The recruitment process is such a maze--it's almost as if it was set up to keep good people out."

Devine intervention

It wasn't always this way. During the fabled first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt's administration, the president's lieutenants recruited with a personal zeal that bordered on the missionary. "With each prominent New Dealer acting as his own employment agency," writes historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "Washington was deluged with an endless stream of bright young men." John Kennedy's underlings did the same, and so did the president. "Let public service be a proud and lively career," Kennedy said, and college students listened. The number of graduates applying for work through the Civil Service Commission, as OPM was then called, doubled under JFK.

Roosevelt and Kennedy understood that the bureaucracy, despite its shortcomings, could do great things. Under them, at times it did. But for that to happen, people of passion and creativity have to be assembled. And this need goes well beyond the political appointees and members of the senior executive service. There are, after all, only about 10,000 of those plum jobs in a federal civilian workforce that has topped 3 million ever since 1940. That ratio reveals something irrefutable: the top dogs can't do it alone. No matter how inspired--or inspiring--their visions, they are sure to be frustrated if carried out by mediocre hands. For truly good government, good people need to be spread across every department and grade level.

Although this logic is straightforward enough, logic was never one of Ronald Reagan's strong suits. Having roared mightily that "government is not the solution to our problem, it is the problem," Reagan directed his administration to conduct its recruiting efforts accordingly. At OPM, as he did elsewhere, Reagan put a frantic ideologue, Donald Devine, in charge. His mandate: institutional self-destruction. Obediently, Devine halted all recruiting by his agency.

The rest of the agencies were forced to follow OPM's lead. Arguments in favor of outreach, Devine would say later, were "basically a cover to get more money." Hence, departments were commanded to stop visiting...