Working for the Government is Cool

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1995 by Gareth Cook

Memo to twentysomethings: Forget about law school. Do work that's interesting, rewarding, and important

One week, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder are rescuing New Hampshire school children from a ring of Satanic parents. The next they are exploring a series of unexplained murders near a traveling circus. Scully is a trained physician and Mulder has an advanced degree in psychology, but neither chose to set up a private practice. Instead, they opted for jobs that take them to the distant corners of the country--from the Arctic Circle to the Arizona desert. They are FBI agents on "The X-Files," one of television's hottest shows.

An advertisement for the show features a shot of Scully and Mulder with a striking headline: "Working for the government is cool." It's a clever attention getter, an ironic message not to be taken seriously. Indeed, when you set aside the glamorous gun-toters (who themselves risk the "jackbooted fascist" label), the image of the government worker is decidedly uncool.

It's amazing what a bad rap government workers get. People who work in all levels of government--federal, state, and local--are written off with a label that has a powerful hold over the country's imagination: bureaucrat. The word evokes images of monotonous and pointless office jobs, reams of unneeded paperwork, lazy and dim-witted workers. A Wall Street Journal editorial writer, for example, recently wrote without a hint of shame that the typical bureaucrat is "a pudgy, middle-aged woman slowly applying polish to her fingernails. Every few minutes, she picks up the phone to conduct a conversation with one of her cronies in an adjoining office." A newspaper ad by R.J. Reynolds features a middle-aged man, triple-jowled and smiling creepily, underneath the headline "Who Should Be Responsible For Your Children, a Bureaucrat or You?"

It has not always been this way. "In the nineteenth century," says Scott Fossler, president of the National Association of Public Administrators, "`Good enough for government work' meant high-quality." Even in this century, great presidents inspired Americans to join the government and honor its work. FDR called on the nation to conquer the Depression, largely through government projects, and to win World War II. President Kennedy was able to generate a real excitement for the work of government--you could go to Ethiopia with the Peace Corps or to the moon with NASA. "With FDR and Kennedy, the government had a noble, respected mission," says Fossler. "People had a sense that the government was doing important things." "Ask not what your country can do for you," Kennedy famously declared. Now, egged on by politicians who've made careers of bashing government, many Americans publicly ask whether anyone can do much of anything.

Certainly, the American public sector has plenty of maddening bureaucrats. Rooting out bad government is one of the Monthly's founding causes. Because of overly zealous civil service protections, it can be almost impossible to fire mediocre, or even incompetent, employees. This is a problem not only for those who want service--I doubt I am the only one who has left the local Department of Motor Vehicles feeling angry and exhausted--but it can also be bad for morale. The public employee unions need to see that nobody's interest is served in keeping a lug on the job.

But the perception that all government employees are indolent, ineffective bureaucrats cloistered inside the Beltway is simply wrong. First, most government employees do not work for the federal government. The federal government employs 3 million people, while state and local governments employ 15 million. Second, most federal employees don't even work in Washington: Some 85 percent of them are out in the field.

More to the point, there are many good people in government, and many have interesting jobs. Consider a few pop-culture heroes: Clint Eastwood, the Secret Service agent protecting the president in In the Line of Fire; the engineers of Apollo 13; the doctors and nurses of "ER"; or "Quincy," the medical examiner who always gets his man. All of these are government jobs.

Plenty of other jobs haven't been the topic of a movie or TV show, but easily could be. You could be one of the National Transportation Safety Board investigators who pores through the twisted metal and plastic of a plane wreck, in search of the clue that will explain the cause of the accident--and, hopefully, prevent it from happening again. Or you could work for the Securities and Exchange Commission, trying to figure out the cons of some of the nation's most devious criminal minds. Or maybe a park ranger job--a historian and preservationist, who has plenty of contact with people, and does most of the day's work in nature's glory--is more your style. "Our big secret" says Greg Carlile, a game warden with Washington state who, among other things, catches salmon poachers, "is that we're getting paid to do work that we love."

Yet I can't count the number of times that I've heard the familiar refrain from my twentysomething friends: "I'm not sure what I want to do; I guess I'll go to law school." "I don't really want to be a lawyer," they usually protest, as if the almost inevitable path to a fairly tedious legal job will not be followed. (See "Golden Handcuffs," page 33.) Why is law school their fall-back position, when they could go into work that is both interesting and satisfying?