Public service in America is at a crossroads. In recent years, we have seen not just political polarization but also a fundamental disconnect in understanding what our government is, what it does, and why it should matter to us. From cuts to civil service budgets to attacks on federal agencies to rhetoric about “getting rid of wasteful government spending,” we have seen how many Americans don’t know how our government functions. Worse, that ignorance is not inconsequential, as it leaves the public vulnerable to tricks, manipulation, and policies implemented by those who do not have their best interests at heart.
Our current situation is driven by leaders who are trying to transform the presidency and our highest offices from roles of service and guardianship into vehicles for personal gain and celebrity. When we let leaders treat government offices like a brand to be monetized, place profit over people, and delegate authority to those without experience or knowledge, you will inevitably get dysfunction, chaos, and public disdain. However, this problem runs deeper than the people we continue to elect. It’s about how most Americans view, understand, and participate in our democracy.
I look at four main areas in this article. The public’s lack of understanding of how government functions, profit-versus-service mindsets, the problems with willful ignorance and disruption for its own sake, and American mythology.
I. When People Do Not Understand Government, They Become Easy Prey
For the past several years, massive cuts to and political attacks on civil service workers have revealed a troubling truth: many Americans do not understand what government workers actually DO. They know that there’s something called “the bureaucracy” and that it costs taxpayers money. But what it DOES… keeps America’s public health system running, ensures the food we eat and medications we take are safe, allows airlines to fly safely across the country, enforces civil rights laws, and provides clean water and safe workplaces… isn’t seen.
The danger in this lack of transparency isn’t trivial. When we don’t understand what public servants do to help our friends, families, and neighbors live safe and productive lives, it becomes all too easy to buy into negative stereotypes of public employees; of them being lazy, stupid, incompetent, or even parasitic drones who “go to work late, leave early, and never get anything done.” During the 2024 presidential election, voters were inundated with messages warning that public service agencies were hotbeds of “waste” and “fraud.” It became easier to cheer when beloved public programs were terminated, budgets slashed, and experienced workers fired… all in the name of reducing waste.
However, the overwhelming majority of public servants do not become government employees to get rich or ride through life longingly. Public service workers are mission-driven: they want to solve problems, improve things, and help people access what they need to live safe and dignified lives. That mission is what motivates them to wake up in the morning. Painting their work as overly bureaucratic doesn’t just discredit the serious challenges they work on every day. It also ignores the fact that it’s PEOPLE who get hurt when our public institutions fail.
Ironically, the voters who applaud efforts to “drain the swamp” may rely on precisely the things they are told to ignore: disaster relief and unemployment insurance, veterans’ benefits and Social Security, public health programs, and so on. When those services are sabotaged or otherwise hollowed out, it’s these voters’ lives that become more unstable. Misunderstanding how government works, in other words, makes people vulnerable to policies that will hurt them.
II. Public Service vs. Profit: Two Very Different Missions
At the core of the current crisis is a fundamental confusion between the goals of public service and those of private enterprise. In the private sector, profit and the bottom line are legitimate driving forces. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to live comfortably or even lavishly; “to each his own” remains a valid sentiment in a market-driven society. Individuals who want to amass extreme wealth may find the private sector particularly suited to their ambitions, where profit maximization is an accepted and explicit goal.
Government, however, operates on a fundamentally different logic. The mission of public service is not to generate profit but to promote the public good—often in areas where profit is hard to measure or even incompatible with equity and fairness. Public health, environmental protection, national security, civil rights enforcement, and social safety nets are not profit centers; they are public commitments.
When individuals whose primary objective is personal enrichment enter high public office, a dangerous misalignment emerges. What we have witnessed this past year is a president and family who appear obsessively focused on making money and leveraging their position and taxpayer resources to do so. Branding the presidency, monetizing the office, and using public authority to advance private financial interests is a stark betrayal of the core purpose of public service.
This is not just a “question of personal morality.” It is a built-in incompatibility. If someone approaches every decision with a profit motive in mind, they will view policy, power of appointment, and regulatory favors as just more opportunities to pad their pockets. They will always see a dollar sign before they see the public good. That mindset should never be in a high office. Government isn’t a business. It shouldn’t be run like one. When it is, we end up with cronyism, self-dealing, and deregulation for the well-connected.
III. The Illusion of the “Successful Business Leader” as the Ideal President
An important misconception often repeated loudly during the past election cycle was the idea that successful business people will make successful presidents. We’ve been trained to equate accumulating riches, closing deals, and shouting the loudest with leadership ability and competency.
Here’s why this connection doesn’t work. First off, many of these so-called business successes are at best filled with serial bankruptcies, failed business deals, and achievements cloaked in fraud. However, even if we assume that we are looking at a highly competent business leader, the business lessons do not translate directly to adept leadership in government.
Running a business is different from running a government in that the skills necessary for each are quite different, and the incentives you face are drastically altered. When you run a business, your primary goal is usually to turn a profit for the business’s owners. You can make decisions solely based on the return on your investment, and if you fail to do so, the owner can fire you. When you are president, your task is to uphold justice, the rule of law, security, equity, sustainable economic growth, and many other goals. Your “bottom line” is millions of current and future Americans and their rights.
You also face numerous constraints. You are bound by laws, courts, Congress, and public opinion. You cannot simply balance the budget on the back of the minority. You must provide due process and restraint for all citizens. In short, there is no cutting corners to become more efficient at the expense of others because that’s just bad governance.
The “businessman president” myth also confuses charisma and media ubiquity with competence. Many voters mistake the ability to rally crowds, dominate headlines, or create viral content for leadership ability. Governing, however, requires long days of reading briefings, holding meetings, negotiating, and making tough decisions that don’t always play well with crowds. These are skills ill-suited to those whose priority is accruing attention and applause.
This doesn’t mean people from the business world can’t effectively serve in government. But business experience alone is not sufficient—and can actually become a liability if it is paired with a single-minded pursuit of wealth and self-branding.
IV. The Necessity of Experience and Respect for Institutions
The President and Cabinet members should come to government with some experience running government or a public institution themselves. The federal government is big, complicated, and connected to all sorts of other systems across the globe. There are “levers” to push and pull, stakeholders to consider, and outcomes to calculate at home and abroad.
You wouldn’t dream of hiring someone to run your business who has never worked anywhere, much less been in a leadership role. For most jobs, employers require a résumé: proof that the candidate has done this sort of thing before and can handle the responsibility. But in the past few years, some voters have believed that experience isn’t just unnecessary for the president—it’s bad.
The result of this mindset has been played out for us over and over again. Incompetent people who have never served in government quickly panic when they encounter the complex realities of governance. They make mistakes after costly mistakes. And when they surround themselves with inexperienced advisers by firing all of the career experts and kicking out experienced public servants who know how to prevent and fix these mistakes, we don’t get “new ideas.” We get disasters. Policy is enacted without anyone thinking through the second and third-order effects. Foreign allies are alienated. Natural crises are amplified by incompetence and poor planning. Wars happen.
Don’t get me wrong, I like to see industries disrupted as much as the next person. But allowing someone with no governmental experience to “shake up” our government is like watching a toddler get their hands on a toy bulldozer. Sure, they will tear up some stuff, but they won’t know what they are destroying or why it matters. We do not need leaders who burn down institutions out of anger or frustration. We need leaders who know how to fix those institutions when they are broken and know what not to touch when they’re not. Real change requires attention to detail, strong judgment, and humility. These are qualities that pundits and those who do not understand government often ridicule in favor of inexperienced “outsiders.”
V. Cultural Myths, Biases, and the Leaders We Choose
Supporting those political decisions are powerful cultural myths about money, race, and merit. We live in a country that bombards its citizens through movies, television, and even family jokes with the message that everyone should want to be rich. If you are not working toward joining the 1%, spending all your time thinking of ways to get richer, you are a baby socialist lacking drive and ambition at best and stupid at worst.
This conditioning bleeds into how we Americans think about public servants. If the best anybody can hope to be is rich, then somebody who is fine with making less money and serving the public good might be damaged in some way: “Why would they do a ‘public’ job? There has to be something wrong with them.” Under this narrative, you don’t respect the public service or want to understand the degree of expertise many public servants have. You mock them; you believe they’re doing their jobs out of some naive allegiance to politics or the country.
Racially and sexually, we as Americans have also been conditioned to believe that a rich, white man can do no wrong. He is intelligent, competent, and gifted in leadership, whether he has any track record, knowledge, steady temperament, or respect for democratic institutions. If he does something foolish, we give him a pass… again and again and again. How can we not? It’s a rich white guy!
So when we go to vote, we have been conditioned to believe that these people should be our leaders. We end up voting for people who “look like leaders” instead of researching their records, policy knowledge, temperament, and willingness to uphold democratic norms. It is not “the government” and “those politicians” making poor decisions; it’s we the people.
The beauty of democracy is that we get to choose our leaders. When we choose people who mock our public institutions, fire the career public servants who know how to run them, and attempt to enrich themselves at the public’s expense, we shouldn’t be surprised when our government doesn’t work. If we want better government, we need to vote in better people to office who then appoint qualified, caring public servants who respect and understand these institutions.
VI. Reclaiming the True Meaning of Public Service
Leadership at the public’s service—not vice versa—is not a brand. It is not personal loyalty at all costs. It is not about getting rich. It is about service and responsibility to others. It means having regard for the law, institutions, and the people whose lives are affected by every decision your office makes.
The work itself is why the best public servants enter public service in the first place. They do not spend nights tweeting to stay relevant, nor do they skirt typical review processes to exercise their voice. They spend all those hours reading briefing materials, meeting with experts and constituents, considering options, and signing their names to policies that will have impacts long after they leave office. They show up every day for hours of briefings and hearings. They are conducting negotiations, managing crises, methodically poring over budgets, and making the gears of government grind more smoothly.
A functioning democracy should take it as a given that we will not see a president or his cabinet on the nightly news too often. The business of government should not consist entirely of rampant scandals and towering spectacles streamed live onto every phone. When public officials can govern without trying to Tweet themselves into permanent relevance, we all have more space to focus on our lives—our families, friends, jobs. We can check the news when we want to, not wake up every morning to a new panic over what someone said overnight.
Wanting more of our leaders to honor public service requires more than dunking on leaders who behave shamefully. It requires voting constituents to educate themselves about how government actually works, to call out reductive arguments about “waste” and “government corruption” whenever we hear them, and to refuse to be excited by glamorous wannabes storming the gates of institutions they don’t understand. It means rewarding experience, knowledge, and honesty more than wealth, fame, or charisma.
The government is us. Those at the highest levels are not some distant gaggles of people who are, as a general rule, bad at their jobs. Those in those high offices, from the President, Cabinet members, Congress, and others elected and appointed, are a reflection of the individuals we elect, and of the voters who select them to represent us. Right now, the solution is simple: Respect public service, ensure we put the best public servants in office to represent the people, and demand that everyone running for office deserves that honor.