America’s public service must remain nonpartisan.

There are only a few days left before the election, and as the presidential candidates make their closing arguments, we would like to make one final proposal to the candidates and those of you who can do something about it: Find a way to guarantee the political impartiality of career government employees, as in uniform and in other forms that will ultimately serve us all.

Who are we to speak? We are a small group of former government employees, both career and appointed, each with decades of public service under Republican and Democratic presidents. We are all dedicated to ensuring that the ranks of the federal civil service workforce remain nonpartisan but remain accountable to democratically elected leaders. More importantly, we have heard the same concerns, almost without exception, from a much broader range of current and former colleagues, as well as from those who work with government in the private and nonprofit sectors, on both sides of the aisle.

We all clearly want a politically impartial career in public service (including our military), but we fear that the seemingly obvious goal may be out of reach this election. In this regard, we have tried – unfortunately with limited success – to offer both sides a “third way” that lies somewhere between today’s anachronistic status quo and the ineffective “reform” of Schedule F.

Nobody agrees with us, but too few are willing to make this information public. We are not afraid to do this. But supporters on both sides criticized us for daring to propose a compromise that for many is no longer part of the political lexicon.

This is a gray area for most voters, but we’d ask them to think about it for a minute. What if FEMA or NOAA were guided by party politics rather than by the law and their statutory missions? Or the Social Security Administration or the IRS? What if politicians put their partisan finger on the scale when it comes to tax laws, hurricane forecasts, disaster relief or disability claims? What if the first thing impartial public servants were asked to do was take an Oath of Allegiance in order to have a say in politics?

And it’s even more difficult when it comes to national and homeland security, including our military, diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. We know firsthand that the next president will need talented, independent career public servants who will tell her or him the unvarnished truth without fear of losing their jobs. They should not prevent the president from being given real opportunities rather than those blithely offered during the election campaign. And if, after hearing these options, elected and appointed politicians tell them to do what they want anyway, those public servants should understand that they have an obligation to do so (provided, of course, that the actions are legal).

According to Harris, if you win, we think you’ll find that you can’t really hold career bureaucrats accountable, especially those whose poor performance or behavior merits dismissal – not without lots of lawyers, endless appeals, and timid, inertial agency heads. who simply want to avoid conflict. Most of the population believes that career civil servants have a job for life, no matter what they do. You can fix it.

To Candidate Trump, if you win, resist the temptation to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” by making political loyalty to you the litmus test for appointing or retaining career public servants (a la Schedule F and Project 2025). Political appointees are another matter: insisting on their loyalty to shape and implement your legitimate policy priorities is fine. But you want and need professional public servants, in or out of uniform, who will tell you the truth whether you want to hear it or not. This is what “speaking truth to power” means, and it is an unwritten but important cornerstone of our Constitution.

To leaders in Congress, put our nation’s need for a nonpartisan, yet accountable military and civil service above party and personal loyalty, and pass something to ensure it – such as requiring Congress to take new action to create a new Schedule F or codify the Office of Human Resource Management Recent merit principles rule even in a lame duck session.

Any series of civil service reforms must be based on policy rather than party politics, on accountability to the rule of law and regulation rather than on anyone’s personal agenda. It should be about setting clear (and legitimate) policy and program goals and reasonable standards of individual performance and behavior, expecting your public servants to live up to them, and evaluating them fairly.

Politics isn’t a dirty word, especially in a democracy, but it comes with tried-and-true (and legal) processes—whether congressional votes or the more arcane but equally necessary interagency foreign policy committees—that exist for a reason. . These processes were designed to maintain the necessary but inevitable tension between politics and administration in an approximate balance. But more importantly, take party affiliation and self-interest out of the equation altogether.

We know because we were there. We have literally decades of experience working under both Republican and Democratic administrations in a variety of influential positions. And we know that whoever wins, the country will need a career civil service that follows the Constitution and the rule of law, is committed to telling our President the truth and then following her or his lawful orders. No more and no less.

Ron Sanders served nearly four decades under both Republican and Democratic presidents as a senior career official and was chairman of the Federal Wage Council under President Donald Trump. Robert Shea, moderator of Gov Navigators, is a former senior OMB official under President George W. Bush. Robert Tobias is a former president of the National Treasury Employees Union and a longtime expert on federal labor-management relations. All of them are fellows of the National Academy of Public Administration.

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