U.S. Public Service Foundation
Washington Post Editorial Board
July 12th, 2024
“National service should be a post-graduation option that all young Americans consider.”
“Volunteer organizations such as AmeriCorps, Teach for America, the Peace Corps and the newly formed American Climate Corps should be well-funded and encouraged.”
The Post argues that national service should be a mainstream post-graduation option and calls on Congress to fund and coordinate programs (AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, American Climate Corps) and pass the Unity Through Service Act. The piece rejects a service mandate but urges better pay and flexibility so more young people can participate.
William J. Burns
The Atlantic
May 4th, 2020
We need every ounce of talent and energy to not only rebuild but reinvent our society.
If America has any chance to recover, let alone rescue a semblance of unity from the rubble of our polarized politics, we have to heed the admirable examples of these workers and seize this moment to end the war on government, revive our institutions, and shape a new era of public service.
William J. Burns is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former deputy secretary of state, and author of The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for its Renewal.
We Need National Service. Now.
David Brooks
The Yew York Times Op-Ed
May 7th, 2020
There is now a vast army of young people ready and yearning to serve their country. There are college graduates emerging into a workplace that has few jobs for them. There are more high school graduates who suddenly can’t afford college. There are college students who don’t want to return to a college experience. This is a passionate, idealistic generation that sees the emergency, wants to serve those around them and groans to live up to this moment.
David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times and a commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Mr. Brooks also teaches at Yale University, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Francis J. Gavin War on the Rocks APR 2020
Our smartest young people flock to graduate programs in law, business, engineering, science, and medicine and are richly rewarded, both financially and with prestige, for entering these professions. As a result, the United States is a world leader in generating new technology and ideas in these fields, to the great benefit of our economy and society.
The same is not true for schools of public and international policy. Many universities do not support independent schools of public affairs, domestic or global. Those that do often treat them like unwelcome stepchildren, far removed from what is assumed to be the core mission of the university. Unlike other professional programs, public affairs alumni rarely go on to generate large fortunes that can someday be regifted to campuses. Nor is public policy recognized as a pure, laudable pursuit, such as the humanities or social and physical sciences. Graduates in the liberal arts may not become wealthy, but they are not compromised by what is often seen as the low and unpopular practice of politics and political bureaucracy. There are no Pulitzer or Nobel prizes for the best new ideas in governance and public policy.
Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University. He is also the the Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Texas National Security Review.
Robert Gates
DIA MasterMinds
July 13th, 2021
There are a lot of challenges to public service … what people don’t see is the satisfaction of working with extraordinarily talented, dedicated and smart people doing the best that they can to protect the country that they love. I wouldn’t trade the experiences that I had as a public servant for anything.
President Bush said, ‘the definition of a full life must include some sort of public service.’ Looking back, I realized that I led a life worth living because I have had the career that I’ve had and served the people of this country.
Rahm Emanuel
Washington Post May 5th, 2025
The common theme is that too many of our young people have come to feel disconnected from their communities. They’ve lost hope in their future and confidence in themselves.
Want to restore confidence in a lost generation? Point them to joining a mission bigger than themselves. Want to rewire the brains of young people diminished by years of scrolling TikTok and Instagram? Assign them something important to do that has meaning in their communities. The ultimate salve for those living lives devoid of moral, professional and spiritual purposes is to immerse them in a culture where the responsibilities that come with citizenship are as sacred and admired as the rights we claim as ordinary citizens. It can’t just be people in the military — 80 percent of whom have relatives who served. We need to revive John F. Kennedy’s admonition that we should ask our young people what they can do for their country.
The former ambassador to Japan calls for mandatory national service (at least six months) with educational incentives, framing it as an antidote to isolation and civic disengagement. He emphasizes that service can be civilian or military.
Rob Shriver
Civil Service Strong
May 16th, 2025
Federal workers are how the government shows up in people’s lives. They’re food inspectors, Veterans Affairs nurses, air traffic controllers and emergency responders. They keep our food, medicine, transportation and water safe; secure our public safety and our national security; deliver our mail; support our education and health care systems; ensure our financial system operates and that small businesses and business owners have access to credit; and work in our courthouses, our airports, our national parks and so much more.
In many regions — especially rural and underserved areas — federal jobs and grants are among the largest drivers of local economies.
Civil servants are the everyday heroes of American democracy. They show up — not for fame or fortune — but to make sure our government works for all of us. They fix broken systems, respond to crises, uphold the law, and keep our communities safe, healthy and connected.
Rob Shriver is managing director of Civil Service Strong, a national project of Democracy Forward that seeks to inform the public about federal civil service and provides resources for civil servants. He also previously served as acting director of the Office of Personnel Management during the Biden Administration.
Richard Haass
The Atlantic
Jan 22nd, 2023
The most urgent threat to American security and stability stems not from abroad but from within, from political divisions that jeopardize the future of American democracy and even the United States itself.
One major reason that American identity is fracturing is that we are failing to teach one another what it means to be American. We are not tied together by a single religion, race, or ethnicity. Instead, America is organized around a set of ideas that needs to be articulated again and again to survive. It is thus essential that every American gets a grounding in civics—the country’s political structures and traditions, along with what is owed to and expected of its citizens—starting in elementary school and continuing through college. It should be reinforced within families and communities. It should be emphasized by our political and religious leaders, by CEOs and journalists.
Richard Haass argues the U.S. faces a “civics deficit” as serious as its budget deficit and calls for a national civics requirement from elementary school through college to reinforce a shared civic identity. HAASS is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order.
Alvin Bragg, Jr.
Harvard College Commencement Speech
May 25th, 2023
I will not try to dissuade anyone from their chosen career path. But I will make the case that service is for everyone, and you should find a place for it in your life. There is a tendency to think of success in terms of degrees, professional accomplishments, and job titles. But success is also measured in services to those without the same privilege you enjoy as Harvard alumni.
Whether it is in your career or as a volunteer in your community, I encourage you to do something to serve. Advance your career, yes, but also measure your success but what you do for others — students taught, victims counseled, patients healed.
Systemic change requires advocates both inside and outside the government. You do not have to pick just one lane, and you do not have to take a straight path. Follow your particular passion at a particular moment in time.
And regardless of what your day job is, remember that there are lots of ways to serve.
Michael Lewis
Casey Cep
Dave Eggers
John Lanchester
Geraldine Brooks
Sarah Vowell
W. Kamau Bell
The Washington Post
February 7th, 2025
The role of the federal government is at the center of the national conversation. But who really is our government? What is it made of? And what is at stake when politicians say they want to expand or dismantle it? To find out, we set seven stellar writers loose on the federal bureaucracy. Their only brief was to go where they wanted, talk with whomever they wanted, and return with a story from deep within the vast, complex system Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss and celebrate.
Statement on Education for Public Problem Solving
Working Group on Public Problem Solving
Stanford
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
For democracy to thrive, democratic governance has to work. There are a lot of problems; the 21st century is surfacing a new set. The public capability to solve them is eroding.
In the United States, and other consolidated democracies, the system of educating and training people to solve public problems is radically insufficient. Often such education and training, especially for professionals, simply does not exist.
We are educators, including current and former deans of schools of public policy and graduate schools. Many of us have also served as public officials. We have been on both sides of this fence. We think it is time to sound the alarm.
In the United States, during the 1960s and 1970s, new schools in public policy were devised and a model was widely adopted based on social science methods dominated by economics, statistics, and game theory. This kind of evidence-based policy analysis is critical for modern policy-making, particularly in an age when leading politicians disdain facts and rely on anecdotes to make their case.
Click here to read the full statement and all the leading scholars and practitioners who have signed on.
To Regain Policy Competence: The Software of American Public Problem-Solving
Philip Zelikow
Texas National Security Review
Vol 2, Issue 4
September 2019
American policymaking has declined over the past several decades, but it is something that can be regained. It is not ephemeral or lost to the mists of time. The skills needed to tackle public problem-solving are specific and cultural — and they are teachable.
My experience is as a historian who studies the details of policy episodes and the related staff work, but also as a former official who has analyzed a variety of domestic and foreign policy issues at all three levels of American government, including federal work from different bureaucratic perspectives in five presidential administrations from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. From this historical and contemporary vantage point, I am struck (and a bit depressed) that the quality of U.S. policy engineering is actually much, much worse in recent decades than it was throughout much of the 20th century. This is not a partisan observation — the decline spans both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, both at the University of Virginia. His books and essays focus on critical episodes in American and world history. A former civil rights attorney and career diplomat, he has served at all levels of American government. He was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and, before that, directed the Carter-Ford commission on federal election reform. He has also worked on international policy in each of the five administrations from Reagan through Obama.