Dear Friends of the National Institute —
A functioning government is enormously important to a functioning society, especially one as large and complex as the United States of America. In his recent book The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis puts it this way:
The US government employed 2 million people, 70% of them one way or another in national security. It managed a portfolio of risks that no private person or corporation was able to manage. Some of the risks were easy to imagine: a financial crisis, a hurricane, a terrorist attack. Most were not: the risk, say, that some prescription drug proves to be both so addictive and so accessible that each year it kills more Americans than were killed in action by the peak of the Vietnam war. Many of the risks that fell into the government’s lap felt so remote as to be unreal: that a cyberattack left half the country without electricity, or that some airborne virus wiped out millions, or that economic inequality reached the point where it triggered a violent revolution. Maybe the least visible risks were of things not happening that, with better government, might have happened. A cure for cancer, for instance.
But government is broken. Public trust in government is at historic lows, partisan squabbling and Beltway gridlock have hobbled effective government, and the COVID-19 pandemic has made everything about governing more difficult and complex. Some citizens have even taken to viewing government as the enemy, calling it the “Deep State.”
Against this trend, Max Stier has worked in a bi-partisan way for almost two decades to improve the quality, practices, and personnel of government in his role as the President of the Partnership for Public Service. Again in the words of Michael Lewis, Max Stier
thought the US government was the single most important and interesting institution in the history of the planet and could not imagine doing anything but working to improve it. A few years out of law school he had met a financier named Sam Heyman, who was as disturbed as Stier was by how uninterested talented young people were in government work. Stier persuaded Heyman to set aside $25m for him so that he might create an organisation to address the problem.
Stier soon realised that to attract talented young people to government service, he would need to turn the government into a place that talented young people wanted to work. He would need to fix the US government. Partnership for Public Service… trained civil servants to be business managers; it brokered new relationships across the federal government; it surveyed the federal workforce to identify specific management failures and success; and it lobbied Congress to fix deep structural problems.
Please join us for a special live event on September 2, 2020. Renowned broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour will interview Max on his work at the Partnership for Public Service, what initiatives his organization and others are taking to improve the functioning of government, and what prospects he sees for the future of government in America.
Max and Judy have each been honored by the National Institute (along with Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation) with its 2020 Gold Medal for distinguished service to society. This promises to be a fascinating conversation about a vital topic, and we invite you to join us and ask your own questions about the future of government in America.
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
12:00 to 1:30 pm ET (US and Canada)
This forum is sponsored by the National Institute of Social Sciences and is free and open to the general public. In order to attend, you must click the link above to register in advance for the event. The event will be recorded for those who cannot attend it live.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Fred Larsen
President, Board of Trustees