The Best and the Brightest

A Washington group seeks to pass the torch of public service

By Nicole Lewis

When Samuel J. Heyman graduated from Harvard Law School in 1963, he could have earned a substantial

salary at a white-shoe law firm or at his father’s real-estate business. Instead, he headed to Washington to work for Robert F. Kennedy, who was the U.S. attorney general, in a job with an annual paycheck of $2,500, or about $17,000 today.

Despite eventually amassing great wealth in business and real estate, nothing has pleased Mr. Heyman more than his early professional years spent in the federal government, first at the Justice Department and later as the chief assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut.

“The opportunity to play on a larger stage, make a contribution to your country, and take on enormous responsibility simply cannot be matched in the private sector,” he says.

Now Mr. Heyman, 68, wants to encourage the next generation of bright, talented young people to consider public service careers by making government jobs more accessible and appealing.

Since 2001, Mr. Heyman, now chairman of the Heyman Companies — four privately held businesses, two of which have sales exceeding $5-billion — has committed $45-million to start and operate the Partnership for Public Service here.

The nonprofit, nonpartisan group aims to publicize the importance of a strong civil service, encourage more people to consider government jobs, and help government agencies become more effective and innovative in their work.

In its short existence, the organization has lined up an advisory board studded with U.S. senators and university presidents, published surveys of the best places to work in government, championed legislation that Congress later passed, and attracted a $4-million award from the Annenberg Foundation, in Radnor, Pa., for its work.

However, a mountain of challenges remain, says Max Stier, the group’s president. At the top of his priority list: getting the public and potential donors to recognize that achieving a more effectively run government should be on top of theirs.

“An insufficient number of Americans understand it as being their problem,” says Mr. Stier. “The general view is, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ The problem is, government isn’t healing itself, and that has consequences for everyone in this country.”

A Generation Gap

Mr. Heyman says he never would have left government work had his father not died at the age of 61. He took a leave of absence to run the family’s real-estate business but found he liked the work and decided to stay. Decades later, Mr. Heyman says, he was disheartened to hear from the then-dean of Harvard Law School that fewer and fewer graduates were entering public service, since Mr. Heyman saw his own four children and their peers volunteering more than the young people from his generation.

“Young Americans today, however, are extraordinarily idealistic, they are the most active citizens in recent history, and they are volunteering for community service at record levels,” he says. “The challenge is now to convert that interest in community service into a similar commitment to government service.”

A mix of reasons can be blamed for the declining interest of ambitious young people to fill federal jobs, including a negative perception of government that has been building since the Vietnam War, higher salaries in the corporate sphere, and a sense that government agencies are bureaucratic jungles that resist innovation and creative problem solving, says Mr. Stier.

“When John F. Kennedy issued his call to service, to government service, it was a lot simpler world,” he says. “The president could actually move a nation in a way that is much harder to do today.”

Mr. Heyman asked Joel L. Fleishman, director of the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Center for Ethics, Public Policy, and the Professions at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., to organize several discussion groups that included high-level people in business, the news media, government, and academe to determine if there was widespread interest in starting an organization dedicated to revitalizing government service.

The issue was not new — Paul A. Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, had led two national commissions on public service in 1989 and 2002 — and several groups currently exist to improve government, including the Council for Excellence in Government, in Washington. Two veterans of Teach for America, the New York charity that aims to encourage more young people to become teachers, are also trying to create a U.S. Public Service Academy to train civilian leaders. But no efforts focused specifically on hiring and retaining talented workers, says Mr. Fleishman.

“People may differ about the size of government,” he says. “But everybody agrees whatever the size, the quality has to be really good.”

A Glut of Retirements

To make matters more urgent, officials at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management say one-third of the 1.8 million federal employees will be eligible for retirement in five years, creating a potential vacuum.

Slow hiring procedures, coupled with a reluctance by politically appointed federal-agency leaders to tackle long-term hiring needs, could mean that government will eventually lack enough skilled workers to approve new patents or medicines, root out drug traffickers, administer to the needs of veterans, or do many other tasks that keep the country running and moving forward, says Mr. Stier.

The government also faces plenty of competition to fill those spots from other employers, notably charities, which are stepping up their own efforts to recruit top-notch employees.

“People generally take the government for granted,” says Mitchel B. Wallerstein, dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, at Syracuse University. “The value the partnership has brought has been to highlight the problems that exist and that they are real, and that they are going to get worse over the next decade as these retirements begin to roll through the system.”

‘We Were at Risk’

The announcement of the creation of the Partnership for Public Service was scheduled to happen on Capitol Hill on September 12, 2001. Instead of ruing the timing of events, Mr. Stier says he believes the September 11 terrorist attacks threw into stark relief the importance of advocating for a responsive government.

“It really made government relevant in people’s lives in a way it hadn’t been for a couple generations,” he says. “9/11 made us realize in fact we were at risk, and that the primary vehicle to address this challenge was our government.”

But in some ways it seems like a David versus Goliath matchup: The Partnership for Public Service, with its $6-million annual budget, is trying to make a difference in the work of the federal government, which has a proposed budget next year of $2.9-trillion. In addition, the charity must carefully balance any critique of how government operates with persuading government officials to make changes. To help with its mission, Mr. Stier has hired several government veterans.

Despite these challenges, Mr. Fleishman says the group has made significant headway. He points to three laws, including a new legal requirement that each major federal agency appoint a chief human-resources official, that the group championed as examples of the organization’s influence. “I don’t know of any nonprofit organization that had three Congressional enactments within the first five years,” he says. “It’s an impressive achievement.”

Still, some people think the group could be more effective if it were more bold.

“As a nonpartisan organization, they have been limited in their ability to speak truth to power about this administration’s lack of support for a strong public service,” says Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University who was involved with the public-service commissions chaired by Mr. Volcker. “Sometimes you have to become more advocacy-oriented, and I don’t think the partnership has come to grips with that quite yet.”

Streamlined Hiring

For now, the Partnership for Public Service is plowing ahead with its myriad programs, including a Call to Serve, a joint effort with the Office of Personnel Management, which aims to educate students about careers in government and connect them directly to agencies with jobs. Nearly 600 colleges and universities and 60 federal agencies participate.

Another program helps highlight government employees’ creativity, thereby making their work more appealing.

The partnership’s annual awards, the Service to America Medals, showcase the achievements of federal employees; past winners include Nancy Cox, director of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, who is working on how to manage an avian-flu pandemic, and William D. Philips, who won a Nobel Prize in physics as part of his work on cooling atoms at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Md.

In addition to attracting job candidates, the Partnership for Public Service is helping government agencies fill positions more quickly. In 2004, the group, with the aid of several corporations that donated time and expertise, helped three federal agencies streamline their hiring practices. At the Office of Federal Student Aid, part of the U.S. Department of Education, recruiters trimmed the typical hiring process from five months to three by eliminating many steps in the application process.

“It forced us to focus on some things about the hiring process that we might not have completely realized,” says John Mondragon, director of human resources at the agency.

The lessons learned from the three agencies are now available on the Web site of the Office of Personnel Management.

A ‘Report Card’

The partnership has built support for its work through its 91-person advisory board and its work to help establish the Congressional Public Service Caucus.

The Congressional Public Service Caucus has a mix of nearly 40 Democrats and Republicans from the Senate and House of Representatives who have met to hear speakers on a variety of federal personnel issues, including how the 9/11 Commission report affected hiring practices and the government’s increasing need for workers with foreign-language skills.

Still, the charity has sidelined some projects because of a lack of money, including a push to find ways to incorporate more positive messages about the government on television and in other news media.

In addition, a law promoted by the organization that would exempt federal student-loan repayments made by federal agencies on behalf of their employees was stalled in previous Congresses but is being reintroduced this year.

And a project to quantify the work of the federal government in an annual report card called “State of the Public Service” has proven to be a more complex and lengthy process than Mr. Stier anticipated.

However, a foundation that requested anonymity has stepped in with a $150,000 award for the project; a new staff member was hired in March to start the effort in earnest.

“Government does not have adequate metrics to allow it to understand its own effectiveness,” says Mr. Stier. “One of our core principles is to help government do its job better.”

Fund-Raising Goals

While the programs operated by the Partnership for Public Service have grown into a “mature tree,” says Mr. Stier, the group now needs to concentrate on raising more money for its annual budget and its endowment, which he would like to see quadruple in the next five years from $10-million today.

Last year, Mr. Heyman made a second five-year commitment to the group for $20-million, as a follow-up to the $25-million he provided in 2001.

In addition to outright donations, he also helps the group raise money by organizing and paying for a gala in New York, where he lives, every 18 months or so. Last year the event featured entertainment from the hit Broadway musical Jersey Boys and raised $2.3-million.

While Mr. Heyman says he will continue supporting the group, which has grown to 52 full- and part-time employees, he would like other donors to step in with significant contributions.

In February the organization received its two largest awards from foundations — $250,000 from the Atlantic Philanthropies, in New York, and $4-million from the Annenberg Foundation.

The Atlantic Philanthropies gift will pay for research about how to start a program that would recruit workers 55 or older who are seeking second careers in government jobs.

The Annenberg award, which Mr. Light says “might be the largest grant given for public service in the last 20 years,” will be used to build the management skills of midlevel federal “supervisors” and also to dispatch “distinguished speakers” to college campuses and other venues to talk about public service and help with the job-application process.

Gail C. Levin, the Annenberg Foundation’s executive director, invited the group to apply for an award after serving as a judge in last year’s Service to America Medals competition. She called the organization’s proposal “one of the best written and most thoughtful” she had received during her 16 years at the foundation.

“I was taken by the passion and strength of those award winners, who spoke eloquently about why they themselves made a career in government service,” says Ms. Levin. “This is our first grant to target the federal work force in such a large measure, and it was fortuitous timing. We were ready to take this leap of faith, and they were poised to move forward in a thoughtful way.”

In 2005 the group received its first government grant, for $600,000, to work more intensely with six colleges and universities to improve recruiting efforts by the federal government, and Mr. Stier says he plans to seek more donations from corporations and individuals as well.

“Most Americans would understand and agree with the proposition that whether they want to be in the military or not, we need the very best military to defend our country,” says Mr. Stier. “We need an equal understanding about the civil service in our country.”