Holding poor performers accountable can lead to better government

https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/10/holding-poor-performers-accountable-can-lead-better-government/400568/

One place government should mirror the private sector and improve, however, is how it manages its employees. My organization’s polling trust data, for example, shows that over one-quarter of Americans view holding employees more accountable for their performance as one of the top two actions the government could take to become more effective and trustworthy.

Large private sector companies like Walmart, FedEx and Home Depot invest in their people—establishing clear cultural values, employee development programs, and performance appraisal, enforcement and reward systems —and they have incentives that help remove poorly performing employees. 

Unlike the private sector, the current process for addressing poor performers in government is difficult for managers and confusing for employees. While most employees are doing good work on behalf of their agencies, some are underperforming and some need to be fired. This happens in every industry across the private sector. 

There’s Something Very Different About Harris vs. Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/opinion/trump-harris-election-day.html

But there’s another axis that politics can polarize along: the basic worth of institutions. To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and preserved.

The Trumpist coalition sees something quite different: an archipelago of interconnected strongholds of leftist power that stretch from the government to the universities to the media and, increasingly, big business and even the military. This network is sometimes called the Cathedral and sometimes called the Regime; Trump refers to part of it as the Deep State, Vivek Ramaswamy calls the corporate side “Woke Inc.” and JD Vance has described it as a grave threat to democracy.