## Notes from 27 December 2025 [[2025-12-26|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2025-12-28|Next note →]] [[Howard Risher]] published [a piece](https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/12/government-transformation-badly-needed/409862/?oref=ge-featured-river-top) in _Government Executive_ arguing that federal civil service transformation needs to focus on culture rather than workforce size. He consistently writes interesting stuff. His core argument: the "Reinventing Government" experience (officially the National Performance Review, or NPR) during the Clinton era succeeded because it treated civil servants as partners in reform. The principle of "empowering employees to get results" led to 384 recommendations saving $108 billion, the elimination of 426,000 jobs, and the cutting of thousands of pages of regulations. Employees received symbolic $6 Hammer Awards for suggestions. The key was enabling "civil servants to see themselves as part of the reform." This contrasts sharply with [[Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)|DOGE]]'s approach. I agree that employees must be partners in reform rather than targets of it. However, this needs stronger incentive signals than symbolic awards or general empowerment rhetoric. If a civil servant identifies a source of waste or fraud (and this requires a robust verification system to prevent gaming), they should receive direct financial compensation. This might feel ethically counterintuitive, especially in fraud cases where one could argue that reporting wrongdoing is simply their job. But financial rewards combined with strong whistleblower protection could create the clearest possible signal about where problems exist and incentivize the surfacing of hard-to-find information. The difficulty lies in designing verification robust enough to prevent false claims while simple enough to actually use. NPR's Hammer Awards were symbolic precisely because they avoided these complications—no one had to prove exact savings, calculate individual contributions, or adjudicate disputes. But symbolic rewards don't create the kind of sustained information flow that systematic waste reduction requires. Risher also holds up Tennessee's TEAM Act reform in [[Tennessee Civil Service Reform|Tennessee]] as the model: a multi-year commitment to building employee support, listening tours, S.M.A.R.T. goals, and three years of training and coaching managers before implementing pay-for-performance. The Tennessee case deserves separate analysis—it's one of the best examples of state-level civil service reform and I keep coming back to it. Will write a proper note on the TEAM Act approach.