We are a nonpartisan organization of former senior civil servants motivated by two key principles:

1

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people cannot long endure unless its citizens retain faith in that government.

2

Citizens will only retain faith in government when it effectively and efficiently delivers on the commitments made by the people’s democratically elected representatives.

That’s why we’re building a civil servant-informed but citizen-led movement to re-imagine the federal government.

Civil-servant informed because we have the necessary insight about why the federal government is broken–and how to fix it.

And citizen-led because we’ll only be successful in removing these barriers if citizens see the need to remove these barriers–and if they pressure their elected officials to remove them.

We’re truly nonpartisan.

Unlike other organizations in this space, we don’t have a political agenda or a political orthodoxy to defend. All of our members are former career civil servants, and none have held political appointments.

What we do have is:

decades of experience in the trenches, under both Republican and Democratic administrations;
a track record of cutting through red tape to achieve results; and
a passion to remove these obstacles and make wins for the American people commonplace.

We’re pragmatists who connect ideas to strategy and implementation.

Lots of smart people have already written about the reasons for government dysfunction. We’re building on those great ideas from both sides of the aisle, and creating practical, detailed solutions that we know civil servants can actually implement.

And we’re focusing on all levels of solutions – from those that can be implemented immediately to those that require rewriting federal regulations or passing new federal laws.

We believe efficiency is about creating value, not just cutting costs.

We appreciate the need for dramatic and urgent change; we were arguing for it years ago. And transforming the government is going to require leaders to make many unpopular, high-impact business decisions.

But we know achieving lasting change that actually delivers a more effective and efficient functioning federal government won’t come from a few indiscriminate slashes with a chain saw or “traumatizing federal workers.”

Staffing cuts should be smart, and designed to create better-functioning organizations. Contract cuts should be thoughtful, and designed in a way that leads to better mission alignment and measurable results. Performance management should be meaningfully tied to outcomes for the American people.

We believe rethinking government starts with rethinking how citizens want their services delivered, refocusing service delivery models on this feedback, aligning the federal workforce and support systems (IT, procurement, HR, etc.) with these new models, and systematically removing barriers to providing services in a cost-efficient, citizen-centered manner.