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Restoring Merit To Government Employment

One consequence of the Trump administration's omnidirectional war on DEI has been the possibility of restoring merit to government hiring and government employment. In this context, we very much appreciated this contribution by Michael Brickman of the Cicero Institute.

Effective government administration serves as the foundation for public trust and successful policy implementation. Regardless of whether one favors expanded or limited government, the quality of execution determines whether public resources achieve their intended outcomes. When government operates efficiently, taxpayers receive better value, citizens experience improved services, and dedicated public servants can focus on meaningful work rather than navigating dysfunctional systems.

On top of a historic American policial culture that, apart from a period from the New Deal to the Sixties, devalued the very idea of competence in government, until recently, DEI made that impossible in practice. The federal civil service examination was ended in the 1970s to comply with DEI rules. This shift, combined with promotion systems that favor insider knowledge over merit and evaluation processes that struggle to differentiate between high and low performers, has created an environment where exceptional talent coexists with persistent underperformance.

Brickman makes three interconnected reforms designed to restore competency and accountability in government operations.

The first reform focuses on merit-based hiring through objective assessment methods. Rather than relying solely on traditional credentials, this approach would evaluate candidates through multiple pathways including examinations, demonstrated skills, apprenticeships, and practical experience. This system would cast a wider net for talent while ensuring that competency, rather than educational pedigree or personal connections, drives hiring decisions.

The second reform addresses performance management through meaningful incentives for excellence. Current promotion systems often reward timing and insider knowledge rather than achievement. The proposed changes would establish clear performance metrics, provide substantial cash awards for outstanding work, and create advancement opportunities based on demonstrated results. This includes innovative approaches such as providing monetary rewards for employees who identify and help eliminate waste and fraud.

The third reform establishes mechanisms for addressing persistent poor performance while protecting legitimate employee rights. The current system makes it extremely difficult to remove underperforming employees, creating situations where individuals can avoid meaningful work for extended periods. The proposed approach would streamline removal processes for those who cannot or will not fulfill their responsibilities, while maintaining protections against political retaliation and preserving due process rights.

Brickman also recommends moving ahead at the state level. States, after all, are the laboratories of democracy… Furthermore, he argues that state governments can move more quickly than federal bureaucracy, allowing for faster implementation and refinement of new approaches. (Well, that's at least true in some states…) He points out that the Cicero Institute has already begun this state-first approach by helping twenty-three states eliminate college degree requirements for government positions (great move). This success, he argues, convincingly, provides both proof of concept and momentum for additional reforms.

Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Policy News You Need To Know

#LiberateDC — Plenty of news sources will tell you that crime has been dropping in DC. We don't think anybody who actually lives there thinks that. Certainly surveys say differently. And, it turns out, your lying eyes weren't deceiving you. There are credible allegations that Michael Pulliam, a former MPD commander, falsified crime statistics. DC is a mess and it needs to be put under Federal control.

DON'T FORGET: Sign our Petition to Avenge Big Balls and Federalize DC

#AI — Yesterday, OpenAI made a big splash with the much-anticipated launch of its latest and most powerful model yet, GPT-5. The headline? Eh. After 3 years of development and many billions of dollars, while the model has made good progress on many fronts, it is not a "giant leap forward," as contrarian AI expert Gary Marcus put it well, still "part of the pack", and clearly not "AGI." In other words, AI seems to be grinding out marginal improvements, and not improving exponentially by leaps and bounds as so many people were projecting just a few months ago.

#Disorder #WarOnDrugs — Charles Fain Lehman, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and to our mind the best expert on crime policy and disorder in America today, has a great piece in the Journal looking back at the effects of drug legalization in the Pacific Northwest. The summary? It's bad. According to a new study, "Oregon’s and Washington state’s experiments with decriminalizing drug possession caused a surge in serious violent and property crime, especially in Portland and Seattle." This also tracks with what we know from the Netherlands and Portugal. Contrary to the panglossian hopes of would-be reformers, drug legalization increases demand for drugs, including the illegal ones, which leads to more drug addiction and more crime.

SEE ALSO: Our interview with Lehman on the Sphere Podcast: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

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#HigherEd #DEI — Very important: the White House has just published an EO requiring universities to publish all of the data involved in making admissions decisions, which means the American people will know if universities are continuing to engage in racial discrimination. Heretofore, universities published little data, and long after the fact. This is crucial since universities are still dragging their feet (to put it very charitably) in complying with the new Supreme Court decision. We hope this gives birth to many many lawsuits.

#Energy #Nukes — NRC reform has been a big part of the agenda of the Trump administration to spur more nuclear energy. Now the Nuclear Enegry Institute has published a very good list of recommendations for the admin. The core recommendations center on eight key areas: streamlining licensing actions to enhance review efficiency and meet licensee schedules; streamlining oversight and inspection by eliminating unnecessary inspections based on licensee performance; enhancing safety focus through risk-informed approaches that eliminate unnecessary regulatory requirements; accelerating environmental reviews to remove delays affecting grid and industrial needs; reforming the hearing process to balance stakeholder participation with project timelines; modernizing the security framework to appropriate commercial facility levels; and accelerating deployment pathways by right-sizing requirements and streamlining approvals. The main idea is to make the agency more efficient and especially more oriented towards deployment, rather than risk avoidance (while maintaining safety standards, of course). The overall objective is to create a risk-informed, performance-based regulatory framework that can efficiently facilitate the deployment of advanced reactors, microreactors, power uprates, and fuel facilities while ensuring the long-term operation of existing nuclear plants.

#Energy #Windmills #PublicHealth — This is one of the wildest studies we've seen: the installation of wind farms has a direct impact on the suicide rate. And there's a mechanism: low-frequency noise exposure disrupts sleep. Here's a link to the full study (PDF).

#Energy #AmericanManufacturing — Interesting, below-the-radar: Li-Cycle, a battery recycling company, has transferred assets to mining giant Glencore, to sustain lithium-ion battery production in Rochester, NY, at a first-of-its-kind facility processing 35,000 tonnes of black mass annually. The move was supported by a $475 million U.S. DOE loan through the Loans Program Office, which narrowly avoided decapitation by DOGE earlier this year. This type of deal highlights the necessity of this kind of government support if the Admin is serious about a manufacturing renaissance.

#AI #Infrastructure — The FCC has just announced (PDF) that it's going to publish new rules "to unleash the buildout of secure submarine cable infrastructure." They point out that "submarine cable systems carry roughly 99% of global internet traffic and are key to further extending America’s leadership in AI and next-generation technologies." The goal is to "streamline the submarine cable licensing process, give certainty to investors, and accelerate the timelines for building cables." Beyond that, the idea is to maintain tech leadership vis-à-vis Chyna by improving American internet infrastructure.

#FreeSpeech — In the 21st century, having access to a bank account is a necessity of life. The left's shadow campaign to "debank" political opponents, through the constitutionally dubious and unaccountable practice of "politically exposed persons." Which is why the new EO to fight debanking is very important. The mechanism is interesting: banks aren't mandated to do anything, but future government support will be contingent on nondiscrimination. Federal banking regulators are instructed to tell financial institutions to remove all material in their guidance that leads to debanking, and to rescind regulations that encourage or expressly permit debanking (presumably including the category of "politically exposed persons"). Also, the SBA is to give financial institutions notice to identify all debanked persons and to reach out to them to tell them they were debanked and that they can now have their accounts reinstated. Obviously much will depend on enforcement, but we can at least expect SBA and the Treasury to be diligent about it.

#Science — The great Heather MacDonald is at the Journal with a warning to the Trump administration: amidst its well-intentioned reform to end funding for DEI, it risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in particular reducing funding to fundamental research.

Friday Essays

Are you taking time off this Summer? It's ok, we don't judge. But in that case, you may appreciate this piece from First Things, where the publication's staffers and editors tell us what they've been reading this Summer. Among many other juicy recommendations, editor Justin Lee recommends the French Decadent writer J.K Huysmans, columnist Mark Bauerlein recommends the new memoir published by (we couldn't have put it better) "the renowned, notorious, despised, and beloved columnist and playboy Panagiotis 'Taki' Theodoracopulos," and intern Cecilia Jones (interns get their day in the sun too!) pumps G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown series.

Ross Douthat is a blessing. After all, who else could write, and in the New York Times no less, an essay pondering the mystery of the miraculous figure of Joan of Arc, and asking why God seems to especially favor France? Joan of Arc is in many ways one of the most stunning figures of history, and a kind of stubborn rebuke to rationalism; Douthat quotes a rationalist writer who reviewed the sources on Joan's life: "I also kind of feel called out by God. 'So, you say you’re a rationalist? You’re dismissing all the historical evidence for miracles as insufficient? You won’t consider the evidence for Jesus Christ persuasive due to a mere two eyewitness and five contemporary reports? You won’t believe in anything without evidence more than sufficient to convince a court? Okay, have 115 witnesses to miracles that nobody could avoid recording because they altered the course of European history. Now, what were you saying about how you’re not a Christian because you’re a rationalist?'"

Balaji Srinivasan is one of the most interesting tech investors alive today, with right-leaning, but impossible-to-easily-classify politics. Which is why we highly recommend his latest essay, ambitiously titled "AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic." What does he mean by that? Essentially: rather than witnessing the emergence of a single, omnipotent artificial general intelligence that dominates all others (akin to a monotheistic deity) we observe multiple powerful AI models from various organizations (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others) that have converged on similar capabilities without any one achieving decisive superiority. This polytheistic model suggests a future characterized by a balance of power among different human-AI partnerships, where competition and diversity prevent any single system from achieving unchecked dominance. To him, this contradicts popular narratives about an inevitable AI singularity or a winner-take-all scenario, instead pointing toward a more distributed and constrained form of AI development where multiple "gods" coexist rather than one supreme intelligence ruling over all. The essay is easy to read, and fascinating throughout.

At Commonplace, Robert Bellafiore, Managing Director for Policy of the Foundation for American Innovation, reviews the new book by John Cassidy, "Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI." He points out that, while capitalist ideologues miss something, left-wing critiques of capitalism have been historically misguided and justly relegated to the ash heap of history.

At The Free Press, Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, the new defense conglomerate, issues a clarion call, to the Taiwanese people (the article is adapted from a speech he gave at National Taiwan University) and to all free people: the future of war relies on technological advantage. The free peoples of the world, if they want to protect their freedom, must "heed the call to build."