Smart paragraphs from Zac Hill
Here's one:
The point of the story ... is not that uniforms are a magical performance-enhancing catch-all. It’s that they’re objective correlatives for a broader sense of excellence and camaraderie and devotion that eroded substantially as the bureaucracy expanded, as it shifted away from subject-specific competency and towards functional ‘expertise’. And so those of us in the state capacity conversation, those of us who are thinking about things like procurement timelines and waterfall builds and registers of eligibles, would do well not to limit ourselves to the mechanical and environmental and procedural adjustments necessary for a department to really kill it at its job.
Instead, we should expand our aperture to what it takes to create and cement and reinforce a culture that gets people out of bed in the morning stoked to be a part of a game-changing mission for the rest of their lives.
And then there's this:
For the DC policy nerds in our story dweebing out over park ranger hats, the point of undertaking government activities is to accomplish objectives. That’s why all of us are here. But for this Administration, the announcement is the accomplishment. The only ‘objective’ is to hear the ensuing applause.
All coming from this piece. Do read the whole thing.