By Shernica L. Ferguson
History’s lesson is consistent: empires don’t fall when they lose their armies, but when they lose the institutional knowledge that holds governance together. Fast-forward to twenty-first-century America, and the pattern is unnervingly familiar. Career civil servants, the architects who sustain the thousands of systems most of us never think about, yet somehow remain invisible, are leaving government in unprecedented numbers. There is no invasion, no dramatic collapse. Just the steady departure of the people who know how the system works, taking irreplaceable knowledge with them.
From the perspective of Mississippi, where I live and work, the fallout is impossible to ignore. Trust is eroding between agencies, continuity is breaking across jurisdictions, and international partners are questioning whether America can still uphold its commitments. This erosion reaches every level of government and every community that depends on capable public institutions. The fundamental question is no longer whether we have the right policies but whether we still have the people who know how to carry them out.
The Erosion
Civil service erosion shows up in three interconnected ways, and each compounds the others.
First, positions that once belonged to career professionals are becoming political appointments, and the continuity that agencies depend on is disappearing as a result.1 The professionals who understood how agencies actually coordinated are being replaced by appointees who are learning on the job, disrupting the functionality of informal networks and rendering formal systems inoperable.
Then there is an abandonment of the principle that government serves everyone equally, a move that creates disparities undermining the very moral foundation of public administration. That idea is not a bureaucratic nicety. It is a democratic commitment rooted in the nation’s founding, and career civil servants have long been the ones who translated it into practice. When they leave, impartiality leaves with them, and the disparities that fill the vacuum are not accidental.
Lastly, when the government deliberately devalues expertise, operational failures get compounded. Responses slow down. Administrative processes face mounting delays. International partnerships dissolve, and in a system in which governance credibility anchors global stability, nations begin to teeter on the brink of war. The public servants still standing find themselves unmoored, having lost the institutional anchor that once gave their work coherence and purpose. For example, the elimination of the Presidential Management Fellows program in 2025 made the point unmistakable: developing the next generation of public service talent is no longer a priority.2
Left unchecked, these three forces do not just weaken domestic governance; they undermine America’s ability to lead. The idea of burden-sharing among democracies is not new. Lord Daniel Hannan has called it “The Anglosphere Alternative,” a vision of deeper cooperation among English-speaking nations.3 It is a compelling argument with a fatal flaw: it assumes America still has the institutional capacity to hold up its end. Without the career professionals who maintain continuity across administrations, that assumption is crumbling. Our allies can see it, even if we cannot.
But the damage does not stop at the global stage. It reaches all the way down to the street level, where policies meet people. Michael Lipsky called them street-level bureaucrats: the teachers, social workers, emergency managers, and public health officers who do not merely implement policy but interpret it, making daily judgment calls that determine what government actually means in someone’s life.4 Policy remains an abstraction until one of these frontline workers delivers it to a citizen, and in that moment, the worker’s judgment becomes the policy.5
This plays out in real time. When the 2025 government shutdown became the longest in American history, it did not stay in Washington. Head Start centers closed across forty-one states, leaving families scrambling for childcare. Military communities saw food pantry usage surge as paychecks stopped. Local governments stepped in to maintain services without federal coordination or the certainty of reimbursement. In community after community, the professionals on the ground were left to make judgment calls that would once have been supported by experienced federal partners who were no longer there. That kind of work demands seasoned judgment, and seasoned judgment is exactly what civil service erosion takes away. In every one of these situations, the accumulated experience of administrators, their understanding of community dynamics, legal nuance, and practical compromise determines whether the government serves its purpose. When that experience walks out the door, communities pay the price; at scale, that is something far more dangerous than slow government.
What communities experience now is not inconsistency. It is the reality of a once coherent government that has morphed into something more insidious. The weakening of coherence has reached a tipping point, producing what I call post-coherent governance: a system that no longer merely struggles to function but actively contradicts itself.6 Without experienced staff who understand the historical logic behind existing protocols, new employees inherit a tangle of accumulated decisions that look arbitrary. A resident in one county gets a different interpretation of the same federal program than a resident in the next, not because the law changed, but because the institutional knowledge that once ensured consistency has vanished. The question for communities is not whether this is happening. It is whether we have the civic imagination to build something better in response.
Meanwhile, algorithms step in as experienced civil servants age out, carrying with them the almost humorous notion that a system designed to meet all needs uniformly can somehow replace the nuanced judgment of professionals who spent careers learning that no two communities, no two situations, and no two people are the same. Algorithms do not solve the problem of lost expertise; they standardize its absence. The real innovation this moment demands will not come from technology, and at this point, it is unlikely to come from Washington. It will come from the states, the communities, and the civic leaders who refuse to wait for a fix that may never arrive. The word for what they are building is subnational resilience: the capacity of states and communities to sustain governance while others fold under the fallout.7
The Response
Our inter-governmental systems are in need of a reset. The objective would not be a quick fix but a quilting of resilience, weaving individual states and communities into a single uniform pattern of subnational institutions stepping into the spaces left behind, not as temporary substitutes but as durable centers of governance. This is already happening. In 2025, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI), a cooperative of more than one hundred river communities between Minnesota and Louisiana, partnered with Convoy of Hope to guarantee disaster assistance within seventy-two hours of an event.8 No federal reform was required, no permission from Washington needed. That is subnational resilience in practice, and it offers a model for what civil service protection could look like if we think beyond the federal framework.
If the MRCTI shows what subnational resilience looks like for disaster response, the next question is whether that model can work for governance as a whole. I believe it can. What I have proposed as the “Magnolia Compact” takes that logic further.9 The Magnolia Compact would function as a voluntary interstate governance network linking state agencies, universities, and civic organizations to preserve administrative expertise and coordinate professional development across jurisdictions. State agencies would form structured partnerships with counterparts in other states to share governance expertise, preserve institutional knowledge, and rebuild the professional networks that erosion is destroying. Universities, civic organizations, local governments, and nonprofits serve as the connective tissue, ensuring that expertise flows where it is needed most rather than vanishing when a position is eliminated.
The most resilient systems are networked, not hierarchical. When federal mentorship programs disappear, state-to-state partnerships can fill the gaps. Similarly, when federal expertise drains away, cross-jurisdictional learning communities could preserve it. The goal would not be to replace federal capacity but to ensure that governance knowledge survives regardless of what happens in any single jurisdiction.
Building networks is only part of the answer. The deeper challenge is one of civic leadership: who will champion the cause of professional governance when it has no natural political constituency? Civil service protection does not win elections. It does not generate headlines. It does not mobilize donors. And yet it is the foundation on which every other civic priority depends. The dependability that communities have always taken for granted now requires more because the foundation on which it was built has been diminished. Disaster response slows. Economic development stalls. Public health systems are weakened. Environmental protections fade, and the functionality of each one declines for the same reason: the professionals who carried them out are leaving.
Civic leaders, whether in local government, nonprofits, universities, or community organizations, must step into this gap. It starts with changing the story we tell about public service. The word “bureaucrat” has become a slur, but the work civil servants perform holds communities together. We need compelling stories about the career officials who keep clean water flowing, who coordinate disaster response, who maintain the infrastructure of daily life that most of us take for granted. Making civil service erosion visible and showing communities the direct cost of losing their irrefutable architects is itself a form of civic engagement. When a resident understands that the person who coordinated their flood response or processed their benefits has been forced out, the abstraction becomes personal and urgent.
This reframing is not public relations. It is democratic accountability. Citizens deserve to know who serves them and what happens when those servants disappear. The communities that bear the heaviest cost are often those with the least political power: rural areas, communities of color, and low-income populations that depend most directly on public services and have the fewest private-sector alternatives when government capacity erodes. Universities and public administration programs have a role to play here by creating practitioner-in-residence positions that provide a safe harbor for career officials during political transitions, ensuring their expertise survives even when their positions do not. Programs such as the American Society for Public Administration’s Founders’ Fellows remain critical to mentoring the next generation and sustaining knowledge transfer across political cycles. These are not luxuries. They are infrastructure.
Civic leaders must also build coalitions that cross partisan lines. Civil service protection is not a liberal or conservative cause. It is a governance cause. Framing it around the shared values that communities already care about–effective disaster response, reliable public health, and functioning schools–offers the strongest path to the broad support that institutional resilience requires.
The Path Forward
The erosion of America’s professional civil service threatens domestic governance and our credibility as a model of democracy. But this crisis also creates space for something new. By building horizontal networks across states, creating academic safe harbors for institutional knowledge, and making the work of career professionals visible to the communities they serve, we can construct a system more resilient than the one we are losing, one that does not rise or fall with any single administration’s commitment to professional governance.
This work draws its courage from practitioners who must hold their integrity under pressure, its creativity from academics who must connect theory to practice, and its leadership from civic organizations willing to defend unglamorous yet essential institutions. States like Mississippi, often dismissed as lacking governance capacity, may prove that resilience grows precisely where vulnerability is greatest.
Ancient Babylon’s towers did not fall because its walls were breached by armies, but because the knowledge that built them was lost. America’s governmental architects deserve not just recognition but active protection. Their quiet professionalism sustains the systems that enable self-governance. Protecting and revitalizing our civil service is not just about better administration. It is about ensuring that this experiment in democratic governance does not become another empire that forgot how to run itself.
Shernica L. Ferguson earned her doctorate in Public Policy and Administration from Jackson State University, where she serves as an evaluation specialist at the MS Urban Research Center. She is a columnist for the American Society for Public Administration. Her research focuses on civil service resilience, community governance, and culturally responsive evaluation methods.
