Is Democracy Burning? Max Stier on the Fight to Save America’s Government

Max Stier, President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service

Denver: Welcome Back to the Business of Giving, Max.

Max: It is a pleasure to be back. It’s been too long, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk again.

Denver: Likewise. Well, to begin with, for those who may not be familiar, can you provide an overview of the Partnership for Public Service, the mission, the core priorities, the role it plays in strengthening our federal government and how it’s evolved here over the past couple months?

Max: Good. I can, and I will try to do it in some concise way. Look, it all starts from our perspective and thinking about: What is our government? And it really is the one tool we have for collective action to deal with our biggest problems, the only one that has the imprimatur of the public and taxpayer resources behind it.

And so, there are 1.5 million nonprofits out there. You’ve probably spoken to a fair number of that 1.5 million. We’ve been pretty much it, for the last two decades plus, focused on making our federal government work more effectively.

And the theory of the case, again, is it’s the highest leverage possible investment you can have, which is make your public institutions, then make them stronger, and they’re going to deliver better results in ways that no nonprofit or frankly, philanthropy could ever do. And frankly, we’re seeing the reverse of that…like what happens when it becomes an agent for bad things. But we can talk about that later.

So, we have primarily focused on people issues. We’ve focused on getting the right talent into government, making sure it was well-led. More recently, over the last four or five years, we’ve been really paying a lot of attention to the relationship between our society and our government, and the belief that you need both a trustworthy government and a trusted government.

Everything has been thrown up in the air. We can come to that. We are, I would say, a very different organization today than we were two months ago. And I will just try to make this a little more concrete on the work we’ve done before: It’s everything from starting the Center for Presidential Transition.

We realized that the handoff of power was an incredibly important process that no one had paid attention to, and it fundamentally was a Groundhog Day exercise, where new presidents came in with no idea of actually how to take over the federal government. So we created a learning system around that.

We’ve created performance metrics for government, like what we call our Best Places to Work rankings. You don’t have financial metrics in the way to measure public sector activity, but employee attitudes are actually incredibly powerful in understanding what is working/what’s not inside any organization, and certainly a public sector organization.

So we rate and rank every agency in the federal government on what the employees have to say about it. You know very well our Sammies program, where we created the Oscars in government service in the theory that you need an upside; you need to actually honor and recognize when good things are happening, not just find problems.

I don’t know any organization that gets better if all you do is kick it; that’s for people, too. And we do a lot of work around leadership development, recognizing again that people are everything and that the people at the top are fundamental to the success of an organization.

And we have a whole leadership model we’ve developed that we see as distinctive to succeeding based on this idea of being a steward of the public good. We’re involved in the technology arena, so we’ve launched a center on AI,… a whole bunch of different programmatic activity to make our federal government better.

And pretty much all of that has ground to a halt. And we are a new, different organization, and I will stop there to get your feedback on whether I should go into that new world.

“I think the first thing is as an organization, we are not about bigger or smaller government, we’re about better government.”

Denver: Well, we’ll get into that new world, but that’s a wonderful grounding for people to understand the ethos and the core of what you’ve done and continue to do.

But we are now in April of 2025…. thousands of federal jobs are gone. Agencies like USAID, which I was particularly close to, and the Department of Education, they’re shells or they’re shuttered. How has this massive loss hit the Partnership’s work, and especially your mission to build better government when there seems to be less government every morning when I wake up?

Max: Yeah, no, look, I think the first thing is as an organization, we are not about bigger or smaller government, we’re about better government.

Denver: Right.

Max: And there is an appropriate argument in the political sphere about what government should do or should not do.

But everyone should be agreed that whatever it is doing, it should do well and effectively. And you asked what the impact of the new administration and DOGE, more specifically, has been on our organization, and it has been profound, as it has been profound on our society. And we’re still at the front edge.

Before the inauguration, I thought of this as sort of like a category 10 hurricane off the coast, and it has now hit shore, but the damage is ongoing, and a lot of it is hidden. It’s still not understood in the ways that it needs to be.

And so, for us organizationally, we’ve had to do a very significant pivot. And again, to be very direct, we got 40% of our revenue from the federal government for fee-for-service work. As a nonprofit, we understood that to be sustainable, we needed both philanthropic and fee-for-service money as well as corporate support.

And our theory of the case was that we would demonstrate value to the government, which we have, and therefore grew the work that we did with the federal government that they would actually pay for. And the Trump administration……. ended all of our contracts with them.

Now, what we realized is that this is the proverbial five-alarm fire. We have a role and an incredible responsibility to do different things. So we have three priorities now. The first is supporting civil servants, and these are the people who are, again, non-partisan experts, therefore the public good. And they are in a chaotic, challenging, and never before experienced environment, and they need help.

So we’re trying to answer their questions. We’re trying to support them, as they continue to try to serve the public. And they deserve that and they deserve better. So we do everything we can to help them. We run webinars; we’re connecting them to free legal help and on and on and on.

The second piece, and this is the longer term one, is we are trying to engage the public. We’re trying to help the public understand why they should care about what is happening, why they’re actually getting hurt. Their services will and are declining. While there’s a better way, we actually believe that our government should be modernized, but burning it down isn’t the way to get there.

And the third priority for us is, since we no longer are welcome with the current leadership in doing support work for the federal government, we are moving into state and local markets. So we are of the view that it’s fundamentally critical for public sector institutions writ large, to serve the public better, and we know that the work we’ve done at the federal level has really great power, not only at the federal level, but state, local.

And so we’ve begun the process of developing relationships where we hope to be able to take what we’ve learned at the federal level and apply it at various states and localities. So those are the three things that we’re doing. It is really fundamentally vital, I think, to our mission, and there’s never been a time where our work has been more meaningful. I wish it weren’t so, but it is.

“…again, I said our leadership model is based on this idea that you lead in the government; your responsibility is to the public good. That is not what we’re watching at the current administration, which is pursuing its own private agenda, and it’s using, in an unrestrained way, the full power of government to achieve those private ends. And so they are putting pressure on law firms; they’re putting pressure on universities as we all know. But the list is going to go on, and it will include philanthropy for sure as well.”

Denver: Yeah, yeah. That’s a wonderful adaptation. Let me ask you a little bit about your private sector support because you say your contracts with the government have stopped, and it may be a little bit too early to answer this, but it does seem when the federal government looks askance at a certain organization, sometimes private funders tend to take a step back.

We’ve seen what’s happened with the law firms recently and what they’ve done. I’d just be curious as to how you sense in terms of the private sector stepping up, if private funders make up the shortfall that has disappeared with all those contracts.

Max: So, I think this is still a work in progress. I do think that we… fact that as bad as it’s been so far, things get worse before they get better. And when I say that, I think one of the terrible things we’re observing is the use of public power, governmental power, to squash opposition.

And it’s not… again, I said our leadership model is based on this idea that you lead in the government; your responsibility is to the public good. That is not what we’re watching at the current administration, which is pursuing its own private agenda, and it’s using, in an unrestrained way, the full power of government to achieve those private ends.

And so they are putting pressure on law firms; they’re putting pressure on universities as we all know. But the list is going to go on, and it will include philanthropy…

Denver: For sure.

Max: …for sure as well. So we have seen, again, just to be very frank about it, reductions in corporate support.

I think that companies are also looking over their shoulder about whether or not they can support things that they think might not be in the good graces of the current leadership, which is, again, a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. Traditional philanthropy has certainly stepped up some. We frankly need more help.

And I would say a place that we have been underdeveloped is in individual major gift support. There are some people who have been phenomenally generous, but there are not that many people who I think have appreciated why helping the public sector is actually an incredibly powerful strategy to achieve leveraged good.

And again, if I… there are two things that I’m hopeful for that might be good, that come out of all of this chaos and destruction. And one would be a public that fundamentally appreciates why the nature of their government is incredibly important and they need to actually pay attention to it.

And the second is that we see real positive modernization of our public infrastructure, which I think will benefit us all.

Denver: You mentioned a moment ago that there are consequences of what’s happened, and many of those consequences we’re aware of, perhaps public safety and things of that nature. But you also said there are some hidden things that haven’t appeared just yet. What are some of those overlooked consequences that we all may be sleeping on?

Max: Yeah, and I think that there are many, and again I haven’t nailed this metaphor exactly. I just use “hurricane.”

Denver: Well, try it out now.

Max: So it’s like the category 10, right? So it’s come ashore. And it’s a little bit like the night after the hurricane. The electricity grid is down. Not getting information from our government itself, which is a problem, a giant problem.

And so we have a limited number of primarily reporters with little pen lights that are flashing those pen lights on a devastated landscape. So we’re seeing pieces of harm, but not the larger thing.

So you say, well, what else is out there that we don’t know? Because we don’t have information coming from our government, and the private resources to find these things is more limited. But they’re massive.

I mean, we’ve started something called a “waste of the week.” And this past week, we did it on the IRS. So the turmoil that they’ve caused in the IRS, the best estimate is going to lead to a reduction in taxes paid of $500 billion.

Denver: Yeah.

Max: And just to put scale on that, that’s almost twice the full cost of the federal workforce. You’d have to fire the entire 2.3 million federal workforce twice to be able to make up for the damage that is being done this year to the IRS.

And just to remind everybody, this is not about raising or lowering taxes, this is just collecting taxes for people who owe it already, who are tax cheats that are cheating on everybody else. That is not counting this $600 billion that is already not collected, that the whole effort to modernize the IRS was intended to do that has been halted in its tracks.

So, you’re talking about incredible waste, and the opportunity costs are unbelievably large. And so, big and small, you’ve got human damage that is profound to the public sector workforce itself. But the implications for farmers, for veterans, for business… everybody has been hurt and will get hurt a lot more.

Denver: Max, when you look at the full picture, the layoffs, the reinstatement of Schedule F, this whole broader narrative, what do you think is the ultimate objective of the Trump administration in its approach to civil service? In other words, what’s their end game? Do you have any theory on it?

Max: So I’m glad you asked that. The first observation I would have is everyone I know is looking for rationality where there may be none.

Denver: Okay.

Max: So like, I think we’re just built that way. We try to find the story, the pattern, the reason. I think there is a reason; I think it depends a little bit on the actor we’re talking about.

I think for President Trump, he’s made clear himself directly his rationale, and that is that he fundamentally does see himself as the king.

Denver: Yeah.

Max: And what he is doing is stripping our government and our society of any institutional capacity to resist the choices that he makes. And so the career civil service… this is a fight we fought as a country in the 19th century.

We had the spoil system, a system in which jobs were given out to the… by the winner of the election. And government was, to some degree, a piggy bank for the elected leader of the time. And we wound up with corruption and incompetence and ultimately, with an assassinated president, Garfield, in 1881.

And we had a public that stood up and said, “This is terrible, and we need something different.” And we had the change to a more professionalized, nonpolitical system that we’ve had for 140 plus years. And so you ask about motivation; I think fundamentally, President Trump is taking out any potential opposition to the choices that he wants to make for himself.

And he is both, in my view, unwilling to appreciate that his job is actually to look after the public good rather than his own. He confuses those two. And that the use of government power needs to be restrained, that it has such consequence that you have to treat it with the care that he is unwilling to adopt.

Now, I think there are other elements of his administration that have related, but different motivations. The Project 2025 effort more broadly lays out an agenda that’s all about reshaping the government to promote a very specific ideology that includes removing much government capability. And I think that’s an element of what’s going on.

And then you have the DOGE effort, which if you follow the rationales that have been provided, has wandered all over the map.

Denver: Yeah.

Max: But fundamentally, what I see is an effort that is based on a model of success that Elon Musk believes that he has used in Silicon Valley, which is: Break it to fix it, which I think has no place in our public institutions.

And he’s been “Fire, Fire, Fire” rather than “Ready, Aim, Fire.” He has enraged rather than engaged employees. And he has been unwilling to understand or contextualize to the public sector environment and therefore, there’s been unbelievable harm that has been inflicted.

Denver: Yeah. Having had a few encounters with Trump in the 1980s, not great encounters, by the way, it does seem to me that he’s just trying to create the Trump business that he had in New York.

Max: Yes.

Denver: And it truly is a family business. And he is the only one who makes every final decision. I even thought about it a little bit more, Max, that I think he looks at other nations as other corporations.

Max: Yes.

Denver: They’re all there to be taken over. And the citizens are really employees. And some of those employees can stay, but maybe in Gaza you got 2 million employees that, “Nah, we don’t want you here, so you’re going to have to leave.” So he looks at it that everybody’s fair game, the way he would look at a corporate takeover.  “Like to be friendly, but if it has to be hostile, so be it!”

Max: Yeah. I think that rings true for me in so many ways. And even as we’re watching the attack on the judiciary and his willingness again to use unrestrained power, it’s like you said: In the private sector, as a developer, he’d be like, “Sue me! …You don’t like what I did?… Just take me to court.”

But there’s no appreciation for the fact that there’s real damage done when the US government investigates somebody, when they make choices that clearly are violating the law. I mean, you’re right. He has not contextualized his role from when he ran a family business to being president of the United States.

But I think, bluntly, that the damage done has metastasized across the government in the leaders that he has chosen, fundamentally based on their loyalty to him rather than their capability and their character. And you’re seeing that obviously in the context of national security, and you’re seeing it across the board in pretty much everything that’s happening in our federal government. And that the harms, again, are proliferating.

Denver: Yeah. Speaking, assuming, where do things currently stand on the legal front in trying to push back against these horrific changes?

Max: So, I mean, look, I think the courts have been a fundamental bulwark. They’re not enough. I think obviously what Trump himself has done is the heart of the problem. I think though, our Congress has enabled this, that so much of what Trump is doing that is beyond the pale, is stuff that is actually the prerogative of Congress, and Congress has not stood up to him.

Denver: No.

Max:  On the courts, you’ve seen a lot of district court judges, federal district court judges, put a stop, a temporary restraining order or maybe a preliminary injunction to many of the activities that are plainly illegal. What we haven’t seen is how the Supreme Court ultimately is going to respond to what is taking place.

And I’m troubled because the history of this court has not been good in terms of respecting longstanding legal and constitutional principles. And the argument about the so-called unitary executive, which we’ve had really hundreds of years of jurisprudence that has permitted a lot of things that this court is willing to sweep away.

So we don’t know yet what parameters this court will set, the Supreme Court will set, for the activity of Donald Trump, and that will be highly relevant. It’s also the case of like: how much is he going to actually respect the role of the courts, and he’s already crossed that line.

And so, this is scary stuff. I mean, it’s fundamentally scary stuff. This is our democracy that is at stake. And I want to just underscore, we are a nonpartisan organization. What I’m saying is not partisan.

Denver: That’s right.

Max: What Donald Trump is doing is overturning 140 years of understanding in our country by Republicans and Democrats alike. So we have peer countries, Hungary being probably the most prominent example, that I don’t think if most Americans visited Hungary, they would want to live in that society. They certainly wouldn’t want that government in terms of the corruption and incompetence and stagnation that exists there. But that is where we are on course to get to.

Denver: Max as the CEO, you’re steering the Partnership through this storm. I mean, layoffs and morale and DOGE slashing away. What’s the most challenging aspect of keeping your team focused and the mission alive, and how’s that playing out?

Max: It is a very challenging situation. I’ve done this now for 24 years. This is the first time I’ve had to lay people off. We laid off more than a quarter of our team. And it is gut-wrenching. We are very much both first responder and victim at the same time, and it’s a complicated role to play.

On the flip side, I have been just amazed by just the mission commitment of the people here at the Partnership. And I would say, bluntly, you asked what the hardest part is, the hardest part is money. Like honestly, having done this for as long as I have, the ideas are relatively straightforward. We know what we should be doing strategically, getting the resources.

I’ve always said we have a double bottom line. You have to know where your mission direction, the resources to be able to drive that mission. And that’s tough. I mean, it is where I spend the bulk of my time, is trying to figure out how to get resources we need.

And as good-hearted and concerned as a lot of people are, people need to move faster, just to be very direct and blunt about it. There’s so much at stake, and I also appreciate there are so many pulls on everybody, especially as the federal government has created such chaos. Philanthropists are trying to fill holes that the government has created by stepping away.

Reality is the stuff that we do… may not feel urgent, but the reality is, it is. And it has leverage, which I think is distinctive. There’s no way for philanthropy to fill the gap of the federal government, but if you can get the federal government or governments writ large to actually do their jobs better, you can create way more value than any individual investment, indirect activity could ever do.

Denver: There’s no question about it, but time to leverage your dollars in intelligent ways like never before.

I’ve always been concerned… I know you are… with all these seasoned public servants walking out the door. I went to a number of your galas and had some of the award winners on the show, and they inspired me like no other. It was just great. What’s going to happen with this brain drain, with decades of experience and judgment and history and institutional knowledge just vaporizing?

Max: So the waste involved there is profound, and the answer is that the American people and, writ large, the world, because our government has impact on the larger stage too, is going to suffer.

I mean, whether it’s veterans getting poor care, or farmers not getting the support that they deserve, or business folks not having an even playing field that has the best rules and the best referees to manage the system. Every element of our society is going to see degraded capacity and experience.

And it won’t only be quantitative. We also are fundamentally putting our very nation at risk. I, again, looking for the metaphors here, I feel like we’re playing Russian roulette in the world, and we’re just adding a whole bunch of bullets to the chambers. Like that is the activity we’re engaged in.

So much of what our federal government does is manage risk, and that risk profile has now just skyrocketed. So people ask me: What’s the long-term prognosis? I’m worried about the here and now. Like we ultimately, we need to get to a point where we can rebuild and rebuild differently because there’s going to be opportunities to modernize. But we need to deal with the situation as it exists today.

I think it will always be the case that our government, if it is in fact a government for the people, will attract great talent because the purpose is so powerful. There’s no more important larger stage to help than inside the federal government. And that value proposition, if it is offered again, will draw great talent in.

Will we have incredible brain drain in science? Yes. Will we put ourselves in national security risk? Yes. Will there be communities in our country who are disadvantaged, who will feel disproportionate harm here? Yes. The list is going to be incredibly long, but we have a good future if we can get to it. We just need, again, leaders who are fundamentally committed to the public good. And there’s much then we can rebuild.

Denver: I’ve always been impressed how the Partnership has kept the dedicated federal employee front and center in the work that you do. And you’ve been doing this, as you said, nearly 25 years. What have you heard in speaking to them? I know you know the agencies, you know the people.

There’s a human toll that sometimes isn’t reported enough. These are just not numbers. These are people, really good people. What have you heard of there, a story or two, that has really stuck with you?

Max: So, there’s so many stories that have stuck with me. And one thing that is so profoundly horrifying is you have people who are there to serve the public, and that they’re motivated by that… and there’s a sense of betrayal, like there’s a sense of like… people should know that a third of the federal workforce are veterans, and there’s a reason for that.

And it’s because either you serve in uniform or you serve in civil service… the same motivation exists, and so many people who have served in the military move into the civil service after they’re done with the military because that is the place they can continue to serve in the ways that they want to.

Denver: Yeah.

Max: So I did, like in Arlington County, nearby in DC, in a high school gym, a Q and A for federal employees who are trying to understand what the heck is going on and what they should do about it. And just listening to someone who had immigrated to this country with his family like 25 years ago, joined the military because that was the way he could give back to our country, became a civil servant.

And he’s looking around and saying, What the heck happened here? Like, it’s craziness. And they understand that this is wasteful. Like if you really wanted to make the government better, you should be listening and engaging the workforce itself. And none of that is happening.

I mean, this is, again, arson is the best term I can think of, it’s arson to our public infrastructure. And federal employees who care about our country and our government are appalled and scared for themselves, but scared for our country.

“I mean, truthfully, it’s our enemies who are the ones that are happiest about what’s happening.”

Denver: You mentioned a rebuilding a moment ago, and I’m sure that there are some things that while difficult, can be rebuilt over time. What do you fear is being lost for good?

Max: So, look, I think that it’s the opportunity cost. We have a world that is both very dangerous and also fast-moving. And there is no preordained rule that says the United States has to be the number one economy, the number one dynamic society, and the number one place to want to live for the values that we have.

And we’re putting that in jeopardy right now– whether it’s the best scientists going to Europe or to Canada, or we surely are failing in competing against China in what we’re doing right now. I mean, truthfully, it’s our enemies who are the ones that are happiest about what’s happening.

Denver: Yeah. Right.

Max: It’s crazy. Well, I’m worried about losing our place in the world. And that is not something you can rebuild, but it’s not like anyone else is going to stand still. They’re going to leapfrog way right over us. I do worry about the existential threats that I think are very real.

I worry about our democracy. Like we have the chance of losing our democracy and moving into an autocracy, to an authoritarian rule of law, no rule of law, rather, like a hungry…

Denver: Yeah.

Max: That is here if we don’t do something about it.

But I believe in the American people. Like, I did a talk last night at Georgetown, to students there, and they were all there because they came to Georgetown because they wanted to serve in the government. And all of them had their dreams and hopes upended.

But my message to them was: it will come around again, and I think they will be there if we’re here as a country that understands why having that kind of talent committed to the public good is fundamental to the world we want to live in.

Denver: That optimism and positive outlook must keep you going, I guess, at a time like this.

Max: Well, I would tell you that the phrase that always sticks with me is, “Hopelessness is the enemy of justice.” And that’s from Bryan Stevenson. I just know, you know that I have two kids. They give me a lot of hope. I want the world to be a good place for them.

And I feel all of us have a responsibility to ask ourselves a question: What are we doing today to address the real threat to our democracy and society that exists? And that’s why I’m on this planet, as far as I’m concerned. I want to answer that question as strongly as I possibly can.

And I know it’s not as an individual that I can do best. I can do it best through the organization, the Partnership. And I want everyone else to be standing up too because we’re in trouble if that doesn’t happen.

Denver: Well, you’ve always had an important, impactful job, and it’s probably more important now than it has ever been before.

For listeners interested in learning more about the Partnership for Public Service, or who might be inclined to support the work that you do, tell us about your website and the kind of information they can find there.

Max: So we have a lot of information. As I said earlier, it’s changing. We just set up a website for federal employees that went live actually today. We had a micro site before. And you just go to ourpublicservice, at ourpublicservice.org.

You’ll see tons of information about what it is we do, how people can engage, but we’re trying to service different communities… the federal employees… give them the information they need, the media… obviously Congress is an important actor here, and the public writ large. So we’re doing a lot of work around storytelling, which we think is fundamental as well.

But you’ve been amazing in your engagement with us. I will say we need more supporters, and we need more people focused on the health of our public institutions. As I mentioned earlier, we’re doing state and local work, and that’s very important now. And we need to show the public that they can get the answers and the support that they need.

We’re doing a lot more work in AI. We think that is fundamental to the opportunity to provide better service to the public. Obviously, government has to not only be a consumer of it, but a regulator of it so it’s done safely and effectively. But plenty of stuff. They just go to our website, and hope they do.

Denver: And now is the time. I want to thank you so much for being here today, Max;  it was a real pleasure to have you on the show again.

Max: It’s a pleasure talking to you. It’s been too long, and really appreciate everything that you’re doing.