alt Hacker News> with no market feedback
It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows.
government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"
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I have to fill out paperwork for the government on a regular basis. I can tell you from first hand experience, the government's main problems are completely their own fault. They are easily 25 years out of date in technology. They can't accept encrypted files, they can't accept credit cards, they can't seem to even do the most basic things that even my dentist's office with 2 total employees can seem to do.
Its so bad that I can't help but think its because the contracts to support government workers are handed out in questionable ways. While I don't think much of the people who work in government offices, I do think they could accept emails if their bosses wanted them to and their contractors provided the tech. They aren't any more or less capable than the dentist's office workers. They just have to work with terrible tech that was clearly chosen for the wrong reasons.
> government employees work for elected officials
This is not correct and we have recent examples to counter this claim:
1. There are government employees directly employed by various branches of the government (ex: USDS was under the executive allowing them to be retasked by EO into DOGE)
2. There are government employees appointed into office who cannot fired after appointment (ex: Fed Reserve Chair)
3. There are also government employees who are non-political appointments
I think there are also more categories. I don't think your reply was charitable.
Some government employees do. Lots of local, state, and federal departments fall under more or less permanent bureaucracatic institutions, and while they might follow the lead of an elected official, often those officials are far more ceremonial than functional.
When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops.
Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership.
They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it.
Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians.
What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.