A Great and Necessary Time to Celebrate the Public Service

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Benjamin Deitchman
May 9, 2025

As we were beginning to laud the heroic efforts of first responders and other public and nonprofit sector professionals leading our global response to the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, I contacted my publisher about writing a book celebrating the public service. When we began social distancing, I assumed it would be an engaging and inspiring activity to complete within the safe confines of my home. It would also provide me with the excuse that I was conducting analysis through my streaming of comedies and dramas tangentially related to government and public policy.

Five years later, after finally getting around to submitting a full proposal last summer, my book, The Public Policy Perspective: A Personal Analysis of Public Work, will be available for purchase this month at a great and necessary time to celebrate the public service.

In 2025 there is daily documentation about the damage to institutions and careers in and around the public sector in the current policy environment. I expect the reader to approach this book with a healthy cynicism, as the tone may be more reflective of an epoch of optimism for civil servants. The pain is present, but public policy and public administration at every level remain essential drivers of our shared and hopeful future on this planet. Earlier this year, best-selling author Michael Lewis edited Who Is Government? The Untold Story of the Public Service. While his book will dwarf my little passion project, it further confirms that now is the right time to acknowledge past successes and build towards a promising public sector.

The general public expects government and governance institutions to run efficiently and effectively to support the functioning and growth of our modern society. Public policy and public administration action at its best is sometimes invisible except for those eager to examine core functions and activities. Professionals in these fields may take on tedious and technical tasks so that others do not need to concern themselves with paving the highways, inspecting restaurant kitchens, conducting the census or countless other tasks in the purview of the public sector, nonprofit institutions and assigned contractors. Competency and compliance are critical to our democracy, economy and general well-being in the twenty-first century.

In originally conceiving of this book, among my intended audiences were people who have watched The West Wing or Parks and Recreation and wanted to engage the ideals of government in those fictional settings. While one should not define his or her career path based on characters from television, socializing into the relevant fields and relating to these utopian visions in the context of our contemporary reality is a useful exercise. The work is tedious, but it is also fun. Not to spoil the ending of my book or the Parks and Recreation storyline, but I conclude my text with the quote from the series finale:

“When we worked here together, we fought, scratched and clawed to make people’s lives a tiny bit better. That’s what public service is about: small, incremental change every day. Teddy Roosevelt once said, ‘Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is a chance to work hard at work worth doing.’ And I would add that what makes work worth doing is getting to do it with people that you love.”

One other intention of this book is to provide readers an understanding of the endemic role of public policy and public administration in our daily lives, whether they are experienced leaders or merely interested in these areas of human endeavor. The diversity and interdisciplinary nature of these fields can make the research, analysis and practice appear esoteric and arcane, but people and the planet are constantly engaging government and related institutions. As stated in the title of the third chapter, public policy and public administration are ingrained from the DMV to the DMZ, but also are a part of life in our schools, playgrounds and sporting competitions. The fields are not without flaws, but they are how we work together to build our communities and beyond.

It is relatively conceited and self-serving to believe that readers should take time out of their busy schedules to delve into my analysis, musings and personal experiences. I hope that as someone who has devoted the past two decades to learning and experiencing all that public policy and public administration can offer, both to ourselves in our work and, more importantly, to the greater public good, this book can find its way into the hands of those who might benefit from its content. It is one perspective on the essentiality and joy of the efforts many of us have chosen and I am beyond grateful to have the opportunity to share it with the world. Whether or not you read The Public Policy Perspective: A Personal Analysis of Public Work, please always recognize that we can and should always celebrate public work.

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Author: Benjamin Deitchman is a public policy practitioner in Atlanta, Georgia. His second book, The Public Policy Perspective: A Personal Analysis of Public Work, will be available from Routledge on May 14, 2025.

 

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