Why Do Federal Civil Servants Stay for Less Pay?

Michael Lewis says dedicated federal civil servants are not anomalies. They are easy to find inside a two million person workforce, easy enough that the book was available five times over with five different casts of characters.

Lazy people work in government, and Lewis says the same kind of people show up in the private sector. What strikes him about the federal government is how many workers can make twice their government pay outside it and still stay. They work not forty hour weeks, not sixty hour weeks, but a hundred or eighty hour weeks. Sam Fragoso asked why they do not leave. Lewis says the jobs are so meaningful. They see the purpose, they see how important the work is, they see knock-on effects on other people's lives, and the work gives them enormous satisfaction. Often they care about a specific problem only the government is going to address, and they bring the skills for it.

Lewis says government does not tell its own story. People conflate politics and government, see politicians, and think the politicians are the government. Civil servants do work everyone agrees needs doing, work the private sector will not do, and they are often there on a mission. They make strong characters because they do not think of themselves as characters. When people think of themselves as characters, they suck as characters. They are obsessed with important work, they are not watched, and they are not used to having their stories told. All of it is a recipe for making the story swing on the page.