Fiona Hill

But we don't have, you know, we have it within the National Institutes of Health, but we saw the CDC break down on this, you know, kind of front.

We don't have sufficient of those institutions that bring people together from all kinds of different backgrounds.

You know, one of the other problems that we have with government, with the federal government over, you know, state and local government, is it's actually quite small.

People think that the federal government's huge because we've got Postal Service and the military that are part of it.

But your actual federal government employees is a very small number.

And, you know, the senior executive service part of that is the older white guys, you know, kind of come up all the way over the last, you know, several decades.

We have a really hard time bringing in younger people into that kind of government service unless they're political hacks, you know, and they want to, you know, kind of or they're kind of looking for power and, you know, sort of influence.

We have a hard time getting people like yourself and other, you know, younger people kind of coming in to make a career out of public service and also retaining them because, you know, people with incredible skills often get poached away into the private sector.

And, you know, a lot of the people that I work with on the national security side are now at all kinds of, you know, high-end political consultancies or they've gone to Silicon Valley and they've gone to this place and that place.

Because after a time as a younger person, they're not rising up particularly quickly because there's a pretty rigid way of looking at the hierarchies and the promotion schemes.

And they're also getting lambasted by everybody.

People like, you know, public servants.

They're not really public servants.

There's this whole lack and loss of a kind of a faith in public service.

The last few years have really done a lot of damage.

We need to revitalize our government system to get better results.

We need to bring more people in, even if it's for a period of time, not just through expensive contracts for the big consulting companies and other entities that do government work out there.

But getting, you know, people in for a period of time, expanding some of these management fellowships and the White House fellows and, you know, bringing in, you know, scientists, you know, from the outside, giving, you know, that kind of opportunity for collaboration that we see in other spheres.

Well, we make it really difficult because of the political process.

I mean, and also because we have so many political appointments, we ought to have less, to be honest.