Fiona Hill

I mean, if you look at other governments around the world that are smaller, it's much easier for them to hire people in.

You know, some of the most successful governments are much smaller.

And it's not that I say that, you know, the government is necessarily too big, but it's just thinking about each unit in a different way.

We shouldn't be having so many political appointments.

We should kind of find more professional appointments, more non-parties on appointments.

Because, you know, every single administration that we've had over the last...

that's the span of presidencies, they have jobs that are unfulfilled because they can't get their candidates through Congress and the Senate because of all the kind of political games that are being played.

I know loads of people have just been held up because it's just on the whim of some member of Congress, even though the actual position that they want is really technical and doesn't really care about what political preference they particularly have.

So I think we have to try to look...

at the whole system of governments in the way that we would over other professional sectors.

And to try to think about this as, just as you said there, that this is a government that's actually running our country.

This is an operating system.

And you wouldn't operate it like that if you were looking at it in any kind of rational way.

It shouldn't be so ideologically or partisan tainted.

It's every level anyway.

So I would actually just make a bid for a more non-partisan approach to a lot of the parts of government.

You can still kind of bring in the political imprimatur, but also you have to explain to people writ large in America as well that this is your government.

And that actually you could also be part of this, you know, things like the Small Business Administration, the U.S.

Department of Agriculture, you know, all these kind of things that actually people interact with, but they don't even know it, the Postal Service, you know, all of these things.

I mean, people actually, when you ask them about different functions of government, they have a lot of support for it.