Terry Gerton When federal employee accountability cases drag on, attention usually turns to rules and protections. A new report looks at what happens inside the process itself, where delays are most likely to occur and how they might be fixed. My guests are Maureen Klovers and April Harding, co-founders of We the Doers, a fiscally sponsored project of the Fund for Constitutional Government. April and Maureen, it is lovely to have you both with me today. April, I want to start with you and first just ask you to tell us a little bit about We the Doers. How did you come to be? What is your purpose?

April Harding We the Doers is a small nonprofit. We started in December of last year, but really the idea for We the Doers came when Maureen and I met for the first time in November of 2025 for a cup of coffee, because we had both commented in the POPVOX Foundation’s Departure Dialogues and provided extensive ideas for what we might do if we had the opportunity to make government better and more effective and more efficient. And as we were chatting about our experiences as senior executives in federal government and our experiences during the change in administration and what we had seen since then, we both realized that the perspective of the people doing the work at federal agencies — who received the OMB memos and the executive orders and the changes in law that affect the work — really hadn’t been a visible, vocal part of the government reform conversation that was emerging. We decided to sort of stop waiting for people to ask, or wait for permission, and decided to start telling the stories of federal leaders and how changes affected their work and where things break down and why things don’t work in government right now so that we could get to the root causes of real, sustainable solutions. So that is our mission, and our focus is to identify those root causes; develop comprehensive, sustainable solutions to them; and work with everyone else who’s working in this space to move those ideas forward so that we can really build the government that the American people deserve. So, that’s how it started.

Terry Gerton So Maureen, we the doers is actually sort of a dual meaning then. It’s people who actually were doing the work of government, but also now people who want to do the work of reform. As you’re thinking about this new reform agenda, how are you all actually doing your work?

Maureen Klovers I think what sets us apart is a lot of the folks in the good-government space have folks with more of an academic background, or a lot of former Biden or Obama political appointees, some former Bush appointees, but they tend to be more Democratic. And that’s great, and they have an important perspective. But they don’t have the length of experience of a lot of senior executives and senior managers. And they haven’t necessarily gotten in the weeds, right? For a political appointee, success is getting money out the door for your administration’s new priority, you know, going to states, talking up the administration, right? But when you’re a GS-15 manager or an SES, you really get in the weeds about why procurement takes so long, why it’s so hard to hire and fire, why it’s so hard deliver IT systems on time. And you see that gap between the goal, the ideal and reality. So we really wanted to engage people who’d been in the trenches, who understood, as April said, why things break down. For example, April and I met in November. We had our first workshop in December. We moved fast. We want to show, too, that feds can move fast, or former feds. And we brought together seven former SES and GS-15 managers around the question, how do we make the government more effective and efficient? In essence, if DOGE had asked you, what would you have said? And we came up with a very candid, unvarnished look, and that’s our first report, that’s on our website and came out January 20th to mark one year of DOGE. We’ve continued that in our current report out today on fast-but-fair federal firing, where we brought together 10 managers with a combined 181 years of experience who collectively had tried to discipline or remove 22 employees. So we weren’t just asking any federal managers — we were asking people who had really gone through this difficult process about what the process was, where it broke down, where it could be improved.

Terry Gerton And let’s pick up right there because today is that report release date. April, there’s a lot of personnel issues you could have focused on, as you mentioned earlier. You both lived through the downsizing in 2025. Why did you decide to pick, as Maureen said, fast-but-fair federal firing?

April Harding There are two primary reasons that that was the first thing we picked to focus on. One is because it’s a really complicated, really thorny topic, and there’s a lot of politics attached to that, and a lot folks have to be very concerned about optics or existing relationships when they’re talking about this. We are aggressively nonpartisan, and we also are new. So we have less skin in the game and are able to tackle that and put forward a straw man, if nothing else, for the rest of the community to respond to. Although I think our report actually is quite detailed and the ideas that we have are very strong and thoughtful, it’s still the first thing that we have seen so far that goes into detail, that talks about how it works now. And only we are in a position, also, to convene that group and talk about how things work now rather than at the abstract policy level. The other core reason is because all of the foundational changes to government that we identified in our first report and that we are focused on going forward, the root causes of culture issues and constraints, include making sure we have the right people in the jobs. And there are many parts of that, but you can’t have a healthy workforce without the ability to remove people who are not in the right jobs. That’s just an unfortunate reality of running any business or any organization, especially one with millions of employees. Sometimes removal is necessary. And if there is a bottleneck there and that can’t happen, the ripple effect of not being able to do that is extraordinary. It prevents the kind of culture change that’s going to be necessary for the next version of government, whatever we rebuild from here.

Terry Gerton Maureen, certainly the Trump administration coming in made no secret that it assumed federal workforce performance was a problem and it took too long to get rid of folks. So maybe there is at least agreement on the core problem, which is it does take too long to get of poor performers. But what did you learn while you were doing this work that maybe took you beyond conventional wisdom? Was there some big insight there about why?

Maureen Klovers Well, first I want to say we don’t agree that most federal workers are not good workers. I mean, that was something that came up over and over again — that actually most federal workers are great workers and we want to support them. And we also want to recognize that morale for those workers really suffers when you have someone in the job who’s not pulling their weight. So that’s part of the reason we wanted to focus on it. The big insights? We like to really get to the root causes of what the problem is, so we kind of just keep asking, “why?” And this one kind of shook out there were five root causes. The first one that I do think was pretty insightful is, there is no one process. So we diagrammed the process. We probably went through 20 versions and it’s on our YouTube channel, you can see it. It looks like a spaghetti monster. It’s kind of “Choose Your Own Adventure,” like, does your employee file a grievance? If so, go up here, you know, that kind of thing. But what we learned is, the statutes governing removal — for performance, that’s 5 USC 4303 and for conduct, that’s 5 USC 7513 — are very, very short. I know you can’t see me, I’m on the radio, I’m holding up my hand, but it’s like a paragraph. And then OPM has a bit more, although if you go on their website, sometimes it looks like it’s a four-step process and you’re all done and you can remove the employee. But what we really learned is, OK, that’s what’s on paper at OPM and the regs. But then you go and your agency has their own regulations, or sometimes it’s really just a culture thing about when you remove someone and how difficult it is. And then each bureau has its own culture within the agency. And then beyond that, the first thing when you call HR and say, “I’ve got an employee with a serious performance or conduct issue,” they ask, well, are they covered by a collective bargaining agreement, and if so, which one? And there literally are, or at least were, thousands of collective bargaining agreements. So then you’ve got to figure out what extra protections are in the CBA. And then beyond that, it’s going to depend on, as a manager, which HR person and which lawyer you were assigned, and maybe which union rep also accompanies the employee. So, there is no one process, and that’s what makes it incredibly unfair, untransparent for both the employee and the manager, because you don’t know what you’re getting. So, that’s only root cause one. Root cause two is that underperformers can game the system, and it’s very easy to do so. We talked to one attorney … who said she had a case that bounced back and forth between the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Office of Special Counsel for 10 years. And eventually they had to pay a settlement because the witnesses had died or retired or that kind of thing. But even before removal, what we found is there are processes that were created for very legitimate purposes, but that are being gamed by underperformers. So. In the 12 cases where we went super, super in-depth with managers about exactly every step and how long it took, in 10 out of 12, the employee filed an equal employment opportunity complaint with their EEO office. Seven out of 12, they filed a grievance. Six out of 12, they filed a reasonable accommodation and three out of 12, they filed Family Medical Leave Act. And for the EEO and the grievance, none of those were found to have merit, but it ate up a lot of time. So that’s two. I’ll go much faster over three, four, and five. Three and four are basically two sides of the same coin: managers aren’t really incentivized to hold employees accountable, and in fact, their career can suffer a setback if they’re perceived as being unfair to employees or there is an EEO complaint against them, that kind of thing. Four is the culture in HR and OGC, dealing with employment and labor relations, tend to be very risk-averse and they’re not incentivized to support the manager generally, big generalization. And five is the managers don’t feel like they have the tools and training to hold folks accountable. A particular pain point was writing airtight performance plans so you could say your employee was not minimally acceptable.

Terry Gerton April Harding and Maureen Klovers are co-founders of We the Doers. April, let me come back to you. Maureen’s just given us the five big findings here. When I put all of those together in my head, I come up with an institutional design problem. And interestingly, the ways to game the system, as Maureen described them, seem like they started as legitimate protections, right? We really want people to be protected from unequal treatment, or we want them to have due process. When you think about this from a design problem, is it a protection? Are the protections the problem? Is it the rules? How do you think about clearing out all of the underbrush so you can really get to reform here?

April Harding It absolutely is an institutional design problem, and that’s the way we’re thinking about it. We also think that the protections and the processes and the statutes that allow employees to do things like take medical leave or get a reasonable accommodation are super important. And in fact, in the same way that being able to effectively fire someone is actually really good for morale overall — because you don’t have people sort of dragging on the productivity of the high performers — the people who are using these processes as loopholes, overusing the protections in the wrong way, creates a lot of noise that makes it harder for people who really are entitled to and need those things to get an effective resolution to their issue. So we believe strongly that those are important and we want them to be more transparent and more efficient so that we can use them the way they are intended. It’s not necessarily the intent behind the rules, but clearing out the underbrush, as you said, is going to require some statutory and regulatory tweaking. Because what has happened is the thing that happens almost every time that we as a society decide to try something: We have the best intentions, we outline it the way that we expect it to work, we create a policy, we create guidelines for how to implement that policy. And then humans do human-ing, and we find out that it’s not going to work exactly as we envisioned it. This is a moment where we can look back at how the policy differs from the theory and the practice differs from both the policy and the theory, and talk about addressing what have become loopholes in that policy and theory when it reaches the areas of practice. So some of that is just redesigning process. Maureen talked about how complex the process is; a large part of that’s because there’s not just one. So just as one example, making one single, unified process that doesn’t allow for the opaqueness that results from every individual agency and bureau and work unit having their own additional process is a way to retain the idea of the original policy, but do a pretty significant change to all of that complexity that has arisen from it.

Terry Gerton Maureen, there are a lot of specific recommendations in the report, and they’re all important. But one of the things that strikes me about reforming something like this is every stakeholder that you want to bring to the table has something they want to protect, something they maybe aren’t willing to give up on, because they represent that protection or they represent that authority. Let me ask you two questions. One, who needs to be around the table to actually get this to the point where it could be implemented? And where are the points of friction that you think, somebody’s going to go to the mat for this, how are we going to deal with that?

Maureen Klovers  I think it takes, first of all, more voices like ours saying, this isn’t just an academic exercise, and it’s apolitical. I think that’s really important, that folks who were in nonpartisan positions saw this on the ground, and these are the challenges. We kind of break our recommendations into those that need to be implemented by Congress, where we’re looking at like an overhaul to those post-removal processes, like the Merit Systems Protection Board — really Congress needs to take that up. We’ve had some really good discussions in the Senate on that, and I think there’s a lot of interest. On the Senate side, it would be the HSGAC, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. On the House side, it would the House Oversight Committee. So I think Congress needs to lead, and that’s also something that we’re finding — it was the first branch in the Constitution, it really should be the first branch and it should reassert itself. And that will also avoid some of these wild partisan swings,  like Trump 1 had an EO about this, and then Biden repealed it and had his own EO, and then the minute Trump 2 came in they repealed the Biden EO. It makes it really hard to plan for the long term as a fed. I think we need something on a much more bipartisan basis. So those are the key players in Congress. I think most of the unions are very concerned about removing protections for federal workers, and understandably so. I mean, this is a sensitive moment, right? And they would say, well, we need more protections, not less, look what happened with DOGE. But what I think we would say to that is, first of all, understood, right? I mean, I was DOGE’d myself. I was fired and rehired and I took the DRP. So we’re sensitive to that. But the fact is, with all these protections on the book, DOGE still happened. And part of the reason it happened is, well, first of all, they didn’t worry about what was actually in this statute at all. But beyond that, I think public opinion gave them some cover. Because it’s very interesting if you look at the moment DOGE was coming in, most Americans polled were in favor of DOGE, because they were in favor of the concept of efficiency and effectiveness. And Partnership for Public Service did a survey early in 2025 and found, you know, two-thirds of Americans thought the government was corrupt and 61% thought the government was wasteful. So there was a general desire to fix things among the American public. But then you go a couple months into the future and NBC News and others are reporting, you know, 60% of Americans disapprove of DOGE. So people agree with the concept, they just don’t agree with how it was implemented. I think if unions and others just want to roll back the clock to 2024, they’re misreading this moment and this opportunity for change.

April Harding  I just want to add that when we think about what We the Doers brings to that conversation, we’re talking about the entrenched interests and the different parties that have to resolve. A core part of our theory of change and how we’re approaching this work is that the ground truth and the voices of people who are implementing the policy is critical to ground and contextualize those conversations. Because when you get into the nitty gritty of negotiating how policy is going to roll out, it’s very easy to forget that there’s even a problem, or what problem you’re solving. I work in technology most of the time, and this is a constant refrain. We get into feature-level details. We’re talking about check boxes and form fields. And sometimes it’s helpful to pause and zoom out and say, what problem are we solving for the people who use this? The users of these policies are federal managers, and being able to consistently be the voice that returns to, “that idea makes sense, but here’s how it falls apart in practice,” and providing that ground truth in the conversation can continue to ground it in, “there is a problem here,” which we can forget sometimes. I think that’s a really important part of how we hope to move this forward.

Terry Gerton So let’s stick with that for a minute, April. And when I look at the list of recommendations and anytime you start on a reform effort, this might be the exception, but the normal rule is nobody gets everything they’re asking for, right? So within your list, what would you hope would be the first reform that we would go after and who would have to lead that conversation? April, you first and then Maureen.

April Harding It’s so hard to prioritize because really for this to work, all of the pieces of it have to work together. But I will say the foundation of reform has to be the process and the measurement. If we don’t get that right, then the other things will be subsumed into the bureaucratic machine and will not sustain. So formalizing a single consistent, transparent process so that everyone understands what is supposed to happen is going to be critical, and then measuring the activity so that we can have meaningful conversations about whether or not it’s working. We propose some specific metrics, like how long it takes to fire someone and what happens when someone goes on a PIP — those sorts of things have to be measured to have a meaningful, ongoing conversation about iterating on that.

Maureen Klovers  I think that’s right. I do think I want to end on a positive note. I think one of our recommendations, though, is probably the most likely to have legs. And that’s because I’ve heard a lot of discussions in the community; there seems to be broad agreement about consolidating the post-removal process, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for federal government employees and the Office of Special Counsel. And some have even thrown in, for federal employees, the Federal Labor Relations Board. We don’t include that in our report, but there’s a lot of agreement around that. And I think the way that it could get done is in legislation, but also the important thing to get unions and others on board is we need to reassert the independence of the Merit Systems Protection Board or the successor agency that comes next. As everyone probably knows, after Trump vs. Slaughter, which involved not the MSPB but another independent agency, the Supreme Court decided that in most cases, independent agencies really report to the executive, and he can change the appointees at will or remove them at will. So we say that there needs to be a successor, but it needs to either be moved into the legislative or the judicial branch to make it truly independent. So I think that’s a basis on which there could be a bipartisan deal.