I do not come at government from a place of hostility. I believe in public institutions. I believe in regulation when markets fail. I believe in the idea that a democratic state exists to serve its citizens. What I no longer believe is that the federal government is designed to treat people like customers. Anyone who has tried to navigate a federal agency knows the feeling. You submit a form. You wait. You receive a letter that answers none of your questions. You try to call. You reach a menu, then a voicemail, then a dead end. No one is being malicious. No one is trying to be unhelpful. But the system itself is not built around your experience.

That is the problem.

I come to this not as a theorist but as someone who spent 16 years as an elected state utility regulator—driving the dirt and dusty roads of Mississippi, sitting in town halls, community centers, and kitchens, listening to people talk about their power bills, their outages, their frustrations. In regulated industries, customer service is not a marketing slogan. It is a legal obligation. You cannot tell a customer to “shop elsewhere” for electricity. You are required to serve. And when people are unhappy, you hear it—face to face.

That experience changed how I see institutions. Systems either orient themselves around the people they exist to serve—or they drift inward, prioritizing process over outcomes. Washington, too often, has drifted inward.

The great political arguments of our time tend to revolve around the size of government: bigger or smaller, more programs or fewer. But most Americans do not experience government as a theory. They experience it as a transaction. A permit. A benefit. A rule. A grant. A compliance letter. A delay. And in those moments, the federal government does not behave like a service organization. It behaves like a bureaucracy designed to protect process, not solve problems. This is not about ideology. It is about design.

When people complain about government, they are often told they are being unrealistic. “This is complicated.” “There are rules.” “It takes time.” All of that can be true. But none of it explains why so many interactions with federal agencies feel designed to exhaust rather than assist.

The problem is not that federal employees are indifferent. It is that the system does not define success in terms of service to the public. In most agencies, what gets measured is compliance with procedure, adherence to statutory authority, budget execution, and risk avoidance. What rarely gets measured is how long it takes a person to get a clear answer; whether instructions are understandable; whether a case is resolved without multiple resubmissions; whether someone leaves the process better off—or simply more confused.

That is not a cultural accident. It is a management choice. You cannot build a service culture in an organization that never defines the public as its customer.

Anyone who has run a company knows the cost of bad customer experience. It shows up as lost clients, disputes, escalations, public backlash, and declining trust. Businesses do not obsess over response times, clarity, and follow-through because they are kinder than government. They do it because customers have choices.

I have seen what happens when service fails in the private sector: revenue drops, reputations suffer, and leaders are forced to change. Government does not face that discipline. People cannot choose a different tax authority, benefits office, or regulatory agency. The result is predictable. Institutions optimize for internal safety rather than external usefulness.

Again, this is not an indictment of public servants. It is a reality of how large organizations behave when they are not accountable for user experience. And it explains why so many federal processes feel designed for the convenience of the institution rather than the people navigating it.

We do not need a new department, a new program, or a new funding stream to fix this. We need to change what government believes its job is. Right now, too many agencies see their role as administering rules. What if they were required—structurally—to see their role as serving the public within the law? That shift in mindset would do more to rebuild trust than a hundred speeches. And it can begin with one immediate, concrete action.

The Proposal: A Federal Customer Service Standard

On Day One, a President should issue an Executive Order creating a Federal Customer Service Standard—a binding directive that redefines how agencies measure performance, manage employees, and interact with the public. Not a slogan. Not a pilot. A management framework.

Here is what it would do.

Define Who the Customer Is—in Plain English. Every federal agency would be required to answer one basic question: Who do you exist to serve? Not “We regulate X,” “We administer Y,” or “We oversee Z,” but: “We help veterans access benefits.” “We help small businesses comply with the law.” “We help communities build infrastructure.” This sounds simple. It is not. Organizations behave differently when they define their purpose in terms of people rather than procedures. If an agency cannot clearly state who its customer is, it cannot meaningfully improve how it treats them.

Measure What People Actually Experience. Every agency would publish a short, public-service dashboard: average response times; time to resolve applications or complaints; the share of cases resolved without resubmission; appeal or reversal rates; basic customer-satisfaction scores. Not buried in reports. Not written in bureaucratic language. Posted clearly and updated regularly. You cannot change behavior without measurement. And right now, the federal government barely measures the experience of the people who use it.

Tie Leadership Success to Service Outcomes. This is the heart of the reform. Senior executives and managers would have a portion of their evaluations—and therefore promotions and bonuses—tied to customer-service performance. Not just whether they stayed within budget. Not just whether they avoided mistakes. But whether their agency actually helps people navigate its processes. In every large organization, people do what they are rewarded for. Federal agencies are no different. If we want them to prioritize clarity, responsiveness, and resolution, we have to make those things part of how leaders are judged.

Install a “Customer Advocate” in Every Agency. Each agency would designate a senior-level Customer Advocate with direct access to the agency head. Their job would be to identify where people get stuck, break logjams between departments, flag rules that exist for internal convenience rather than public benefit, and recommend changes that reduce friction while staying within the law. Think of it as an internal voice for the public—someone whose job is to ask, “How can we make this easier on people?”

Require Plain Language and Clear Next Steps. Every notice, denial, or request for information would include a plain-English explanation of what happened, a clear statement of what the person can do next, and a real contact path for assistance. No more letters that cite a rule without telling you what it means for your life. This alone would change millions of daily interactions between citizens and their government.

Some will hear this and assume it is a critique of the public sector itself. It is not. This is about making government work better at what it already does. Regulation will still exist. Programs will still exist. Laws will still be enforced. But the default posture would shift from “administer the process” to “help the person through the process.” That is not ideological. It is managerial. And it is exactly how every high-performing organization—public or private—operates.

For most Americans, government is not experienced through speeches or policy debates. It is experienced through a permit that delays a construction job, a benefits application that disappears into a void, a regulatory letter no one will explain, or a grant process so opaque that only consultants can navigate it. These frictions have real costs: lost income, delayed projects, missed opportunities, wasted time. None of this shows up in the federal budget. But it shows up in people’s lives. A government that sees citizens as customers— rather than case numbers—would not eliminate every delay or dispute. But it would take responsibility for making the process navigable. That is what people are really asking for when they say they want government to “work.”

Washington often treats “helping people” and “supporting business” as opposing goals. In the real economy, they are usually the same goal. When government is slow, opaque, and unresponsive, working families pay in lost time and missed opportunities—but so do employers, contractors, entrepreneurs, and investors who are trying to build, hire, comply, and expand. Every unnecessary delay in a permit, every unclear regulatory instruction, every application that disappears into a procedural maze is not just a human frustration; it is an economic cost. It is a project postponed, a job not created, a bid not submitted, a loan not closed.

The people hurt most are not large corporations with in-house legal departments. They are small businesses, family operations, and local employers who do not have the time or money to navigate bureaucratic uncertainty. A federal government that treats the public as customers—clear in its communication, predictable in its processes, and accountable for results—does not weaken markets. It strengthens them. It lowers transaction costs. It reduces friction. It makes compliance understandable rather than adversarial. That is not deregulation. It is good administration. In the private sector, customer service is not charity; it is infrastructure for growth.

When government adopts the same discipline, it does not become “procorporate.” It becomes pro-functioning economy. Helping people move through public systems more easily is the same thing as helping businesses operate more efficiently. You do not have to choose between them.

An objection might be that government isn’t a business. Of course it isn’t. Government does not sell a product. It does not operate for profit. It cannot choose its customers. But that is precisely why it must be more deliberate about how it treats the people it serves. Markets impose discipline through competition. Government must impose discipline through management. If anything, the absence of competition makes service culture more important, not less.

An administration cannot fix every program overnight. But it can change the frame. A single Executive Order establishing a Federal Customer Service Standard would redefine how agencies think about their mission, change what gets measured, change what gets rewarded, and—over time—change how government behaves. Not through rhetoric. Through incentives. That is how real reform happens.

Trust in government will not be restored by slogans or new offices. It will be rebuilt one interaction at a time—when a person gets a clear answer, when a business receives timely guidance, when a family is helped rather than processed. People do not need government to be perfect. They need it to be human.

After 16 years listening to Mississippians on front porches, in boardrooms, and in rural courthouses, I learned something simple: people will tolerate complexity if they believe the system is trying to help them. They lose faith when it feels designed to push them away. We do not need to shrink government to make it work better. We need to redesign it around the people it exists to serve.

The customer is missing from Washington. It is time to put them back at the center.