recur—reinforces trust. FEMA’s long journey since the disaster of its response to the 2005 disaster of Hurricane Katrina shows the power of resilience. Because of strong leadership sustained across Republican and Democratic administrations, there’s been a consistent pattern in natural disasters: the dog that didn’t bark. There have been few tales of an unresponsive, inefficient FEMA. Building trust is now a central part of the FEMA training curriculum. Make it simple and reliable. We’d expect that people want their experience with government to be fast, and that’s true. But they value simplicity and reliability even more. In fact, speed ranks only third or fourth in the public’s priorities. They want to know what they will get and when they’ll get it. After the pandemic, there was an explosion of travel, and the processing time for passports slipped. Along the way, however, the State Department posted the estimated time. It’s now returned to pre-COVID levels, and travelers can find the current estimated time for routine and expedited processing times on the department’s website. Share the tale. Performance wonks (with me at the head of the parade) love to wade around in the performance data. Performance.Gov has become a first-class resource. Much performance data, however, is prepared by performance wonks for other performance wonks. It doesn’t create the lexicon in which reporters and members of Congress travel. Even worse, there’s a public policy version of the old “if it bleeds, it leads” approach to news coverage: bad news stories drive out the good. The statistical measures are essential for tracking the long-term progress of management initiatives, but stories are essential for communicating that progress to broader audiences. The VA, for example, launched its VSignals program to collect feedback from vets on their care and wring out bad experiences from its programs. Asking vets what they like and what they don’t allowed the VA to increase trust from 55% in 2016 to 80% in 2024. “I don’t have customers.” Oh yes, you do! The response by many federal managers to these customer service lessons often is that they don’t have customers, so none of this matters to them. They couldn’t be more wrong. The central purpose of the government is to deliver value to the people, and every single federal employee has a role in making that happen. (If that’s not true for any employee, then they ought to be fired.) There’s the famous story—if it isn’t true, it should be—about the NASA administrator walking down a hallway and bumping into someone carrying a pail and a mop. “What’s your job?” the administrator asked. “Helping put a man on the moon,” the person replied. Everyone in an agency plays a role in its mission, and everyone needs to know—and perfect—that role. Tweak the conversations. Federal leaders need to improve their conversations: not only to explain to everyone outside the agency what value they create, but also to ensure that everyone inside the agency knows the role they play in creating that value. The government reform movement has often lost the importance of this internal communication. That needs to a centerpiece of the next presidential management agenda. As we frame employee engagement, this is what employees need to be engaged in: understanding their role in building a more effective government from the inside out so that it works better from the outside in. We certainly don’t want to go backwards on the progress we’ve made through previous management agendas. But Americans want to know that they’re appreciated and respected for the taxes they pay, that government is devoted to connecting with them in trustworthy and transparent ways, and that government gives them what they want, need, and deserve. This is what the pivot from a focus on outcomes to results means.