1. They are pre-vetted. They all have undergone background checks and/or obtained security clearances. They’re colleagues you can trust.
2. They understand brand management. Their brand was the United States of America, and they served it with pride and distinction. Think what they could do for your brand.
3. They are all about delivering on the mission. Nearly every fed contributes directly to a mission that impacts citizens’ health, livelihood, security, or safety. For feds, 99% is a failure rate. Your KPIs will never look so good.
4. Bureaucracy is their superpower. It’s easy to be a disrupter, a wrecking ball, or an outlier. But they will use the system to serve citizens peerlessly (“citizen” is what they call a customer). You have to be good to think creatively inside the box.
5. They are scary good at risk management. Everything they do is under spotlights from 360º: high risk, high visibility. And they know they get one swing at one pitch, and have to hit a home run, every time. So they know how to do their homework before stepping up to the plate.
6. Scope, scale, and complexity. The kind of work feds do has few equals outside of government and military. The nature of the projects and programs they work on is massive: multiple internal and external stakeholders; national or global impact area; asset profiles exceeding many companies’ market cap. (cf. #5)
7. They’re leaders. They know the difference between authority and leadership, and they model good leadership by example, to peers, to junior employees, and, of course, to direct reports.
8. They’re loyal. If your organization has a true mission, and your leadership team projects integrity, you will get a stalwart mission-partner for as long as your mission exists.

—Dr. Bryce Carpenter,
former Chief of Staff, USAID (2024-2025) and
U.S. Department of Education (2021-2022)