FEI gets DOA
A once vaunted insitution joins the choir invisible
News of the demise of the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville arrived on Monday and unexpectedly. What happened there? What sins were committed?"
According to the executive order signed by President Trump, “bureaucratic leadership over the past half-century has led to Federal policies that enlarge and entrench the Washington, D.C., managerial class, a development that has not benefited the American family. The Federal Executive Institute should therefore be eliminated to refocus Government on serving taxpayers, competence, and dedication to our Constitution, rather than serving the Federal bureaucracy.”
Those are different thoughts welded together to make a point that makes little sense, but welcome to 2025. It doesn’t take much for a federal agency to run afoul of the new mentality. Maybe someone at the Cato Institute called and the FEI hung up the phone on them? That alone would probably do it.
The Federal Executive Institute has sat on a rise above Route 29, just north of Barracks Road Shopping Center, since the Johnson Administration. Its white arches frame the entrance to what, in 1951, was first opened as the Thomas Jefferson Inn and, as a result, there’s a pool.
Pools were important as my brother and I were growing up. No hotels without a pool. Period.
I knew that road in the 1950s well because it carried us to Amherst and our grandparents. Headed south (there was no bypass then), you would see the hotel – there were fewer trees then – to the right up the slope. The shopping center arrived later and all that land, as I recall, sat within Albemarle County. It would be annexed into Charlottesville in the 1960s.
There was another visual landmark just down Rt. 29 (Emmet St., if you prefer) past Barracks Road and on the left. Lambeth Field. It was UVA’s football field before Scott Stadium came along.
In the 1950s, there’s was nothing then along Rt. 29 to obscure the field from the road and it sported the dramatic Lambeth Colonnades. It was quite impressive. I would see that and think, well, that’s where the Romans have their games.
In point of fact, UVA defeated Vanderbilt 34-0 in 1913 right there and it was a record margin. “Orange and blue warriors hammer Commodores into a pulp,” ran one headline. Go Hoos.
William A. Lambeth, for what it’s worth, was superintendent of grounds and regarded as the “father of athletics” at Virginia. The facility named for him – ranked as one of the finest in the South -- had pavilions at either end, the southern one reserved for the home team. You could get 8,000 people into Lambeth Field and on that day, in 1913, Vanderbilt obviously should have called in sick.
I digress, of course, but the FEI facility became no less a fixture in Charlottesville. It stood for serious people doing serious work about serious subjects. And, that, pretty much describes my in-depth understanding of what constituted the FEI’s activities.
I would guess that the FEI was still doing serious work, but I would have no way of knowing.
Which underlines the problem. If a government entity’s public justification doesn’t immediately leap to mind and do so on a contemporary basis -- if it is not broadly known, obvious and compelling -- then look out. In this moment of time, under the new realm, it may be vulnerable.
While some may assume enduring durability, that hardly matters much anymore. A new day has dawned. Someone recently out of high school shows up on short notice and throws everyone in the joint on the defensive. Soon you’re reading a press release about your sudden demise.
Here's what the Federal Executive Institute says about itself:
We believe great leaders can transform and improve government to best serve the American people. Whether you are an aspiring leader, new supervisor, or seasoned executive, our career-spanning, multilevel leadership curriculum guides you through development and career growth – for your current role or the one you aspire to.
The Federal Executive Institute (FEI) curriculum is built upon OPM’s Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs) and competencies that represent guideposts on the path to career and organizational success. Grounded in the latest public and private research, our programs and services help transform people and organizations, focusing on contemporary challenges through the lens of government.
So, the FEI can do all this – does much more, in fact, or has -- but the plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
I am paraphrasing from a bit by John Cleese and Michael Palin and here’s one from a famous film: The Bridge Over the River Kwai.
I’m talking about the ending, where most everyone who topped the credits are lying dead in the river, and actor James Donald stares at the carnage and exclaims, “Madness. Madness.”
So it must feel at the vaunted Federal Executive Institute.
Vaunted it was. It has long preserved a certain aura of gravity about it. They used to do a program called, “Leadership for a Democratic Society” and it was explained thusly:
As they prepare to graduate, participants also work on a Leadership Challenge to present to their organization back home. This activity helps executives synthesize their learning around four key leadership questions: What drives them as executives? What are their organization's core values and purpose? Where do they want to lead their organization in facing the challenges of the future? What further personal development do they need to make their vision of the future a reality?
No more questions. Be gone. The time for seriousness is seriously kaput.
Level-headedness does not appear to count for much and I have that nearly first-hand. Discretion obliges vagueness, but if what I’m told is only slightly true about one federal agency’s confrontation with one angry, Trump Munchkin, then the harm being done is considerable. The Munchkin simply appeared at the door, demanded answers and then started screaming. Trump has deputized brats.
The FEI, I’ve been told, was often about renewal for talented, committed people worn down by the work they do. These people, the way the argument went, needed to be motivated and supported and encouraged. Money was not the thing driving them.
O.K., I buy all that.
But let’s, for fun, do the politics. Democrats imagine themselves to be the defenders of the people who labor within these vital federal institutions. They will step into the gap.
They should watch themselves. The “defenders” ran out on behalf of the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) and it became immediately clear that the noisiest among them had not a clue about the agency’s priorities, results and general habits.
That is unwise in politics. Before you decide to take a bullet for the team, you might wish to first make a few inquiries. As for the agency itself, you should really have your defense up and running being loaded into the tumbril well before for the trip to the Place del la Concorde – or what was once known as the Place de la Révolution.
What are the arguments for closing the Federal Executive Institute?
It served its own ends. It’s been ineffective. The metrics do not support the expenditures. The FEI only worked to enlarge and entrench the Washington, D.C. managerial class. And, according to one news account, the FEI sits in what used to be a luxury hotel.
That last bit is a hoot. The Thomas Jefferson Inn was pleasant and adequate. No one listed it as a luxury facility, the pool notwithstanding.
But those other objections, if they’ve been floating around out there, needed to be aggressively countered. As old King Hamlet was said to have done: “He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.” In that era and this one, you have to smote now and then. Vigorously.
The larger problem is that Virginia provides home for many, many federal things.
We sort of knew this was coming, but it’s been unsettling nonetheless. Gov. Glenn’s Youngkin’s administration has sought to downplay the potential damage to Virginia from Trump administration demands for greater efficiency and wholesale bureaucratic reductions.
It’s just not an easy argument to make. Virginia ranks among the top recipients of federal funds and often wins the prize on a per capita basis. Pull the financial rug out from federal spending and watch Virginia perform a unplanned back somersault. In my end of the state, Hampton Roads, an estimated 60,000 workers are federal civilian employees.
Civilian. Then there’s the uniformed crowd and, well, that’s us all over, too. From Naval Air Station Oceana to whatever they do (don’t ask) at Camp Perry, Hampton Roads and the Pentagon are fully melded.
Go up to Northern Virginia and you find another whole vastness. Would there even be a northern Virginia without the federal government? Not really.
The fact is that Virginians have been in close proximity to the military for generations. The joke was that the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce posted someone to Cape Henry just to make sure an aircraft carrier didn’t get away for the wrong reason – like being relocated to Florida (a terrible idea).
It’s not just the number of people on the federal payroll (roughly a quarter million) who reside in Virginia. It’s also the money they individually spend and the sales tax receipts. After that, comes procurement and, good grief, it piles up into billions and billions.
So there’s no playing games with this stuff. If the Trump administration whacks federal spending, Virginia will say, “ouch.”
All of which suggests Virginia should brace itself.
Do you remember Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 film, “The Limey,” with Terrance Stamp? There’s a great moment when Stamp’s character screams directly into the camera, “I am coming!”
That’s Donald right now, looking southward out over the Potomac.
What do you do? Or, more to the point, what should Democrats do?
Not panic – that would be step one – and then do some measured thinking. That often appears un-instinctive for today’s Democrats. They scream and say excited things, instead. They hop up and down. There’s lots and lots of hopping.
This is the thing about political life that appears hard for many people to do, regardless of their affiliation. They fail to adequately self-assess. They apparently don’t own any mirrors. They don’t get up in the morning and say to themselves, “O.K., how I handle this, what I do in response to bad news, is going to matter to what I get done.”
No, they just start bellowing and later wonder why that didn’t get advance the cause. Hello, Elizabeth Warren.
It’s okay to have a plan. It’s okay to make choices. As the old Napoleonic adage goes, “He who defends everything, defends nothing.”