The Departments Most at Risk

Where Political Saturation Has Made the Mission Fragile — and What We Do About It

Campaign Briefing: Decoupling Partisan Politics from Governance

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

March 30, 2026

I. Not All Agencies Are Created Equal

We have spent the past week describing the problem of political appointments in operational roles. Today we get specific. Because not all federal departments are equally exposed to this problem — and the ones that are most exposed are, not coincidentally, the ones that touch the most people.

When you map the density of political appointees across the Cabinet, a clear pattern emerges. The departments with the highest ratio of political to career leadership are the departments with the most complex, most mission-critical, and most publicly visible service obligations. That correlation is not accidental. It is the predictable result of a system that has, over decades, allowed political control to accumulate precisely where the work is most consequential — and therefore most useful as a lever of power.

II. What Makes an Agency Fragile

Stability in government is not a feeling. It is a set of measurable conditions. Career executives, protected under the law from politically motivated removal, provide the continuity those conditions require. That protection does not shield them from accountability for poor performance. It shields the public from the disruption of having functional leadership replaced every time the political winds shift.

When a department loses its senior operational leadership every four years — sometimes every two, when midterm-driven policy reversals accelerate the turnover — the cost is not abstract. Programs stall. Contracts go unmonitored. Institutional knowledge evaporates. New appointees spend their first year learning what their predecessors spent a decade mastering. And the people waiting for services pay that cost in delays, errors, and gaps they had no hand in creating.

This is mission fragility. It does not announce itself. It accumulates quietly, and it surfaces as failure when the conditions are worst and the need is greatest.

III. The Ten Departments Where the Problem Is Most Acute

The departments with the highest concentration of political appointees in operational roles — and therefore the most urgent need for career conversion — are Health and Human Services, Transportation, Interior, Commerce, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, Agriculture, Education, and Veterans Affairs.

These ten departments collectively administer the vast majority of direct federal services that Americans encounter in their daily lives. They are also the departments most frequently subjected to top-to-bottom leadership replacement following elections. That is not a coincidence. Political control has been prioritized over mission continuity in exactly the places where mission continuity matters most.

Consider what these agencies actually do. Health and Human Services administers Medicare, Medicaid, and the public health infrastructure this country depends on. Veterans Affairs serves the men and women who carried the uniform. Transportation oversees the safety systems governing how millions of Americans move every day. These are not abstract bureaucratic functions. They are the government's direct obligations to the people who fund it.

IV. What Mission Fragility Looks Like on the Ground

Mission fragility rarely looks like a crisis from the outside. It looks like a backlog. A delayed inspection. A benefit payment that doesn't arrive on the schedule the recipient was counting on. A long-term infrastructure project that loses eighteen months of progress when the team overseeing it turns over.

I have seen the equivalent in clinical settings. A unit that loses experienced charge nurses to a restructuring doesn't collapse. It just gets slower, shakier, and more prone to the kind of errors that experienced hands would have caught automatically. The patients don't always know why their care got worse. They just know it did.

Federal agencies work the same way. The expertise that prevents errors, catches problems early, and keeps programs functioning through the inevitable turbulence of a complex operating environment — that expertise lives in the people who have been doing the work. When those people are replaced by political rotation, the expertise goes with them.

V. Where Reform Begins

These ten departments will be the priority targets for the Career Leadership Reform initiative described in the briefings earlier this week. They are where the operational need is greatest, where career conversion yields the most immediate stability benefit, and where the public will feel the improvement most directly.

This is not about reducing accountability. It is about ensuring the people running these programs are there because they can do the work — and that they will still be there next year, building on what they learned rather than starting over.

Government that forgets its mission cannot serve the people it was built for. We intend to fix that — department by department, position by position, until the mission is secure.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN