The War on Excellence

Progress depends on leaders who raise the bar

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

This week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of senior military leaders to a meeting in Quantico so he could lecture them about setting and meeting higher standards.

I watched the Secretary’s speech, and then I looked at the photo above. I thought about the journey each of these individuals had taken throughout their lives to end up in those seats. How many years they’d served. How many challenges and hardships they’d overcome to earn each promotion and each medal. The sacrifices they’d made, the opportunities they’d passed up—for more money, for predictability, for safety. After lives of dedicated service, they were called in from their posts across the globe so that the Secretary of Defense could tell them that he didn’t want to see any more “fat generals and admirals,” to which he added, “no more beardos.” And this was the more respectful and coherent of the speeches they heard that day. It was an insulting display and a waste of time for people with much better things to do.

The irony is that Hegseth’s speech about standards was part and parcel of the administration’s hostility toward excellence. They put unqualified people in positions of power, from Hegseth to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Kash Patel, down to the staff at DOGE. They try to remove qualified people—the economist who ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics because they were embarrassed by jobs data, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors because they were desperate to boost the economy, and now an executive at Microsoft because of investigations into the President’s misconduct while she was a senior Justice Department official. And they lower the bar everywhere—for example by taxing high-skilled immigration. Together, these actions will have a profound chilling effect. Under this leadership, why would talented people from around the world come to the United States to make their careers? Why would capable Americans ever enter public service if it might put their families and their livelihoods at risk?

Perhaps the most under-appreciated attack on excellence is their indiscriminate work against inclusion programs, typically called DEI, which extends beyond the federal government to the law firms, universities, businesses, and other organizations the administration strongarms. To the extent that inclusion is used to lower standards, I’m all for ending it. As someone who has hired at major companies, that hasn’t been my experience.

The consulting firm where I worked, BCG, hired me out of a legal career, without an MBA or significant business experience. As they competed to hire talent, they realized that people without a business background might nonetheless have high aptitude for the work; they could hire lawyers, doctors, and PhDs outside of the traditional pool and train them. Hiring inclusively is based on a similar insight. There are people who have raw ability and valuable perspectives, but whose backgrounds kept them from opportunities that would have looked good on a resume. I know those people, starting with the brilliant kids that I taught in New York, who I’m certain would have gone further than me given the same opportunities. Inclusion is a way to find and develop that talent. Instead, the administration is working to force the government, academia, and the private sector into a childishly simple idea of “merit” that will waste capability, creativity, and even genius. Equity is a valuable goal, but excellence is what I worry most about in the assault on inclusion.

I care deeply about excellence because it is essential to the progress I want to see. In research, in business, in government, in education, and in the armed forces, low standards lead to delay and therefore have human costs. We should be finding and training the most capable people—from every neighborhood in America, and from around the world—and making room for them to do their best work. Unfortunately, this administration is giving us the opposite of what we need, as they always do. They say they want free speech, and they end up censoring; they say they want security, and they make people feel less safe. Now, the Secretary of Defense lectures vastly more accomplished men and women on the importance of high standards while personifying an administration intent on lowering the bar.

We can’t afford any more of this.

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