Bah Humbug to Public Service : Government isn’t a growth industry, and Generation X knows it.

This time, the pied piper was supposed to play the saxophone.

Bill Clinton, the first U.S. president born after World War II, was expected to inspire thousands of young Americans to join his crusade to reform and reinvigorate government. George Stephanopolous himself was to be living proof that bureaucrats could wear Armani blazers to work and order decaf lattes at the White House mess. Big Government was going to become hip again. But it didn’t happen.

Interns at the Clinton White House don’t want to return for full-time jobs after they graduate from college. Princeton University is worried about how it will fill seats at its Woodrow Wilson School of Public Administration (total cost of a master’s degree: $63,860). There aren’t enough high-paying government slots to interest students at campus career centers.

The thrill is gone.

Cause for alarm? Hardly. If Generation X is filled with young men and women who would choose a career making movies or writing software over a career pushing paper in Washington, that’s indicative that America’s love affair with big government is ending, and it’s cause for celebration, not alarm.

The United States is stuck with more government than it can afford, and a bipartisan consensus has been reached on the need to shrink bureaucracies, disband programs and departments and balance government budgets at every level. The good news is that government is no longer a growth industry. Even better, young Americans have figured out that government is a dead-end job and they’re seeking other opportunities.

There are exceptions. But there is nothing about public service that by itself inspires passion in young people. The agenda--the goal--is what matters most.

Frankly, I would question the judgment of a young idealist who thought she could learn more at the knee of Donna Shalala, the liberal U.S. health and human services secretary, than she could by working for the outspoken Eloise Anderson, director of California’s Department of Social Services. Shalala delays welfare reform; Anderson is more than the nation’s premier welfare reformer, she’s a revolutionary.

So if public service in the age of Clinton isn’t hip, don’t blame the troops, blame the general.

That said, there are a few things that could be done to make public service more rewarding for those men and women, young or old, who do choose government as a career.

We should make it easier for people to move between the private and public sectors freely. The standard career path in government is the long, slow climb from the typing pool to the front office, a sojourn of 25 years or longer. Hardly a formula for attracting the best and the brightest, who are disproportionately the young and the restless. We should also reward public servants based on merit. Gov. Pete Wilson banned automatic pay raises for his political appointees and is seeking to implement merit-based compensation for all state workers.

These two reforms will attract and retain smart, talented people to government service and discourage do-nothings.

Other cures are worse than the disease. Clinton aide Bowman Cutter suggests that government jobs don’t pay enough to attract the best young people. Nonsense. Dozens of White House aides make $100,000 per year or more. Sure, a Justice Department lawyer makes less than a partner at a major private firm, but that was as true when Bobby Kennedy was attorney general as it is today.

We can’t restore the public’s faith in government by making government salaries more attractive to Ivy League graduates. The answer instead is to make government smaller, less burdensome and more customer-oriented. There undoubtedly exists in this country a mindset that holds a government job to be inherently more admirable than a private sector job. That mindset generally also believes that a dollar reaches its highest and best use when spent by a government agency, and it’s a perspective that young Americans increasingly don’t share. Young people who seek to do good should look more closely at the immense personal contribution they can make as mentors and volunteers.

If Gen X is turned off by civil service and turned on instead by chemistry, music or digital animation, great.