About the Event

​To celebrate Public Service Recognition Week, join us for a briefing on Departure Dialogues, a report that documents what fifty career civil servants want Congress to know about where its laws break down and demonstrates a model that Congress can use to “close the feedback loop” in the future.

​Agenda

• ​Explore the Departure Dialogues reports

• ​Hear from participants about why they wanted to share their experiences with Congress

• ​Learn about how this model could be applied to your legislative and oversight work

This event will take place on Tuesday, May 5 from 12 - 2:30 PM in Canon 330.

About Departure Dialogues

Career civil servants spend years learning how government programs actually work: what the law says, what implementation actually requires, and where the gap between the two creates real-world problems. In early 2025, a historic number of employees left the federal government, taking that knowledge with them. Departure Dialogues was built to capture what they knew before it disappeared.

Departure Dialogues was a nonpartisan initiative launched by POPVOX Foundation, the Niskanen Center, Civil Service Strong, the Partnership for Public Service, and the Foundation for American Innovation to create a structured pathway for that knowledge to be preserved and made useful, and demonstrate the potential value of new technologies and tools for large-scale qualitative outreach for future Congressional oversight.

Participants were guided through ten focused questions covering program challenges, successes, and inefficiencies with direct relevance to Congressional oversight and policy. Submissions were accepted as video or audio recordings or written responses, with flexible attribution options including full anonymity. All submissions were reviewed before being archived in a publicly accessible database for use by Congressional committees and researchers.

This was not a whistleblower platform or a vehicle for partisan grievance. The initiative was focused exclusively on actionable, nonpartisan information about implementation realities — gaps and frustrations that frequently persisted across multiple administrations regardless of party.

The project served three audiences. For departing federal employees and contractors, it offered a respected and structured outlet for expertise that might otherwise go undocumented. For Congress, it produced a source of candid, ground-level intelligence about program implementation that sits outside the rigid feedback loops of agency self-reporting. For the American public, it offered a demonstration of civil servants' continued commitment to improving government function even amid an uncertain and turbulent transition.

Learn more and browse the findings at popvox.org/departure.