There are plenty of people here in Washington who are content to try and make the government-owned trains run on time, and of course there's nothing intrinsically wrong with efficiency. But we'd prefer privatizing the railroad, and getting the government out of businesses where it doesn't belong. Nonetheless, the federal government has legitimate core functions, and ensuring that the civil service bureaucracy carries out those functions effectively is an important public policy goal. I was a non-career member of the Senior Executive Service for nearly eight years during the Reagan Administration, and believe strongly that political and career civil servants are both very important to the functioning of government in a constitutional republic. And I believe that a number of the reforms you are considering would highlight their distinct roles in ways that would serve the public well.
Political appointees are, by design, transient members of the federal work force.
They hold their positions because they share the President's views on public policy. They are willing and able to articulate those views to Congress and to the public on the President's behalf, and work to see that they are implemented at the agency level insofar as law and regulation permit. When the occupant of the White House changes, they must change, too. Career civil servants perform a very different role. They implement policy, rather than make it.