How do we align the incentives of government employees with the goals of taxpayers?

Not, as Michael Barone has opined, by giving labor unions the ability "to elect [their] own boss."

What would FDR have thought about this?

"The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," he said in the 1930s. A public employee strike, he said, "looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable."

...The problem is that, as Roosevelt understood, public employee unions' interests are directly the opposite of those of taxpayers. Public employee unions want government to be more expensive and government employees to be less accountable.