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Civil Servants Are Not the Villains Here [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-31
I just submitted the following proposed OP ED to the Philadelphia Inquirer. As a retired civil servant, I am appalled by the Trump administration’s treatment of the federal work force. Rather than simply complain among each other here, I believe it is important to resist administration lies in mainstream news sources. Civil servants make our Government work. They do so in a non-political way. They do not deserve to be called villains.
Civil Servants Are Not the Villains Here
A recent Inquirer article by Ariana Perez-Castells and Fallon Roth addressed the anxiety among federal workers caused by recent actions by the Office of Personnel Management (OMP). That anxiety is neither accidental nor productive. In the words of Russel Vought, who is the nominee for Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (and OMB director under the prior Trump administration), “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected . . . When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
The American civil servants that Mr. Vought and others in the new administration view as worthless bureaucrats and villains are in fact the people who keep our country safe and who provide essential services to our families, friends and neighbors; moreover, they are our families, friends and neighbors.
Notably, many federal workers, if not most, could be earning more money in the private sector. I am a retired Navy attorney who spent over 30 years in Philadelphia as a career civil servant. When I was 20 years into my federal career, a neighbor graduated from law school and was hired with no experience by a Philadelphia law firm at a salary that was $20,000 higher than I was then earning. That is not unusual. People that choose government service generally do not do so primarily for the money. They want to work for the good guys. They want to do something meaningful. They are proud to work in the service to their country. Also, historically, the federal civil service has been family friendly. E.g. you could use your paid leave to take your kids to the doctor or go to their sports events without worrying about it impacting your employment. There was generally some flexibility in work schedules, and civil service employment historically offered a better level of job security than in the private sector. These features were viewed as a reasonable trade-off for the lower compensation.
Political activism does not factor into why workers choose to be civil servants. The new administration portrays career civil servants as “the deep state” filled with liberal activists whom they view as intent on imposing their “woke” ideology to obstruct its agenda. That has not been my experience. Virtually everyone I worked with viewed their job as advancing the stated mission of their agency without a political agenda. They diligently complied with the laws and regulations that are applicable to their agencies. (That included the Hatch Act which limits political activities for civil service employees.) In all the time I worked for the Navy, I never saw any civil servant actively advancing a political agenda or ideology on the job. In fact, I was unaware of the political views or affiliations of most of my fellow civil servants. They only wanted to do their job well without political interference.
Quite simply, there is no “deep state” among the career civil service. There is, however, an increasingly dangerous and reckless component of the Federal Government that is intent on radically and rapidly reducing the size and scope of Government regardless of the impact on regular citizens. These efforts are being implemented entirely by ideologically driven political appointees, not civil servants. Their efforts to intimidate and traumatize personnel are often referred to within the government as efforts to “excite attrition,” i.e., get workers to voluntarily quit or retire. Those efforts include taking away benefits such as flexible work schedules, threatening reductions in force (lay-offs), relocating their jobs, and various other efforts to reduce employee morale. However, it is these career civil servants who collectively hold the knowledge necessary for the smooth operation of our government, and this generalized effort to chase them from service (or make them hate their jobs if they stay) is both foolish and counterproductive. Once institutional knowledge goes out the door with experienced workers, it takes decades to rebuild the previous level of professional competence within an organization. As such, any efforts to downsize government should be done with a scalpel and not the meat ax that is currently being employed, and competent employees should be encouraged, not intimidated. Employees should treated with dignity and respect and not falsely painted as villains. Still, it appears that the new administration would rather demonize and traumatize its career employees than empower them and motivate them to effectively and efficiently perform their agencies’ missions. That’s no way to run a country!
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