Federal Employees – Hard-Working Human Beings or Lazy Villains?

  OR

Federal Employees – Hard-Working Human Beings or Lazy Villains?

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

Spoiler alert: My mother, my father, my stepfather, my uncle and my son were all federal employees who worked their butts off, both in their Washington, D.C. HQs and, when posted overseas, worked even longer hours. Each was specially trained, often highly-educated with advanced degrees and usually multilingual. The more senior they got, the longer their work hours. I admit to having a summer job at a US embassy between high school and college; I had to get to the local Beirut (Lebanon) airport by 5 am on Sundays to deliver and pick-up materials shipped to and from the local US embassy… and no, that did not generate extra pay or result in being credited against the rest of my work week. I met the US aircraft on the tarmac.

When my stepfather was on overseas assignment (which included the Austro-Hungarian border during the Soviet invasion in 1956), stints in Bombay (now Mumbai), Beirut, Antwerp (Belgium), and Saigon (Vietnam, during the War), he was on call 24/7. He spoke French, German, Hungarian and Hindi fluently. My mother spoke Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian (her native tongue), French, German and grammatically perfect English. My father (who worked as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill) was fluent in Italian, German, Hungarian and French. I once was fluent in French, German and could swear like a trooper in Arabic (and carry on a limited conversation in that language). My son was an investment officer at the US Department of Energy, an MBA/CFA, who spoke fluent math and was (is) an expert in business analytics. We just weren’t used to lazy, under-educated government sloths. And for those who worked with us who were in the military or the intelligence agencies, long hours were the absolute rule! Pride, commitment & dignity!!!

So, I watched with horror the demonization of the entire federal bureaucracy as if these civil servants did not care or did the least they needed to do to get by. Most do not work the DOGE “nerd ours,” but their efficiency at their jobs always impressed me. Through my experience with federal employees, most were certainly able to secure better-paying jobs in the private sector but chose public services as an honorable profession, tenured with job security and a good chance for advancement. The majority of federal bureaucrats were veterans, who simply wanted to continue their commitment to government service. My stepfather, who worked his way up to Army major working in the Office of Strategic Services, which led many to continue with the CIA or the Department of State… chose the latter and also transferred to the Air Force (newly formed under President Harry Truman) as a Lt Colonel in the Reserves.

Over the years, I came to realize that the federal bureaucracy created both legacy standards, continuity between and among political changes and literally served as a shock absorber to prevent political whimsey and unworkable political decisions that would have unraveled government efficiency, reliability and the predictability required of international relations. As you might guess, our allies came to count on a self-sustaining military and bureaucratic consistency to keep our alliances healthy yet flexible. What I am now witnessing is our allies’ and veterans’ worst nightmare: the hyper-accelerating destruction of our political state, the breaking of pledges and treaties that held most of our world on a steady path, one that fostered the greatest economic success the world had ever seen. What is left is a combination of oligarchs’ grabbing power, the destabilization of decades and decades of bipartisan policies and practices, and destruction without a plan for what was to replace the decimation of America.

We’ve been here before, even in my lifetime, but our wayward self-destructive urges were tempered by sober bureaucrats and stopped by a commitment to ethics and integrity that seems long gone today. It was the 1950s, and the “red scare” (the fear of the infiltration of communists into to every aspect of our nation, from government to our cultural enjoyment) redefined who we thought we were. It was the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). All it took to end a creative career or get a bureaucrat fired was a raw accusation of communist leanings.

Writing for the March 31st Los Angeles Times, Berkeley Law Professor, Catherine Fisk, reacted badly “at the callousness of Elon Musk talking about taking a ‘chain saw’ to agencies and Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, saying he wants government employees to be ‘traumatically affected’ and ‘viewed as villains.’” Among those fired without genuine cause was her mother: “Making trauma for government employees a policy goal is horrific. I know, because I grew up in a home where that trauma hung in the air like smoke from the cigarettes chain-smoked by my mother — a civil servant fired without cause in the McCarthy era.

“The ongoing mass firings of federal employees (over 100,000 at last count), arrests of activists and attacks on universities [today] have rightly been compared to the Red Scare of the 1950s… Now, as then, people are being fired without a semblance of due process on baseless allegations of disloyalty or incompetence. Now, as then, the firings are inflicting trauma for those who are fired. Now, as then, the goal is to instill fear in those who remain. During the Red Scare, my mother was fired from a federal job on false charges of disloyalty. She never recovered.

“Like many of today’s civil servants, my mother loved her job. She graduated from UC Berkeley at the end of World War II with a degree in international relations and a desire to help build the postwar order. She went to Washington, D.C., thrilled to work for an agency that valued her expertise in Soviet politics and facility with languages. A week before she was to depart for a two-year post in Berlin, her assignment was suddenly canceled. Someone accused her of being a communist because she had been seen with Russian emigres. She explained that her Russian acquaintances were anti-communists who had fled the country after the 1917 revolution, and she socialized with them to perfect colloquial Russian… The government rejected her and everything she had studied for and worked to achieve. She lost self-confidence. She succumbed to self-pity, and then quickly apologized for it. Her letters expressed anxiety, depression and fear about money.

“Her letters describe the struggle to find another job that valued her skills. Some of her skills could not be used in the private sector. Even the transferable knowledge was useless in an era when most companies would hire women only as secretaries. Plus, as her letters prove, she was a mediocre typist. Her savings dwindled. She gave up her apartment and moved in with friends. Finally, she abandoned her career, accepted my father’s offer of marriage and became an unhappy housewife in a small Southern California college town… Eventually she found a job teaching in a community college. But she never found another job that used her knowledge and training, and she never overcame the feelings of loss, grief and rejection. Her faith in her country had been shaken.”

Waste, the real government waste, and sadness were what was unwarranted. The corruption, then as now, was in the accusers. Lives were ruined. Today, the damage from the Trump/Musk cabal will take decades to repair, if indeed the damage is even reparable. Those early in their government careers are likely to find new lives, new opportunities. For those in the middle or later part of their careers, they have been abandoned in a flurry of wildly inaccurate conspiracy theories promulgated by those with a greedy agenda… or others simply looking for someone to blame for the decline in their ability to achieve their own expectations.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I find little sympathy for the insensitive chainsaw wielding sociopaths who are obviously not remotely going to deliver a better America, instead leaving a path of cruel brutality in their wake… destroying the greatest nation on earth.