Government Workers Are The Best Of Us

We're firing heroes, not villains.

In the late 1980s my Mom sometimes took me to work (I was in preschool). I’m not sure if it was the Capitol or the Hart Office Building, but I recall everyone being tall.

Mom and I circa 1986.

She worked for Mark Hatfield (R-OR) for 15 years, a wonderful senator who served from 1967 until 1997. She started as a caseworker in 1974 and was promoted to legislative assistant. When Hatfield became chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, my Mom joined its staff as a legislative aide.

Americans may be surprised to learn that staffers largely run Congress. The members help (and their names are on the work), but it’s the people in their twenties and thirties researching and writing the bills, logging long hours with no credit.

The Senate Appropriations Committee has the job of setting ‘discretionary spending’, things that aren’t mandatory (like social security) but optional (like education). The chair can embrace or oppose budget items. Staffers on the committee, especially those close to the chair, can affect what gets funded.

My Mom used her influence to help fund PBS programming like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, reaching countless households that lacked access to good preschools. She steered money to the arts. And I learned recently that she was instrumental in appropriating the first federal grant for AIDS research in 1983.

This past week I’ve been reading (and sharing) stories of longtime government employees who were fired by DOGE. Like my Mom, they chose this career because of the work, not the money. And what my Mom helped fund wasn’t wasteful — it quite literally improved and saved people’s lives.

Now to be fair, waste does occur. By the government’s own estimate as much as $500 billion annually (7%) could be waste, fraud, or abuse from false claims, forged documents, and/or misspent funds.

To root it out, DOGE has been busy cutting the federal workforce. Most of these layoffs are probationary employees — people hired, transferred, or promoted within the past year. Many have spent decades in the government building their knowledge and expertise. Unfortunately for them, it’s easier to fire probationary employees — and if ‘poor performance’ is the cause (regardless of whether it’s actually poor), then the government can avoid paying unemployment benefits.

That’s what’s happening, in many cases, right now.

Up to 200,000 employees are being targeted for cuts. The plurality are in the Department of Agriculture (USDA) — which screens our meat for bacteria and helps prevent forest fires — where 4,200 employees have been fired. The Department of Interior (with the National Park Service) has also lost 2,300 roles. Same with 2,000 in the Department of Health and Human Services (which oversees Medicare and Medicaid) and 1,000 each in the Department of Energy and Veterans Affairs. The Federal Aviation Administration (which keeps planes from colliding), the Environmental Protection Agency (which protects our air and water), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which prevents us from being scammed), and USAID (which administers charity around the world) have also seen reductions from dozens to thousands (with more coming).

Many of these employees have posted heartbreaking reflections on social media (or appeared on TV). They adored their work — the pride it gave them, the purpose it provided.

With government, what’s often overlooked is that it doesn’t just serve people — it is people. People write our laws. People decide if those laws are constitutional. People make sure those laws are carried out fairly. The government gets discussed like some vague apparatus, but it’s not — it’s us.

That said, it is huge. The federal workforce is 2 million employees (4 million with the military). It has heaps of red tape. It moves slowly. Its equipment is dated. It has some corrupt individuals. It’s hard to shape.

Understandably, this leads to impatience, especially since we’re used to more immediacy in our lives. We can now get food, dates, and taxi rides by tapping our phone. We buy things on Amazon that arrive that day. Our world is increasingly on-demand.

But you can’t Postmates policy change.

In truth, DOGE fascinates me on some level. Publicly auditing what we distrust? Learning where our tax dollars go? Its speed and breadth are impressive.

But so far DOGE has yet to uncover any big conspiracy. Questionable line items, sure — but no mass corruption. And DOGE is admittedly making errors like accidentally firing the officials guarding our nuclear weapons and the scientists preventing bird flu outbreaks.

Like much of Congress, DOGE is staffed with twenty-somethings. Learning on the job is natural, but when your job is cutting thousands of employees from an org you don’t fully understand, it’s dangerous. Surgery requires scalpels, not machetes.

I hope DOGE improves our government’s transparency and functionality, but its layoffs give me pause. Thousands of workers aren’t just leaving with crushed hopes, but institutional knowledge. Government isn’t a business you can easily gut and rebuild — if anything, it’s the inverse of a business. Instead of few at the top hiring many below, it’s many at the top (voters) hiring few below (electeds). Like CEOs, we pay our subordinates’ salaries, benefits, and expenses. We extend their contracts (terms) if we like. But unlike a business, the government’s goal isn’t increasing the share price — it’s improving people’s lives.

My Mom left the government in 1989, but when she recounts her work she lights up. It meant so much to her and to the millions of kids and adults she helped (who have no idea who she is).

As a toddler visiting the Capitol and Hart Building, I remember the people running by as I craned my neck to look up to them.

I still do.

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SLIGHT CORRECTION: In last week’s article I mentioned that federal courts have no internal enforcement mechanism. That’s true for criminal cases — but for civil ones, courts can put liens on bank accounts or seize private property, as Rep. Jamie Raskin has noted.