Should They Stay Or Should They Go?

A primary justification for taking a government job was job security. After all, it’s not as if the government is going out of business anytime soon. But that may not quite be the case as the Trump administration takes over, promising to create massive disruption in the federal workforce for two independent reasons. The first is the promise to decimate the federal bureaucracy, eliminating wasteful departments and personnel. The second is the elimination of personnel who fail to swear fealty to Trump, where loyalty is the foremost criteria for employment rather than competence, experience or fealty to the Constitution.

Stacey Young, a lawyer in the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice, asks whether federal employees should stick it out or cut and run.

One reason many federal employees are thinking of leaving government — often after decades of serving our country, under Republican and Democratic presidents — is that we’re afraid. The incoming leaders of the government have told us in aggressive terms that they want us either gone or miserable. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Russell Vought, who has been tapped by Mr. Trump to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

It’s curious that Young views herself as a bureaucrat. Is that how lawyers working at Main Justice view their job, or is that only in OCR, which has become a highly politicized wing of justice using its powers to reimagine the civil rights laws its charged to enforce by expanding its scope far beyond the laws’ inception and text in order to impose an ideology Congress neither intended nor provided for in the law?

There is certainly much work to do for the lawyers in OCR dealing with enforcement of the Civil Rights laws of 1964 and later, but it’s hard to fathom those lawyers considering themselves bureaucrats rather than lawyers.

We’re worried for our safety, too. Elon Musk, after being selected by Mr. Trump to help recommend cuts to the federal work force, broadcast on X the names of several federal employees working in climate-related jobs. Those employees were then hounded online. The rest of us have reason to fear such harassment — as well as the possibility of violence against us.

This is a pervasive problem, but it’s not the “doxxing” necessarily. When you take a position of responsibility with the government, you do so realizing the criticism comes with the job. I’ve been fairly harsh in my criticism of Catherine Lhamon, head of OCR at the Department of Education, and maintain that she’s earned every word of it. But at no time have I suggested anyone harass or harm her. That extremists on the left and right now view harassment and physical violence as acceptable tools in their various fights is sick and disgraceful, and should not be tolerated. But it’s hardly limited to one tribe or the other.

We’re also worried about our financial security. We don’t know if we’ll be able to continue to do our jobs and take care of our families when we’ve been told that our working conditions could drastically change. We may, for example, be ordered to relocate to another state or else quit. If we do stay in our jobs, we worry about how we can uphold our professional ethical standards when it seems that our willingness to say yes will matter more than any other aspect of our performance.

And boom, we finally get down to the nitty gritty, that federal employees will no longer enjoy the job security long expected of government employment. Welcome to the real world that the rest of us have lived in, where we do our jobs well or get canned, deal with asshole bosses or get canned, help the business turn a profit or get canned. Or just get canned.

Of course, big changes happen in workplaces. But they’re rarely motivated by this kind of overt animus and ideology.

While loyalty to a person over a nation is not quite the norm in federal employment, elections have consequences even when we disapprove of them, and presidents set their agenda and policies. Granted, Trump’s primary policy is worship Trump, but what about the Biden policy of equity throughout the government, or the OCR policy of identity politics and victimhood? Animus toward a bureaucracy of over a million regulations will definitely be unpleasant to those grinding the gears of the bureaucracy, but there are a great many people who seriously doubt we can’t survive with a mere 500,000 regulations.

And what would Young want to stay the course?

What sorts of practical support would help? For one thing, lawyers and mental health providers could offer pro bono or significantly discounted services to federal employees to navigate the challenges of difficult workplace situations. Data-removal companies that specialize in taking down personal information online could offer free or discounted plans to federal employees who are being harassed or at risk of harassment. Friends and family members of federal employees with young children or other caregiving responsibilities could offer to pitch in. (Without their help, employees who are stripped of their ability to do some remote work or forced to adhere to overly rigid work schedules may have no choice but to leave their jobs.)

Most of society is subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, from difficult bosses to businesses that are not guaranteed to succeed. Pretty much everyone believes they should be better paid. And yet they have to pay for lawyers and therapists when needed. Same with car mechanics, plumbers and grocery bills. And they often hate doing so, but that’s how life works.

Why are you so special that you shouldn’t have to endure the vicissitudes suffered by people who aren’t on the government dole?  Perhaps you’ve discovered the reason why people are so antagonistic toward the people who make up the bureaucracy and believe themselves entitled to that which the people they serve are denied.

16 thoughts on “Should They Stay Or Should They Go?

  1. Pedantic Grammar Police

    bureaucrat: an official in a government department, in particular one perceived as being concerned with procedural correctness at the expense of people’s needs.

    Yes, Young is a bureaucrat, and yes, she and her fellow bureaucrats should leave the government and get real jobs, for the good of the country. Maybe she could follow her own advice: “lawyers and mental health providers could offer pro bono or significantly discounted services to federal employees to navigate the challenges of difficult workplace situations.”

  2. Mike V.

    To me it is simple: Either you are willing to follow the direction of your bosses, so long as what they direct is not illegal, or you are not. If not, quit. Different political agendas from yours are not cause to obstruct your bosses, but obstruction could be grounds for your termination, at least in the real world. The federal government seems to sometimes operate as an alternate reality.

    1. Dan

      Yep, pretty much this. Executive agencies are responsible to carry out the policies of the executive–the President. There’s certainly a place for advocacy to your bosses that this policy is poorly thought-out, or counterproductive, or whatever. But ultimately, if you aren’t the President, you aren’t the boss. Do what you’re told, so long as it’s legal and ethical, or quit.

  3. Chaswjd

    The Civil Service Act creates a trade-off for federal employees. They are protected from the vagaries of electoral politics. In return they do their utmost to enforce whatever policies that their elected officials ask them to carry out. This is typified by the reaction of Sir Humphrey Appleby in the 1980’s British comedy Yes, Minister when asked by a junior civil servant if a civil servant should believe in government policy:

    https://youtu.be/wKDdLWAdcbM?si=GRB4szwh9e0lIjb8

    The problem is that members of the Civil Service now view themselves as part of the “Resistance.” If, as a civil servant, you want to be part of the opposition, resign from the Civil Service and run for Congress. Otherwise, do what you are told and do it well.

  4. Mark Dwyer

    Have we decided that civil service protections are no longer a good idea? That when they are eliminated and we return to the spoils system, corruption and graft will not return? That employee experience has no value? That the Trump regime will dismiss thoughts of politics when deciding whether your meat is safe or whether hydroxychloroquine will be the answer to the next plague?

    The non-profit Protect Democracy tells us that 70% of the federal government’s civilian employees work in defense and security-related positions. About a third of civil service workers are veterans. And the number of civil service workers is about the same as in was in the late 1960s. Should they all be exposed to harassment or dismissal even if they do their jobs well?

    What should we expect to happen? Well:

    “In Hungary, for example, one of Viktor Orbán’s first acts upon retaking the office of Prime Minister in 2010 was to dismantle civil servants’ labor protections, allowing political appointees to remove career employees without cause. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro fired over 3,500 career officials on his third day in office. And in Poland, the Law and Justice Party, under Jarosław Kaczyński, moved to weaken the country’s Civil Service Act just one month after taking power.

    In all three cases, these moves reintroduced patronage politics at the expense of government services. In one index that compares economic and governance indicators across 137 countries, Hungary steadily moved from being one of the top performers, ranked #15 in “government performance” when Orbán took office in 2010, to almost the bottom third, with a rank of #87 in 2024. Among other problems, retiree pensions have steadily decreased, “corruption is pervasive,” and “the efficiency and quality of basic public services such as water, sanitation and electricity have declined.” In the same index, Brazil went from #26 in government performance before Bolsonaro took office in 2019 to #77 in 2022 when he left. Poland, under the tenure of the Law and Justice Party, saw a somewhat less steep decline on the performance index, but was beset by a massive corruption scandal, the cash-for-visas scheme, in which upwards of 250,000 visas were issued to non-EU citizens in exchange for bribes.”

    1. Mark Dwyer

      PBS is reporting today that folks on the Trump team have begun asking staff members on the White House National Security Counsel who they voted for or gave money to, and about their social media posts. And

      “Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, in recent days publicly signaled his intention to get rid of all nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials serving on the NSC by Inauguration Day to ensure the council is staffed with those who support Trump’s agenda.

      A wholesale removal of foreign policy and national security experts from the NSC on Day 1 of the new administration could deprive Trump’s team of considerable expertise and institutional knowledge at a time when the U.S. is grappling with difficult policy challenges in Ukraine, the Mideast and beyond. Such questioning could also make new policy experts brought in to the NSC less likely to speak up about policy differences and concerns.”

    2. Chaswjd

      Civil service protections are a good idea if civil servants maintain the quid pro quo. When a new administration comes in, they must faithfully carry out the new administration’s policies. If they don’t want to honor that agreement and want to behave like party loyalists, they get swept out of office when the new administration arrives.

  5. Curtis

    I work for private industry and my wife works for a university. I know that when the quarterly profits are going up less than expected, there will be layoffs (especially of older workers) regardless of performance to ensure that the execs will get their bonuses. She knows a lot of people who barely do any works for decades.

    I wish there was a happy medium where performance and loyalty mattered.

  6. Skywalker

    In a competitive capitalist economy the profit motive drives managerial decisions to promote efficiency. Not so much in a monopoly. Government is by definition a monopoly that is not driven by profit. Tenured civil service produces sloth and inefficiency. The Pendleton Act was passed in 1883 because giving the executive branch unbridled discretion over hiring and firing government employees resulted in partisanship and incompetence. I am put off by Young’s whining sense of entitlement. But if government employment inherently leads to inefficiency, I prefer that the incompetents be nonpolitical.

  7. orthodoc

    Federal employees are typically paid less than comparable civilian jobs would offer. In return, they gain more job security (as noted in the post’s first line). But there’s more. For one thing, federal jobs come with ample vacation time and 11 national holidays (and even more if presidents keep kicking off). There’s also a defined-benefit pension. And then there are the non-pecuniary benefits. These can include the feelz from patriotism (fighting for one’s country), adventurism (living or working abroad), or sadism (gleefully wielding petty power over others, particularly those unable to resist or push back).

    If Stacey Young feels that her job in the Office of Civil Rights will now offer fewer opportunities for sadism, she may well perceive this as a pay cut and quit for that reason alone. Of course, if she’s any good at the gleeful wielding of petty power over others, particularly those unable to resist or push back, she will quickly find work at the DMV.

    1. rxc

      The defined pension benefit was severely cut back in the 80s, to something more like a defined contribution, plus a much smaller pension. But the healthcare plan is the great attractor. The same plan used by the Congress, so you know it is good. I had people I regulated, and contractors, ask me if we had any jobs available they could apply for, because of the health plan.

  8. Jardinero1

    My octogenarian parents worked in the ed establishment for their entire lives. My mom a school teacher and my dad a career administrator. They are aghast at the idea that any kind of government employee could be laid off or ever face a reduction in benefits. Only Hitler or maybe Satan would lay off a civil servant. To them it is gospel, that once the government gives you a job, it is yours for life or until you collect your pension, which is 80 percent of your best three years, with a joint and survivor benefit. I am like, what about me? I have been self employed my whole life and paid a fortune in taxes, for me and my employees. Do I get a guarantee like that? They’re like: don’t be absurd, of course not.

  9. Mark Creatura

    “Hounded” may be the bureaucrats, she fears.
    What delicious irony.
    From a government lawyer, whose job description is “unleash the hounds.”

  10. Bryan Burroughs

    You are conflating “doing what your boss says” with “swearing personal fealty to the President,” which I think are two very different things. I can agree that, in general, civil servants should be executing the President’s agenda, whether they like it or not. I’d like for them to have the chutzpah to stand up to any overtly unConstitutional or otherwise illegal demands, but I suppose that carries with it some measure of employment risk. However, demands for who you voted for or donated to are wholly inappropriate and have no place being applied among the rank and file. I dare say they have a right to be concerned about such measures being implemented. As a nation, so should we.

  11. rxc

    Ah yes, the good old days. When my colleagues would to up to Indian Point for a public meeting and have the audience boo them loudly and throw stuff at them as they sat at the table. Or the protesters out on Long Island who would hound you as you walked to your car and try to shame you for doing your job. And the guy up in Massachusetts who could not control his saliva as he litteraly spat his questions in your face.

    Yesterday I ran into another fellow while I was doing Physical Therapy, from up north who had all sorts of problems with my former agency, and the tech, in general, because it is poisoning the earth. And then there were the people I used to meet in my sailing club in Boston, who, when they learned what I did, looked for a way to get off the boat and swim ashore.

    Nothing quite as bad as the way service members were treated during Vietnam, though.

Comments are closed.