I had not planned to post more about work, but since my last post I’ve seen colleagues discharged for dubious reasons, requirements to justify my employment continuously, and a reduction in force directive. Each of these actions has damaged my morale and messed up my sleep schedule for several days. Reading the news and discussions online has brought me to a realization that few people really understand all of the things that government employees do. While I can’t speak for all of them, I can at least speak for myself.
If you haven’t heard, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), has started using a service called the Government Wide Email System (GWES). This was the system that was used to send the original and follow up “Fork” messages. OPM also sent, on February 22 (Saturday afternoon) and February 28 (Friday afternoon), messages with the cryptic subject line “What did you do last week?”. Around the same time on February 22, Musk posted on his nazi filled social media platform that failure to respond to this email would be taken as a resignation.
Government agencies were divided on whether responding the email was required. Originally, the Privacy Impact Statement (PIS) for the GWES stated that all responses to that system were voluntary. Nonetheless, I was directed by my leadership to respond. On February 28, the PIS was quietly edited to state that failure to respond could incur consequences, without stating what sort of consequences. It’s all veiled threats and secret edits to hidden documents.
I realize that I’m approaching “tl;dr” territory here. The situation is complex, changes daily (sometimes hourly), and, in the words of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought, is designed to “put [Federal Employees] in trauma”. The large, legacy media outlets have tended to be slow to report on these stories. They tend to view White House press briefings and interviews with Cabinet officials as the best way to report on what the government is doing. A few independent journalists have taken the opposite approach, cultivating contacts in various departments and levels of government and reporting what is actually happening. Marisa Kabas is probably the exemplar of this and has been doing some great reporting on the various indignities that are now being pushed onto the Federal workforce. If you want to follow what is happening at a broad scale, you should follow her reporting.
Having provided some background, let’s talk about what I’m going to do from here. I can’t bring back the folks who were dismissed from service without justification; I can’t stop the cruel policies aimed to harm folks of already marginalized communities; and I can’t stop the weekly requests to justify my continued employment…
…but I can tell my story.
I think many civil servants, myself included, have had reservations about being too public about our work. For one, many of us are content to let the work speak for itself. For another, since Reagan, vilification of Federal employees has been ingrained to such a degree, we just don’t know how people will react when they learn where we are employed. In right-wing circles, this vilification got pushed to such a degree that in 1995, a terrorist specifically targeted us for destruction. This is can give us pause about being public on what we do.
But this modesty (or caution) has led to a public that is uninformed (or deliberately misinformed), about the role that civil servants play in their lives. I want to start changing that. I want to tell you what I’ve done this week, each week. If Musk is going to feed these answers into the plagiarism machine anyways, I’m going to make them public so that anyone who decides to read this can at least know what one civil servant is doing. I don’t know how this will end up. Most likely, I’ll be a singular voice, casting my words into the void. But maybe you’ll read these words and get curious. Maybe others will also broadcast their stories for the public to read. I think we can still save our civil service if enough people act now. And I know it is worth saving. Everyone I work with cares about their area of expertise, but the true passion that brings them to work is mission and service.
Please consider following me to hear one perspective from the civil service. I’ll be posting the “back issues” of my five bullets soon, and plan to post weekly. I’ve long struggled to find my voice for blogging; I suppose I just had to be pushed by one of the worst human beings imaginable to do so.
← Back to the Blog