Trump’s government was a very bleak workplace for many. Then it shut down.
Lately it’s cold and gray in Washington. The days are short, the nights are long and the president has vowed to keep the government shut down for months, even years if he does not get what he wants. A southern border lined with “artistically designed steel slats,” apparently.
For so many languishing federal workers — public servants alternately characterized as deep state antagonists or bloated bureaucrats — it’s all too much.
Over two years, the Trump administration has dealt blow after blow to government employees — budget cuts, hiring freezes, inept Cabinet secretaries and, for some, open hostility to their fundamental mission. President Trump promised to shake up Washington, and he has. But the country’s 2 million federal workers have mostly soldiered on, believing in the value of their work even if they question decisions coming out of the White House.
In what some see as the ultimate insult, almost half of them were told to stay home. Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect any dollars.
We talked to six of these workers, some of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs. They told us about their sleepless nights, creeping anxieties and financial distress. All of it an affront, they said, the nadir of indignation wrought by two years of government work under Trump.
If the president of the United States said anything that made a lick of sense when he toured the smoldering ruins of Northern California last year, you’ll have to forgive this particular federal fighter if he can’t immediately bring it to mind. He hasn’t been sleeping much since the furlough and is frustrated beyond words.
Tight budgets notwithstanding, he said, his crew spends each winter clearing out excess brush and burning it in piles. Taking care of the floors, so to speak.
That’s what he would be doing right now, he said, had the shutdown not cut off the funding and forced his crew to stop.
“We’re not allowed,” he said.
Next summer, there will be that much more kindling on the forest floor, waiting to spark. Waiting for a president to make a photo tour across the wreckage.
These are the things a U.S. Forest Service firefighter thinks about when he can’t work and can’t sleep.
“I enforce civil rights for a living. I try to enforce equality for all,” says Jamie Rodny, a 35-year-old with a law degree, who was recruited into public service under a presidential management fellows program in 2011.
Rodny scoffed when she heard recently that Trump said the government has no problem retaining talented professionals.
The better part of a decade with the National Park Service took a ranger to some of the most beautiful places he knew to exist. His job was to learn about the land and share its story with visitors — to teach them to preserve it for those who would come next.
After Trump became president, nearly 2 million acres of once-protected land were opened up for potential drilling. The new interior secretary spoke of exploiting the land for its energy. Over the past two years, the ranger said, his supervisor warned him against speaking to visitors about the threat of climate change.
Still, he said, he never considered giving up. The job felt like a calling. But on Dec. 22, they gave him no choice.
This staffer, who was attracted to government work because it seemed to offer stability, says she thinks NOAA has been protected from budget cuts faced by other environmental agencies because it operates under the Department of Commerce. But they still feel hostility to their cause.
“Our job is noble,” the worker says.
A lifelong employee of the federal government, she is approaching retirement from deep within the bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security in Washington. She holds one of those unglamorous-but-someone-has-to-do-it roles that keeps an agency with a quarter-million employees from disintegrating on a granular level. Her long career is essentially a chronology of abandoned ideals.
She was raised in a family that revered the U.S. government, and she carried that reverence into the federal workforce when she joined it after high school.
She lost that feeling shortly after Trump took office, about the time she noticed a change in department communiques distributed by Homeland Security’s top officials.
Prior to the Trump administration, department leaders sent out emails notifying the entire staff about agents who died in the line of duty. Officials under Trump began sending out notices that seemed overtly political, she said.
Trump’s campaign-promised border wall kept showing up in her inbox. She tried to put it out of her mind and carry on the work. Until last month, when Trump decided the wall was more important than her job.
When she goes back to work, assuming she ever goes back, she isn’t sure what will be left of nobility.
Gary Morton has been an employee of the federal government since 1981. He remembers when he started out and an older colleague promised him it was a good place to work, a place to build a career.
And over almost four decades that’s been true, but he doesn’t think young people will see it that way now.
Morton, who is president of a local union representing EPA workers, says he’s never seen his co-workers so depressed.
Morton worries about his colleagues who have bills to pay. He worries about the Superfund cleanups that aren’t happening and the permits that aren’t getting processed. Mostly he worries that everyday folks will pay the price for political ineptitude.