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We’ve all heard the language those backing the ongoing, reckless purge of the federal workforce are using to justify their actions: Government employees are nothing but bureaucrats, or worse, deep-state saboteurs of the politicians who trash them. Government is rife with not just waste but fraud and abuse — the latter two of which are firing offenses if actually proven, which those throwing around this phrase rarely even try to do.
In justifying the DOGE-driven assault on the public workforce, President Donald Trump claimed without evidence that “many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”
This storyline is nothing new, and it’s been weaponized against workers at all levels of government. Before Trump, there were people like former Gov. Bobby Jindal, who would sneeringly boast of having removed 30,000 “bureaucrats” from Louisiana’s payroll — never mind that the reality was far more nuanced.
You have to dehumanize people in your mind to talk about them that way, and certainly to do what the Trump administration is doing — locking them out en masse; firing them without cause and sometimes saying oops, never mind; mocking them with Elon Musk’s childish chain saw. You can’t think of them — or have your supporters think of them — as fellow citizens who must put food on the table and pay the rent, let alone who do important work on behalf of all of us. Who’d support this level of collective cruelty then?
Like many narratives, this one is powerful.
But then, so is a growing counternarrative.
It turns out that if you’re open to hearing them, stories that undercut the stereotype of the lazy, freeloading government worker are incredibly easy to find, because they’re all around us.
That was one of the takeaways of a stirring conversation at last week’s New Orleans Book Festival, led by best-selling native-son Michael Lewis, author of "Moneyball" and "The Blind Side." Lewis first set out to document the work — and I’m not making this up, the fascinating stories — behind government service during the first Trump administration, in his book, “The Fifth Risk.” He and some other prominent writers are now out with a new book, based on a Washington Post series and aptly called “Who is Government? The Untold Story of Government Service,” and its publication could not have been better timed.
In the introduction, Lewis is explicit, writing that the project’s ambition is to subvert the “lazy and stupid” stereotype of the public servant.
If you’d attended their panel at Tulane University last week, you would have heard Lewis tell the tale of a child of Princeton privilege who rebelled, worked for a time in coal mining and wound up figuring out how to keep mines from collapsing for the Department of Labor, saving countless private-sector worker lives.
You’d have heard Casey Cep talk about the man who oversees the nation’s network of military cemeteries, which have higher customer service ratings than private companies like Costco and Chick-fil-A.
“I think the story Ron Walters allows us to tell is that a lot of people are working very hard to meet the needs of the American people. ... And that work is meaningful,” she said.
You’d have heard W. Kamau Bell describe interviewing a federal employee he happened to know, and getting an earful from his goddaughter about the sense of purpose she found as an antitrust paralegal for the Department of Justice.
And the stories weren’t just told on one stage.
Elsewhere at the book festival, courtly former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins practically seethed over the dismantling of his former agency, which has discovered breakthroughs on a long list of devastating diseases and is working toward more. He said it’s particularly shortsighted to fire recent hires with fewer job protections, as the Trump Administration has done, because the newly hired often bring new skills, ideas and talent.
And Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah told the story of how American health care workers and military personnel went to West Africa a decade ago and stopped the spread of the deadly Ebola virus before it could come to U.S. shores. That happened when Shah ran USAID, the humanitarian agency that was Trump’s first high-profile target for destruction.
As always, there’s a “to be sure” here, as journalists put it.
To be sure, government does not always operate efficiently or heroically, and not every public employee is a star or even a top performer. Where potential taxpayer savings exist, they should be identified and targeted. When bad behavior happens, it should have consequences.
And where outdated regulations and technology prevent government workers from doing the best job they can for the public, they should be aggressively confronted; on that, I suspect most government employees would agree.
Regardless, there’s a powerful story to tell — or more like millions of them — about what the people who work for our government — for us — do, and why they do it.
At this moment of wanton, senseless, mean-spirited destruction, these stories are urgent.
And they have the added power of being true.