Thoughts on current employment in the federal government

It's bad out here.

I’ve been a federal government employee for (I can’t believe I’m saying this) eighteen years. Sixteen of those have been with the Department of Justice. I worked in DC for about half that time, but now I live in Chicago. Needless to say, there is a lot going on right now in the world of federal employment, and well… I have thoughts.

On Tuesday, every federal employee got the “Fork in the Road” email that’s been in the news lately. The email is weirdly tone deaf and cloying and it sorta sounds like it was padded with a bunch of AI-speak. I won’t print the whole thing here, but it’s gross, and the upshot of the email is a basic offer, much like what Elon Musk did at Twitter: It’s an offer to pay out the rest of an employee’s salary through September 30 if they resign (i.e., go on administrative leave). Employees (all 2.3 million federal employees!) have until this Thursday to accept, which they’re instructed to do by simply replying to the email with the word “resign.”

You get the idea.

The thing is.. this offer is insulting. It’s weird, and it’s gross, and it doesn’t make any sense, but mostly it’s insulting. And even though it’s been reported on in the news with an appropriate “this is some crazy shit” kinda framing, I feel like no one has really taken the time to articulate why, exactly, it’s so damn offensive to get an email like this.

I work as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the civil division of the Northern District of Illinois U.S. Attorney’s Office. In non-government-speak, this means I’m a DOJ attorney in Chicago who mostly defends the government when the government gets sued for different things. The U.S. Attorney’s Office itself is largely a criminal prosecutor’s office, bringing federal criminal charges against various people. “Federal “ criminal charges can be pretty much anything, but in practice it’s a lot of gun cases, drug cases, kidnapping or child sex cases, bank robberies, and healthcare fraud or other white collar fraud. The civil side of the office (where I work) is much smaller in terms of the number of attorneys, and we defend the government in medical malpractice cases (e.g., VA hospital cases), car accidents (often postal trucks), employment discrimination cases (brought by aggrieved federal employees), and a ton of other weird things. I’ve defended situations where border agents detained someone and managed to lose all their luggage / environmental groups tried to halt FAA approval of an airport construction project because it would harm an endangered species of bumblebee / a man was shot by Homeland Security agents in his own home as the agents tried to conduct an immigration removal operation / and one instance of a guy spending 10 days in jail because FBI agents confused him with someone else and arrested the wrong guy on a drug charge. These all make for pretty decent stories at family dinners when the question, “so what are you working on these days?” is asked. But it’s all just kinda random lawsuit stuff that happens every day in the federal government.

This is the context in which I and all of my coworkers received the buyout offer from Elon Musk. The email was followed up a few days later with a question-and-answer list that contained the following moronic prose that sounds like it was written by a Heritage Foundation intern with a seventh grade education:

Q: Am I allowed to get a second job during the deferred resignation period?

A: Absolutely! We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so. The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.

I know of almost no one in the federal government who is seriously thinking about taking this deal. There is at least one survey out there that says 11% of the workforce are inclined to take it, but who knows. Even that survey notes that of those who say they’re taking it, more than half of those people were planning to retire anyway. And if that’s the case, this is just a criminal waste of public money. Any person who was going to retire would be crazy not to take a free offer to collect their old salary in full for eight months. And like.. even if I was planning to switch jobs, *why* would it make sense to pay me out for eight months?? The government is not a profit center. It is not cash-strapped in such a way that it needs to drastically reduce payroll. In my case they’d literally be paying me roughly $120k to not work at all, which is an insane use of public money.

Then there’s the issue of how the offer was communicated. First off, the buyout offer (and and the subsequent communications about it) came via an email from “HR” (hr@opm.gov) that was emailed government-wide. This makes no sense. The “federal government” writ large does not have an “HR” department.¹ The government is made of agencies, and each of those agencies has a mandate, a leadership structure, and rules and processes for how we’re employed. I know the people who work in my US Attorney’s Office HR department, because they advise me on how to make retirement account contributions, make sure I’ve taken the annual mandatory sexual harassment training, assist in processing my five-year background check, etc. They do exactly what anyone’s HR department does. But there is no government-wide über-HR that like, simultaneously “employs” a DOJ attorney in Chicago, a VA nurse in Texas, a TSA agent in Maryland, a park ranger in Utah, etc. That wouldn’t make any sense because none of these employees has anything to *do* with one another. We all have “government jobs,” but none of us works “for” the president. We’re just civil servants, carrying out the mandate of our respective agencies.

And like.. of course those mandates are all set by Congress, and each agency is helmed by a presidential appointee. We all took civics class and we get that. To a certain extent, every agency is going to have its priorities reshuffled by the new administration every four years. If, for example, you work as a DOJ civil rights attorney, you’re probably going to bring different types of cases under one party as opposed to the other. If you’re an ICE agent, you’ll operate under different sets of rules and be told to meet a different set of expectations. There’s no shortage of “scandal” stories in the press every four years about all of these changes. It’s just what is.

But this “HR” nonsense isn’t about reshuffling priorities. It’s just a wholesale campaign to get as many government employees to quit as possible, without any regard to what they’re doing or whether it’s important. As with so many things in this administration, it’s “government” as imagined by some contemptuous person who has no idea what they’re doing, and doesn’t want to learn, but likes making big crazy decisions.

Look.. I mentioned before that my day-to-day job is to defend the government in lawsuits. I defend a lot. And many, many times that defense amounts to a procedural, institutional defense that doesn’t even account for the underlying events or facts. By that I mean — I am frequently in the position of arguing in the context of a particular lawsuit, “I’m sorry that happened to you, but you can’t sue for that. Even if what you said is true, the government still wins.” The government wins because you filed your suit too late. Or too early. Or you didn’t fill out the form right. Or there’s an exception to the rule that applies here. Or, or, or. Sorry. You’re out of luck. It’s not fair, but it’s what is. Doing this kind of work day-in, day-out makes one an institutionalist in the strongest possible sense. My job is to defend the institution of government, and I believe in that institution and I want it to succeed. Not for profit or or for “productivity,” but for society to simply work. Whether it is fair in every instance isn’t even the test. The institution should be stable and predictable and, on a macro level — in some aspire-to-do-our-best sorta way — honorable and just. But “fair,” not really. Not by default, anyway.

So I’m not here to yell about how squeezing people out of government, massively reorganizing things, or firing people arbitrarily is unfair. The point of the buyout is to undermine stability — the institutionalism that holds it all together. And that’s what enrages me so much. How many people might take this offer? Where are they working? Which offices will really be impacted? No one has asked, and no one seems to care. How is the “reshuffling” that happens after going to work? What’s going to happen if a particular critical office goes from like, 20 employees down to two? Is *anyone* at any point going to make a decision based on what’s needed, rather than what ideologues simply believe?

Institutions matter. Government matters. Politics is always going to be politics, and just like any good American, I try to stay informed about the never-ending red-vs-blue circus that makes up the news cycle. Impeachments, Supreme Court confirmation hearings, debt ceiling, government shut downs, Speaker of the House mutinies. All of that is a kind of theater that — if you’re the type who likes to watch MSNBC or whatever — is just kinda there, going on, being crazy, and happening all the time. But government still *exists* in a neutral, baseline way, and it has to go on. It has to. TSA agents need to screen passengers. Lawyers need to defend car crash cases that involve postal trucks. VA patients need surgeries. Clerks need to process Social Security eligibility claims. You can’t simply hand-wave through all of it and say, “well, these people would all be better off in the private sector, who gives a shit.” Excuse my crassness here, but I’m really at a loss for how else to respond to it. Fuck these guys.

On some level, one has to concede that the government can do this.² The government can literally draft young men under the age of 26 into battle and ask them to give their life for their country, if that’s what’s needed. Shuttling people into retirement and saying “things are gonna be different around here,” is low-stakes, when you think about it that way. But the bargain — the thing that makes it all “work” in a civil society — is that government isn’t supposed to be arbitrary. It’s not reckless. It will move slowly, and thoughtfully, and with deliberate speed to make sure, as best as humans can allow for, that we all act in concert to try and get it right. None of that is happening here. We’re not even pretending it’s happening. Rather, the point is to be reckless and move fast and dismantle as much of government as they can before it all blows up in some huge scandal that causes Elon Musk to go to jail or lose billions of dollars.³

I can’t sit here and insist that my job is “essential” in some fundamental way, that the world will end if it’s eliminated (though honestly, surely somebody needs to defend against the lawsuits?). Why is office X staffed with 40 people, instead of 35? Could they get the job done with 30, if they had to? I mean.. sure, maybe. Could Agency Y and Sub-department Z be combined and downsized in order to be more efficient? I don’t know, yeah why not. My point is not that Big Change is unworkable or uncalled for in the government. But damn, this is so obviously not the way to go about it, and we should all *care* that this is so reckless and so damaging to our institutions. We *need* stable, accountable institutions to function as a society. I thought that was too obvious a point to state out loud, but.. apparently not.

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It all makes me very sad. I feel sad. I’m reading Chris Hayes’s new book about attention right now and it’s hard not to reflect on how all this looks. The pandemic came and everything got very dicey and destabilized for a while, and lots of us retreated to our phones and digital walled gardens and then never really looked up or engaged much after that. And now we’re in a world of TikTok politics and curated algorithmically driven feeds and vaccine conspiracy theories, and all of that was there before the pandemic, sure, but it’s gotten so, so much worse. This is just another step along the path. There’s a palpable sense that no one’s going to look up. Nothing is going to be done. It’s all very sad.

In the list of radical, crazy things that the new administration is doing, I’m not sure most people would even put this civil servant stuff in the top five. And there are more politically charged areas of the government (environmental policy, healthcare, education), where the substantive changes have been and are going to be truly awful. But on a procedural level, for regular day-to-day government to work at all, we need sober, reasonable institutional stability. That’s baseline for a functioning civil society. This isn’t that. It’s the opposite. I hate it.

1. It certainly doesn’t have an HR that’s housed within OPM — an agency that sets standards and protocols for how government jobs are created and classified, but doesn’t hire or employ anyone in the agencies. Also, I want to reiterate that the terms of this email instructed employees to “accept” the offer by simply replying to an email with the word “resign.” There’s no form, there’s no website, there’s no official action or chain of command, just “Resign.” Most people I know have concluded the offer is frankly bullshit, and will never pay out. Honestly, that’s probably where I am, too.

2. And by that I mean, Congress could do this. One guy just acting, unaccountably, with no oversight, no confirmation hearing, no way to fire him, no check at all except the president’s whim, should not be able to do this.

3. That’s where this is headed, right? Elon Musk goes to jail or loses all his money or otherwise implodes spectacularly? He’s not like.. just going to be normal eventually, for god’s sake.