Dehumanizing Public Servants

Trump and Musk aren't just trolling government workers, they're hurting good people.

This column is adapted from an item in “Morning Read-In,” a daily curation of the most interesting stories on politics, culture, communications, and life. Exclusive to paid subscribers of this “Convulsions” Substack. Click the orange button for access to the MRI.

I lived in Washington long enough to develop friendships and relationships with scores of government employees like J. Todd Weber, an epidemiologist whose unheralded work saved countless lives.

Featured in this Marc Fisher column, Weber is an avatar for public servants demonized by Elon Musk, a billionaire government contractor attacking government workers. He calls them "our bureaucratic opponents." If you knew them like I do, you wouldn’t call them names.

You might call some heroes. Here’s Fisher’s lead in the Washington Post:

Fourteen people were dead and 14,000 were in danger. A never-before-seen form of fungal meningitis was spreading fear and illness from Tennessee to Virginia and Maryland and 20 other states.

My friend J. Todd Weber, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, assembled an emergency response team. Medical sleuths fanned out, examining patients and records. Todd and his colleagues quickly discovered that all of the patients had been treated with a long-acting steroid that eased swelling and calmed pain in people with herniated discs and some kinds of arthritis.

CDC doctors traced the source of the outbreak to three contaminated lots of the drug, made at a compounding facility in Massachusetts. Then Todd and his team followed the trail of the bad doses and contacted everyone who’d received the shot so they could be examined and treated, if necessary.

Do we need a smaller, more modern government? Yes. Do we need to cherish public servants like Weber? Absolutely. Both things can be true.

But such subtleties are lost on Trump and Musk, two men willing to dehumanize good people to advance their politics.

It’s a malicious tactic as old as conservatism in America. During the reform battles of the 1880s, which made government employment contingent on merit rather than party hackery, anti-reformers branded the government workforce a “snivel service.”

The Red Scare of the early 1920s featured conservative attacks on government agencies, especially those staffed by women. Antisuffragist leader Margaret Robinson claimed the civil service system would “destroy our form of government” and poison society.

New Deal government expansion under Franklin D. Roosevelt drew cries from the right, where public servants were derided as eggheads and “short-haired women and long-haired men.”

It’s a trope that modern-day trolls can’t resist. Trump adviser Steve Bannon long ago declared war on “the administrative state.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich encouraged Trump to clean out “leftists” from the State and Justice departments. Trump himself has shown an utter lack of respect for government workers, casting them as shifty, lazy architects of the so-called deep state.

This is personal to me. One of my closest friends helps the U.S. government feed the world’s poorest people. Another grants federal benefits to working-poor Americans, many of whom voted for Trump.

As a journalist for 30-plus years, I witnessed the good works of countless state and federal bureaucrats — Republicans, Democrats, and independents — before becoming a consultant in Michigan. I now work with state employees who pour more energy into serving the public in a single day than the entire 535 members of Congress do in a month.

That is why I love a series of essays in the Washington Post called, “Who Is Government?” Subtitled “Seven writers go in search of the essential public servant,” the series puts a human face on bureaucracy.

Christopher Mark, a former coal miner who engineered the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. It took a decade of arduous, thankless trial and error to perfect his innovation. “The science wasn’t there,” Mark said. “It didn’t have a clear mathematical solution or a way to get one.”

Ronald E. Walters, heads of the National Cemetery Administration, 2,300 federal workers who bury more than 140,000 veterans and their family members every year and tend to the perpetual memory of nearly 4 million other veterans, from the Revolutionary War to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. For seven straight years, the NCA has received the highest rating of any entity, public or private, in the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Pamela Wright, Chief Innovation Officer of the National Archives and Records Administration, which is closing the gap between Americans and their most valuable documents via a massive digitalization campaign. “My job,” she explained, “is to find the most efficient and effective ways to share the records of the National Archives with the public online.” So far, about 300 million of NARA’s more than 13 billion records have been scanned and posted to the internet — “but now my family in Montana can easily access census records, military records and many other pertinent records from home.”

These are just three stories in a series of seven, a series that will soon be released as a book representing the untold and unappreciated stories of 2.2 million federal workers and their counterparts in state and federal government.

They’re not our enemies. They’re our friends and neighbors in service.

They don’t work for a deep state. They work for us.

They’re not pawns. They’re patriots.

---

What is this?

Convulsions is a reader-supported newsletter for and about you — “A witness to change in an age of acrimony” reading essays on politics, communications, culture, and life.

First-level subscriptions are free. If you value the written word and want greater access plus twice the content, level up to a paid subscription: $5/month or $50/year. Or be a Concierge Member for $500. Click the orange button for Paid and Concierge benefits.

Read about me and my return to writing here.