This may not be the right timing to talk about this, and I apologize for that if anyone is offended. But I think there are many generalizations made about federal employees, on either side, and as usual, the situation is more complicated than expressed in news stories.
Over the weekend, Joe Reddan and Jim Zornes talked about a change in attitudes they’d perceived before they retired. I’ll quote from their comments. I’d like to clarify that I think the current situation is unequivocally bad.
1. I also think that the way all career employees are portrayed does not match anyone’s lived experience of all employees. People, if left to their own devices, will generalize, as Dave Mertz says in this comment:
the unfounded stereotypes of federal employees, that they are lazy, somehow getting rich in their jobs, on and on. They now look on with glee when federal employees are getting the axe. It does not help that a lot of our politicians reinforce the stereotype.
I’d say some reporting doesn’t help, when employees are quoted as not feeling they should go back to in-person work because they’ll have to commute or get child care, or when they are quoted as saying they are going to fight the new Administration. Of course, no one can control what other people say, so there’s that.
As we know, most feds are D’s, and some agencies have engaged in insubordination, intentionally over-reacting to decisions, leaking documents, and so on. I experienced the document leaking long before Trump 1.0. People generalize from what they’ve experienced, it’s human nature, and maybe the FS feds can’t help that people generalize from other agencies and experiences to them. Or maybe they can, by intentionally carving out a separate space? Or maybe they already have?
Here’s a quote from a comprehensive Wyofile story on the cuts in Wyoming:
Most federal employees in Wyoming are not performing their jobs with partisan politics in mind, they said. Yet those workers are being inundated with a public discourse that paints them as either partisan or lazy — simply on the public dole, they said.
That sentiment is reflected in emails sent from the administration’s higher-ups in recent weeks.
“They have this language that was very clearly not written by a federal employee,” they said. “It has no formality, it has no professionalism and it has these snarky comments like, ‘We’re giving you the opportunity to quit being a lazy employee and you can go be more productive in the private sector,’” they said, summarizing the tone of emails. “The language in those letters is condescending and insulting.”
“I feel like this tactic — by the person who’s instigating it — their concept is that it’s an acceptable way to go about things,” they said. “But in the public- and in the civil-service sector, those are different people.
“For one, you take an oath before you’re hired. Everyone takes a live oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and to serve the people of the United States, not an administration. And that’s different [than the private sector]. That feeling of dedication is different, I think, when you’re a civil servant. They’re not just doing a job just to make money and go home. There’s another component to it.”
2. Was there a change in culture around overtly political conversations and actions in the last 15 years or so? What was this due to? Can the culture intentionally change back?
From Joe Reddan:
Chief Tidwell held an optional all employee meeting in the Yates Building Conference Room on the afternoon of November 9th. At that meeting a colleague stood up and demanded that the Chief oppose Trump, citing the Yates Building proximity to the Holocaust Museum of North America and disparaging Trump as a Nazi. To say the least, the chief was flummoxed. This same guy channeling Woody Guthrie would bring his special chili to employee potlucks with the admonition that this chili kills fascists!
Then came the “pink pussy” hats worn conspicuously in the Yates Building.
To me this was surprising, a Forest Service professional since the Carter Administration, I had seen administrations come and go. But we were a professional workforce and could serve any administration, even if that wasn’t our guy.
Nearly 8-years before that the GW Bush Administration ended and President Obama was inaugurated. There was much rejoicing in the Yates Building and many of us attended the Obama celebration at the Lincoln Memorial “We are One” on Sunday as well as the Inauguration on Tuesday. Obama was not my guy, but he was the elected President and deserved my respect.
I moved to SW Colorado after retirement in April of 2017. At the local national forest supervisor’s office (SO), the parking lot was full of vehicles with resist bumper stickers. Again, partisan and not professional.
At one point in 2018, my truck was parked in the SO parking lot. My truck was adorned with the following stickers: a Gadsden flag; NRA sticker, a Steal Your Face Sticker (Grateful Dead) and an American Flag sticker. A friend told me that an employee reported my truck to the forest LEO, who attempted to run my vehicle tags, but was stopped by probable cause issues. Yet, the vehicles with resist stickers were not investigated.
From Jim Z
Joe Reddan, that’s exactly my point of contention with how far the FS slipped into partisanship! I never, ever allowed political influences, nor promotion of one party over another. As a Forest Sup, it was harder to manage the zero tolerance because of the shear number of employees on these larger Units, but by dang there was no question in the employees on what was tolerated.
Before I retired in early 2017, I had relocated to the Regional Office, with a very talented and dedicated group of employees. I might add – professional, these types of disrespect were never seen! However, I saw the rapid decline in discipline and professionalism, magnified by the advent of social media and the ever present Internet. I still never uttered a political word until I exited that door for the last time.
I found this on Government Executive in 2022, of course they were Gov Exec subscribers and could be from any agency. I think that’s part of the problem, you can’t generalize and yet people regularly do.
While feds overwhelmingly say their workplaces are collegial, 72% said they do not feel comfortable expressing their political views at the office. That was particularly true of Republicans, 30% of whom said they have been threatened at work due to their political views. Several agencies across government have reported spikes in threats against federal workers, pointing to backlash to the FBI’s search of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Florida and recent funding provided to the Internal Revenue Service. Only a slight majority of Republicans say lawmakers’ rhetoric has contributed to those threats, while 81% of Democrats said the same.
It seems to some extent that partisan-ness has expressed itself differently and more overtly (in some places) than the old days. Why?
When I worked on the Fremont, we talked about “the ranchers” getting invitations to the Inauguration for President Reagan (yup, 1981) and a generalized feeling of the ranchers having too much political power. I also remember thinking, and maybe saying, that since Reagan spoke against federal employees, maybe we shouldn’t go on fires to protect his property. But that was against agency culture to think that way and certainly behave that way. I guess the vibe was “that’s the way it is, and this is the work we get paid to do and the system we’re under.”
Here’s what Gov Exec said about Reagan’s policies in a review of them in 2004 (he initiated a government-wide hiring freeze immediately after he was sworn in.. as in.. before he even left the Capitol Building.
OPM Director Kay Coles James said Tuesday that Reagan’s opposition to big government did not mean he was opposed to federal workers.
“I think a lot of people who covered Reagan did not make that distinction well,” James said in an interview. Critics say that “because he didn’t like expansive government, he didn’t like federal workers. You can’t make that leap, and you shouldn’t.”
Regardless of how Reagan felt about federal employees, Pfiffner said the president’s efforts to depict the government as bloated and ineffective have tarred civil servants ever since.
“He did damage to the federal civil service, with his really negative attitude at them,” Pfiffner said. “Reagan encouraged [Americans] to think that government administrators were bad or lazy.”
3. Is there a relationship between visibility of employees (again, highly uneven across the FS), accessibility and public support? When the public sees USG rigs and NGO employees in their branded clothing, helping them out with information, or a concessionaire at a campground, does that give them the impression that FS employees are less necessary?
4. If it’s important to have employees that reflect local culture, would that be equally true of local political alignments? No, I’m not suggesting a new diversity hiring process, but I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it. If diversity is good, then maybe having employees more reflective of different political alignments would help with public understanding, acceptance and support of employees, budgets and priorities?
One thing that has obviously changed over the last 20-30 years is political polarization. Ezra Klein made this observation in a recent podcast (this particular episode was very partisan, but the observation was not):
o While we’ve always had a two-party system in this country, in reality for much of the 20th century we had four parties, conservative Ds, liberal Ds, conservative Rs, and liberal Rs. Party affiliation and policy preference were frequently out of alignment. This is no longer true – now we actually only have 2 parties – the first and last “parties” in the above list have gone extinct.
This meant that politics used to be more complex and therefore less openly toxic. There was less incentive to communicate a simplistic political message because it didn’t necessarily tell anyone anything useful. More diretly relevant to this blog, it may be worth remembering that almost all of the majorlaws governing forest management were passed with significant support from Senators and Representatives of both parties, a concept nearly inconceivable today.
I do think social media inflicted some damage, but the passage of time here has also been harmful. Millions of Americans today have no living memory of any form of political discourse other than the current scorpions-in-a-bottle conflict.
(The bumper sticker discussion was interesting – I was also careful not to have anything partisan on my car, although even here changing circumstances can change the nature of the message. A support Ukraine sticker is not explicitly partisan, and would not have been seen as such in 2022, but many people (from both parties) might see it that way now.)
My Chicago Cubs sticker, however, seems safe. 🙂
With all due respect to Ezra, I agree on the partisanizing, but I find that people don’t fit neatly into any categories. Much of the media seems intent on either characterizing issues simplistically or putting people into boxes, or both. However that’s probably another discussion.
I don’t know what we can do about it, besides somehow change our culture, I hope TSW can contribute in some small way to that.
Some thoughts related to point 3: last summer, when I was seven days into a nine day stint on a poorly maintained section of the PCT in Northern WA, my opinion of the USFS was near an all-time low.
Then as we reached out campsite, I encountered a creature I thought had gone extinct – a Wilderness Ranger! We had a good chat about the trail, how districts manage a trail like the PCT that constantly crosses administrative boundaries, and even a little about the friction between field and office employees. When I finally let him move on to finish his day’s work, I felt a lot better about that district and forest, if not not the overall USFS.
Well two months later that Wilderness Ranger was extinct, part of Chief Moore’s shock purge of 100% on non-fire seasonals while leaving the bureaucracy completely untouched.
Public visibility and interaction matter. A lot of good people lost their jobs in October, and a lot lost theirs last week. I hope – without much confidence – those doing ground-level work IN the forests will be brought back when the dust settles.
On 2-11, it appears that Trump fired the rest of the Federal Temps. Non-issue.
I think you mean non-Fire temps.
The Forest Service is a professional agency, in the sense that its leaders trained for particular careers and are motivated by their training and how they believe that fits with the mission of the agency. It’s not surprising if individuals don’t agree with political positions that are contrary to their motivations. Professional also means higher education, which aligns with one party more than then other. The Forest Service is also a science-based agency, and one of the things that I believe is new in politics is an anti-science agenda, so there’s that. I also don’t think there are many anti-government folks who are going to want to work for the government. So I think there are plenty of legitimate reasons why most Forest Service employees would want to resist an administration like this one.
However, the other thing you get with professional employees is integrity. To me that means you don’t cheat. You argue your position and make decisions based on the facts you know and those of your expert advisors. At some times and places that is going to get overruled by someone’s political positions. I don’t think many Forest Service employees would try to subvert that dishonestly.
(I think this is true of other less “professional” agencies as well. I briefly worked for the Social Security Administration. I did not spend my preparatory years training to be a claims representative, but I think claims representatives are dedicated to serving their clients, and would not be supportive of policies that don’t do that.)
It’s hard for me to imagine what kind of people this administration would find to fill government jobs now.