A high school classmate of mine worked 21 years for the Social Security Administration, retiring 10 years ago when the stress, she told me, became too much.
“I loved helping people,” she said of her role as a claims rep in the Supplemental Security Income program for disabled people and impoverished older Americans. But the work environment was overbearing, clients’ situations frequently heartbreaking and staff cuts made her job harder. “I lost relationships and was ridiculed for my job because I worked for the feds,” even though Nebraska, where we both grew up, and she still lives, is among the states that gets more federal money than it pays to Washington.
Now, reports say that at least 7,000 — 12% — of the nation’s 57,000 Social Security workers will be laid off in Elon Musk’s self-described “chainsawing” of the federal workforce. At least 105,000 federal employees have been laid off in the first two months of the Trump administration, with many of those dismissals being challenged in court.
As much as we have been encouraged for decades to vilify bureaucrats, Americans are at the beginning of a painful process of learning that government in fact does an awfully lot to keep the country working — including in ways that affect each of us personally.
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A force for good
I confess: I am a fan of government. It has been a force for nothing but good in my life, helping me rise from childhood poverty to living what I consider a pretty good version of the American dream. After a strong K-12 public education, I was the first in my family to attend college, which wouldn’t have been possible without federal grants and loans.
Later, I bought my first two homes with FHA loans, which lowered my down payment and interest rate. Decades later, when I was laid off 11 months short of Medicare eligibility, the Affordable Care Act provided a bridge of health care coverage before I returned to Detroit and the Free Press. Today, my wife and I have attained full retirement age and get monthly Social Security payments like clockwork that are helping us be ready for retirement. Already enrolled in Medicare Part A, soon enough we will fully rely on that program for health care.
These are the most obvious, direct — and common — ways federal programs have touched my life. Indirectly, everything from our weather forecasts and warnings to bank deposit insurance to the roads we drive rely on the government.
Behind all of this are government workers following rules and procedures meant to apply programs consistently and fairly across a population of 340 million.
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A sense of mission
We have a sense that the federal workforce has grown wildly, but it hasn’t really. The federal civilian workforce was 2.2 million in early 1958, when I was born, and the U.S. population was about 175 million. The population has doubled, while federal workers have increased about a third as Congress has tasked them with many more jobs. In 1960, we had no federal protections for workplace or vehicle safety, clean air or water, and the Federal Aviation Administration had just been created.
I think clean air and water, workplace and auto safety rules and air traffic regulations are good things. Ensuring that our laws are followed, the public is protected and fraud is stopped takes workers, just as much as it takes workers to staff any business.
It’s simply not built into the private sector to ensure these protections.
Does government screw up? Sure, and I cheer when my profession uncovers bad public spending, such as the Washington Post’s 2016 report that the Pentagon had hidden $125 billion in administrative waste. Do government programs have waste? Sure — Social Security alone pays nearly 72 million people $1.5 trillion a year. It bends the mind to think that could be done without some mistakes, but the error rate of less than 1% seems pretty good.
We all have work experiences. We’ve had stellar colleagues and have worked with some underachievers. I’m willing to bet that in a workforce composed of nearly 30% military veterans, the sense of mission is greater than at the average insurance company. But we all know that even the best workers spread more thinly will make more mistakes and, like my classmate, be more likely to quit in frustration, taking their expertise and commitment with them.
‘Trying to help’
Karen Schroyer, a retired forest ranger who was my neighbor in Colorado, described her colleagues this way: “They don’t get jobs with the Forest Service to make a lot of money. These are dedicated public servants who care about the land and the communities they serve … smart, energetic people who are/were the future of the agency and public lands stewardship.”
The firings, she said, will hurt National Forest visitors and the local economies in gateway towns adjacent popular public lands.
Lost in the glee of dehumanizing Americans who have sought careers serving their government and fellow citizens is the simple reality that the federal government is a critical economic engine. Besides things like providing loans that save innovative companies like Tesla, and pumping $2.3 trillion into the economy each year through Social Security and Medicare, the federal payroll excluding the military and postal service is $271 billion. Consumer spending accounts for 68% of our GDP; these layoffs will harm local businesses.
The loss is greater than that, though. Another friend of mine who spent 40 years in the National Park Service described how he saw his colleagues’ role in helping visitors enjoy our historic sites: “We saw it as trying to help people become better citizens.”
Oh, these awful bureaucrats.
Randy Essex is an editor at the Free Press. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it online and in print.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: I’m a fan of government and the people who make it work | Opinion
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