Regarding Federal Workers

An Open Letter to President Trump

President Trump, today you are being inaugurated, again. An ominous specter permeates over the government offices. Everyone knows how you are filled with an angry vendetta against the Deep State, the mass bureaucracy that seemed to go out of their way to stifle your presidency. You were blindsided by the nature of Government in your first term, and realized just because you were in charge on paper didn’t mean the bureaucrats would actually listen to you. You’ve vowed you won’t make this mistake this term.

The Federal Bureaucracy has always had a reputation for its snail-like pace with many going as far as calling Federal Workers largely bums of which 90% could be rid of with no one noticing, and Musk has implicitly said he wants to do to the federal government what he did to Twitter with his DOGE. You agree with him.

Before a year ago, I rarely had to deal directly with the federal bureaucracy. I never had to fight my taxes and or defend myself against a federal crime. The only federal aid I’ve ever requested was college loans. I did know a large swath of people who worked in the state sector, whose usefulness I’ve always questioned. One relative had a job for thirty some years with the State Government that I could have automated away in a weekend. Then there’s, of course, the infamous DMV.

This changed about a year ago when I found myself unsatisfied with my current job and was contracted by a recruiter for a quite different position in government contracting. All of the sudden I welled up with an unspeakable amount of patriotism, witnessing in tears the American Flag rustling in the background. My lips began to sing “God Bless the U.S.A.”

It might have been more like this.

Note my experience is in military procurement in a base far from Washington D.C. The office I work in is about 50% federal workers with the rest being contractors with various firms like Booz Allen Hamilton and Raytheon. We largely work side by side, and for general tasks there is very little difference in treatment between the two factions. The only real difference is Federal Workers have their official Government photo with the American flag in the background in Microsoft Teams, while contractors just have whatever they feel like. That being said, there is a distinct difference in attitude between the contractors, who consider this a job like any other, like mercenaries. The federal employees have a different mindset, a sense of vocation.

If you look at federal payscales for jobs, the first thing you will notice is their pay tends to be significantly lower than the industry standard. For my job, I would be paid about 25% less if I came in as a federal employee. Because of this, the incentive structure is far different than base income. Federal Workers are strongly rewarded the longer they work in Government, being given a generous retirement package that keeps them locked in the system.

The other is social status, with large public accolades given for long-timers. This used to be true in the private sector also but has largely gone away. There is a sense of identity in working in the Federal level, also fostered by the difficulty in getting fired for anything other than blatant incompetence or criminal behavior. They are willing to take lower pay for the security of knowing the system has their back in the long term. There are a few people in my office who took some of their wedding photos outside the government office to show the level at which they consider themselves lifers.

The reputation of federal workers is that of office slugs, incredibly lazy drones trying to shirk work as much as possible, but this hasn’t been my experience. Most everyone I work with works hard and has a strong sense of duty and patriotism. Uncle Sam has given his loyalty to them, and they give right back. To be clear, I mostly work with upper-tier government employees, at the GS-10 pay level or higher. These are the people most likely to be “locked-in” to the system, working their way up for years. From my limited experience, the enthusiasm and work ethic of the lower tiers is a very different story.

The slowness of the Government is the nature of our system, which is (supposedly), law-based vs. people based. To federal workers, it’s not as important to get things done as it is to follow the rules properly. If that causes a slip in schedule, so be it. One guy put it to me this way. “We’re going to follow the rules, no matter how stupid.” To them, loyalty to the nation is loyalty to the system and its rules, and boy are some of the rules stupid.

To be clear, they usually don’t start out that way. When legislation is passed to fund a certain project using a certain method it seems to make perfect sense. Then the Executive branch reads legislation and implements it in the way that makes also sense on paper. Once it percolates down to the actual work though, all the inconsistencies start to show, and it’s very hard to pivot. Instead of a CEO with near total power to enact policy, there’s a slow grind of our branches of government, with even the Judiciary entering the fray sometimes on how to interpret and execute a bill. Curtis Yarvin made an excellent post that went into this in detail, along with the challenges Trump and Musk are going to come across when trying to make the bureaucracy more efficient

America has no executive branch. It has a procedural branch: the administrative or “deep” state. In this procedural branch, every employee in every agency, from top to bottom, has not goals, but duties. These duties are set by rules and procedures. These rules and procedures are set not by the executive branch, but the legislative branch.

Federal bureaucrats do not really have a CEO. You, Mr. President, are the closest we have, but even presidents are hamstrung by the words in legislation and often battling worker who wants to interpret it differently. They are largely how the system is organized, most of the time byzantine and inefficient with responsibilities delegated to various factions that all need to sign off. Also, there are countless protocols on what I am NOT allowed to do, and little reasonable direction pertaining to specifics on how am ALLOWED to get my job done. The duties of many of these offices, whether it be cybersecurity, work sourcing, or internal management, is to make it impossible for subordinates to do something wrong, but often make it impossible to do anything at all.

Because of the nature of governance, the size of meetings are comical. I am in Teams sessions of twenty people regularly or so from several different organization listening in on a couple poor saps who are actually doing the work. And yes, I’m often one of those useless people. The rules require our presence. While this has to do somewhat with interdependencies of a complex piece of software/hardware, it has more to do with a simple lack of any sense of urgency. Meetings regularly run over, with little motivation to keep them on schedule. There’s also little tabling of items or letting the two or three interested parties hash it out and make a decision. Every time, the same crowd is invited, where maybe a quarter actually say anything in the entire session.

Also, because employment is essentially permanent, it only takes a few people in places of authority to make everyone’s life a living hell. Whether it’s by slow-walking efficiency updates because it’s not the way he’s used to, or creating onerous rules himself to develop his own little fiefdom, they’re the equivalent of punching a brick wall. The compliance groups have a vested interest in making everyone’s work difficult to gain power for their own department, but have no responsibility in easing the burden. The story I see again and again is the people in the field trying to get things done while the upper levels are covering their asses and giving minimal assistance.

I got my first taste of this with something that I thought would be a slam dunk, installing a piece of free software that is used by countless software developers. Well, I learned my designated machine was locked down, hard, and anything installed needed the blessing of IT. Fair enough, I made the request and got a response from a lady with a laundry list of credentials on her byline that more or less went like this.

“That software is not approved for your type of laptop. Therefore your request for has been denied”

“Okay, can I get a waiver.”

“No, fuck you.”

“Okay, so can I get the right laptop?”

“Talk to your supervisor. Also, fuck you.”

This was annoying, but the fun had only started. It ends up that government computers don’t allow USB drives to be inserted (they don’t even allow Bluetooth). Kepp in mind, this is an UNCLASSIFIED laptop, and the regulations are still this onerous. Okey, so I went to IT again. This time a much more helpful guy responded to the ticket in a friendlier and helpful manner.

“I read your security request and am not able to give that permission. You’re going to have to go through this other channel and get permission from the General in order to do this. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but one guy tried this and gave up after six months, so you’re likely fucked. Sorry about that.”

“Thanks for the info. Is there an alternative? I need it to do X.”

“I see. For your case there’s this other backchannel that gets permission easier if you <insert convoluted method>. Some people have had luck with that.”

I ended up getting a laptop more in tune with my needs and entered did backchannel way of getting USB drive access. This wasted weeks on the task I was working on, which in most placers would be catastrophic, but not in the government. There’s a hysterical dismissiveness of timelines, the dates just whooshing by with not a care in the world. This isn’t because the people who work here are incompetent or lazy either. The technical people I work with are toe-to-toe with anyone I’ve worked with in the private sector, but the minute you start making progress another edict gets passed down that needs compliance, or a vendor is going to be late, or some form of new scope creep is demanded from above. They know it’s a losing game, and also understand they won’t get fired, so it’s shrugged off.

A lot of the reason governments outsource to contractors and outside firms isn’t necessarily because they have better technical skill, but because they don’t have to deal with burden of a massive bureaucracy, and they laugh all the way to the bank. There have been instances where security protocols made it literally impossible to do certain tasks, so they get outsourced to a contracting firm that does everything in a far less secure environment for an obscene cost.

Also, the huge firms we outsource to absolutely nickel and dime the hell out of us. The smaller ones we have a beneficial relationship with. Of course, from a sourcing perspective, it’s better to go with a large firm because no one is going to be mad at you for picking Lockheed Martin when they drop the ball, but they absolutely will if some small local software shop does. Also, these guys do a lot of lobbying, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise they grease a lot of wheels to get large projects. Many of these contracts would be better off being done in-house.

A Proposal

Mr. President, you had a terrible time with cheating bureaucrats, criminal leaks, and slow-walking necessary changes, not to mention being outright lied to. I would have nothing but respect if you burned down the offices some of the worst offenders, like the FBI, CIA, EPA, etc. and salted the earth. They are unredeemable. For other federal agencies and workers though, I would argue the solution needs to be more nuanced.

I know you are planning on making significant changes to the job security of federal workers. While I agree their level of job security is obscene, you need to be careful. First off, part of the deal of lower pay was the implicit understanding that you would be taken care of and not be removed on a whim. And stable government workers should not be fired on a whim. The core nature of government needs to be stability, which means the workforce inside can’t go through massive churn and restructuring constantly. In any case, I think it’s not possible to make them at-will, but your edict to force workers back into the office will likely churn out a decent percentage of the chaff.

The Government is not a corporation, but oversees an entire people, with a near total monopoly on hard power. There is also the culture of thinking oneself as a public servant, that one’s work makes our country stronger. While some of us will scoff at the idea, the people I work with truly believe this. Federal workers do need some protections, though not nearly as absurd as their protections today. Because you are removing some job security though, you are going to have to raise their wages to be more competitive with the private sector. A little give and take would go a long way in creating a new equilibrium.

Second, like I stated earlier, a lot of the issues with the snail’s pace of government programs has to do with the bureaucracies passing down draconian edicts that are incredibly difficult to comply with. Because of the “tell what not to do”, or the “tell them to do it in the most cumbersome way possible” strategy of management, there is little room for flexibility. The solution needs to be a more honest atmosphere, where the people passing down the regulations have to support their compliance regulations, and if they don’t have the staff to do this, then maybe their demands need to be tapered off. Countless memos get passed down full of nonsense that has clearly gone through little to no field testing or work assessments, and it ends with everyone spinning their wheels.

Also, even when a policy is reasonable, and can be executed with minimal fuss in 80% of systems, it often ends up, especially with cybersecurity, that the edicts make the other 20% of projects impossible to comply with it, causing months of chaos. There needs to be far more flexibility to make judgement calls that keep the spirit of the law without causing mayhem on people trying to get work done. A spirit of agency while still respecting the rules pushed through in the legislation is necessary. Believe it or not, most of the people I work with aren’t afraid of responsibility and would love more agency in getting things done.

Enforce a mandatory transfer every five years or so. A person who makes his own little fiefdom is a menace that will suck the life out of an organization for his personal gain. This also has the benefit of making people learn new skills and not ossifying into a comfortable and easy role and becoming unable or unwilling to react to necessary changes.

As a final note, when you walk into the door of the White House, tell IT to uninstall Powerpoint from every federal computer. Enforce a white paper policy for all government meeting. Fire anyone who walks into a meeting with a Powerpoint decks and watch productivity increase by three-fold. You’re welcome.

Good luck Mr. President, I’m rooting for you, even if many of my co-workers are not. If I come in this week and am told I am being let go, along with the rest of the crew, I’ll smile and consider being fired by The President himself a badge of honor.

Thank you for reading Social Matter, as always, if you enjoyed this article, please subscribe and share.