We are driving south on the Thruway once again. Heading to New York City for the weekend. Gary will be going to see a Met game with our son on Saturday. I will find ways to amuse myself – not a difficult assignment in the City (in my heart the one and only city :)).
I am struck by the disconnect between my life and the world at large. It is a beautiful day. The green hills of the Catskills are showing hints of color as we approach fall, they still look green and lush. The air is clear, the is sky a cloudless, azure, and the sun is beaming. If I only look at the world right in front of me, it is lovely. But, I know better. If I cast a wider look I think of the tragedies around the world (in Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, etc.), the crackdown on free speech, the unrelenting gun violence in our country, the degradation of our environment that leads to more and more natural disasters, the fear that immigrant families live with, the extraordinary corruption and lack of integrity of Donald Trump. Most of those realities don’t touch me directly. Not yet, anyway. I am fortunate. I can afford higher prices in the supermarket and at the gas pump. I already own a home. Gary and I have savings – hopefully enough to ensure a comfortable retirement. We are able to make these pleasant plans for the weekend.
I look at the cars streaming down the highway, wondering about the inhabitants. Are they like me, heading off to pleasant destinations? If they aren’t faced with serious illness or job loss/uncertainty, are they just taking things at face value, telling themselves, “It’s all good.”
I worry that people like me, who are in my economic situation more or less, can delude themselves that everything is okay. If your immediate family is okay – they are gainfully employed, aren’t married to immigrants, perhaps own homes, if their children are healthy – you can put your head down and ignore everything that is going in the wrong direction. They may not be paying attention to the larger picture. Maybe they don’t need Medicaid, maybe their employment isn’t impacted by federal budget cuts, maybe the confusion around vaccinations isn’t concerning if they aren’t immunocompromised, maybe they assume that since they have resources, their children and grandchildren will be protected.
But life is fragile, and things can change on a dime.
A mass shooting and/or random violence can strike anyone. A natural disaster can unmoor a whole family. Illness can change everything. We don’t have control over these things, for the most part, but when they happen, we hope to have support to get through it. Some things could help minimize the occurrences – gun control (or see my last essay on repealing the second amendment), more mental health services, steps to slow down climate change could help. But even if we can’t stop these things from happening, we can build supports to help us cope and knowing that support is there, can lessen the anxiety. The current attitude, though, is in the opposite direction. Our social safety net is being decimated. Cutting FEMA, loosening environmental regulations, reducing funding for mental health and pulling government resources from medical research are all disastrous policy choices.
More than that, though, the attitude that is allowing all this to happen flows from our president, his callousness, his thirst for revenge, his selfishness. We, the American people, are being led by someone who is a terrible role model, and we are worse for it. We cannot allow his character flaws to become part of our national character.
The danger is that if our lives are largely blessed, or if our vision is narrow, we can pretend all of this is not happening.
I hope your eyes are open. I hope, as we approach the midterm elections, you pick your head up and use a wide lens to look around and then vote accordingly. It’s not all good and if we continue on this road, we will no longer be the United State of America that I grew up believing in, its values established in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men* are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
*I note the archaic use of the term men and understand it to mean all humans.
Lady Liberty still stands in the harbor of New York City, as viewed from Governor’s Island on a recent visit.
For a while, after the election, I put my head firmly in the sand. I could not follow the news. It was all too overwhelming. But, there was only so long I could maintain that approach. I have looked up and I am frightened by what I see of the actions taken by the Trump administration. I cannot be silent.
I started this essay about a week ago and I keep having to change it, add to it, amend it. I can’t keep up with the transgressions. It is also hard to prioritize which of his moves are the scariest. Right now, I am leaning toward Elon Musk hooking up private servers to the Office of Personnel Management to communicate with all federal employees (and have access to all of their information). No one elected Elon Musk, and that is just the first problem with this scenario.
Perhaps in second place is the attack on DEI, especially blaming it for the tragic collision between the jet and the army helicopter resulting in the loss of 67 lives. Again, there are so many things wrong with the Trump Administration’s reaction to that calamity that it is hard to know where to start. One can assume that whenever things go wrong the playbook will call for blaming previous administrations and DEI.
It seems like the Trump administration strategy as they start their new term is the equivalent of a military blitz. Send everything in all at once so we are caught off guard and don’t know what to respond to first. Before you know it, the whole system will be upended. Some may have voted for him for that, but I don’t think the majority did. In fact, when you look at the numbers, Trump didn’t even win a clear majority of the vote. He has no mandate. Upending the system will have many unintended consequences (or if they were intended, they will be damaging in ways most Americans did not sign up for).
I have a master’s degree in public administration and policy from Columbia University. I completed my comprehensive exam to earn a PhD in public administration and policy at the University at Albany, but I did not write a dissertation – that means that I took all the coursework for that advanced degree but didn’t do the final piece. I share this because I have some background, some credentials, with which to evaluate what the Trump administration is doing. Most people do not want to get bogged down in the weeds of policy or administration. I understand that, and I am not going to go that far in this essay, but we do need to take look behind the rhetoric.
Most of us learned, at some point, about the separation of powers which characterize our government structure. You don’t need to go to graduate school to understand that. At a fundamental level, Trump was violating that by trying to freeze federal funds already approved by Congress. He offered no rationale or plan for going forward. Fortunately, his power grab was stopped, but it will not be the last attempt. We will face similar challenges in the future and these questions will need to be faced: Should federal agencies even comply with those orders? Are they constitutional? If they are unconstitutional, can they be disobeyed? Do they have to be obeyed until the courts decide? Meanwhile, how much damage will be done? Which brings us to a subject that is not sexy but may be increasingly important in this current environment: the role of the civil servant.
One of the first things you learn when you go to graduate school in public administration is the history of the civil service. I will not bore you with the details. It is important, though, to know why, in a general sense, we have that system. It was installed as a response to rampant corruption and a belief that the government was not being responsive to the people who fund it. Before the civil service existed, government hiring was through the spoils system – where family members and loyalists were rewarded by elected officials with positions in government without regard to their competence. It was called the spoils system from President Andrew Jackson’s quote ‘to the victor goes the spoils.’
This led to two major problems – ineffective policy and a culture of bribery. The needs of the people were not a priority. This was how things were run from 1828 (before 1828 it was also a system of patronage, but positions were awarded to elites; Andrew Jackson broadened it to include the ‘common man’ in 1828) until 1893 when the Pendleton Act was passed and created the federal civil service. Most states followed suit and created their own versions. It is important to note that the civil service does not cover the highest positions in federal or state agencies. It was understood that it was appropriate that the leadership reflect the will of the President. Secretaries/commissioners of departments and layers below that are political appointees. There was also recognition that under those policy-making positions it was important to have a class of employee who was not beholden to politics or parties, who could maintain stability and provide service when administrations changed – thus the creation of the civil service.
An essential element of the civil service was to provide a pathway to jobs with the government that was open to all, as opposed to through connections or bribery, and that would test for competency. Over the years the system has evolved with more specialized testing especially as government work required more expertise (lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc.). There have also been measures to make the workforce more reflective of the demographics of the country, ensuring that barriers to women and minorities were removed.
The civil service system has its flaws. For one thing, tests are never perfect. There is also no question that it is too difficult to fire employees who are lazy or inept or worse. But that does not mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water. We need to improve the system. President Trump appears to be trying to circumvent the whole structure. It suits his agenda to have everyone beholden to him and the MAGA universe. This would be a case of history repeating itself if we don’t learn from what happened before.
There is another aspect of this changing perspective on civil servants that deserves attention. Starting in about 1980, with the candidacy and election of Ronald Reagan, there has been a steady stream of insults hurled at government employees. Some of that may be a result of those flaws in the civil service system mentioned above. I think of the negative experiences many had with the Department of Motor Vehicles back in the 1970s when a trip to apply for or renew a driver’s license was an all-day affair in Brooklyn. The public facing clerks could be surly and seemingly inefficient. But, that was not an indictment of government as a whole. It was a failure of management and some aspects of the system, but it does not follow that we don’t need a Department of Motor Vehicles or the civil service. In fact, today, I believe, the DMV functions pretty effectively. We renew our licenses (for the most part) and registration online. When we go to the office, it is set up to process customers efficiently. Vehicles do need to be registered, and they need to be inspected. We need commercial trucks to be regulated for the safety of everyone on the roads.
We can argue about how much government is necessary; how much regulation is needed when balanced with the red tape created. That is fair game, and we can agree to disagree. But, disparaging the public workforce is counterproductive. Who wants to go into public service when it is so disrespected? So devalued? Government needs the best and brightest. I will never understand politicians who degrade the folks who implement their policies.
I went into public service because I wanted to help people. I wanted to make a difference in the quality of life of my community, to contribute what I could to improving services. Sometimes I felt frustrated because the work I did was far removed from that goal, so I looked for other opportunities. But even when I was buried in the bureaucracy of the department of tax and finance, I still believed I was doing something worthy. Collecting taxes in a fair and efficient manner is necessary. No one likes paying taxes, but without them essential services can’t be delivered.
The take-aways I offer are four-fold:
Know our history – let’s not repeat the errors we have made in the past.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Change structures, improve efficiency, but we should not dismantle whole systems impulsively and without planning for what replaces it and understanding why it was established in the first place.
Stop demeaning public service. Even if you are a libertarian, you need to value the essential work of the government and the people who do it. Insulting people is unhelpful to say the least.
Recognize that public and private management are different in important ways. The model of private business, where profit is the motive, is often not appropriate for the provision of public goods. Sometimes it may fit, and it may make sense to move certain functions to the private sector or adopt their systems, but many services don’t lend themselves to that approach.
We can’t sit back and allow the dismantling of our government without proper checks and balances. We need to make sure Congress hears us. We need to support organizations that are bringing lawsuits that raise legitimate questions about whether constitutional lines are being crossed. Please pay attention. Though it is tempting to put my head back in the sand, none of us can afford to do that.
Stories I Tell Myself 