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| Image by StarFlames from Pixabay |
Most days, I like my job. I’m an engineer, and I get to help people fix things. There is something satisfying about starting with a thing that doesn’t work and ending up with a thing that does. I am part of a team composed of mechanics and welders and machinists and quality assurance people and many others that all work together to fix boats. Is that team perfectly seamless and efficient? No. But stuff gets fixed. And most people are doing a good job. I will admit that some people are just doing enough not to get fired, but they are the minority and I assume any large organization has people like that.
I have done variations of this job for the last twenty
years or so. I never really questioned if the work was valuable. The boats need
to float and do boat-things. We help them do that. It was self-evidently a good
arrangement. But recently, I have been told that being a civil servant is
inherently wasteful. That claim has made it hard for me to be motivated to do
my job and help fix boats. Because I don’t want to be wasteful. I want my labor
to be valuable.
Allow me to back up a bit. I work for the Department of
the Navy. I am a civilian who helps fix their boats. I am writing this blog
post on February 25, 2025. Currently, the Department of Government Efficiency
(DOGE), is hard at work making the government more efficient. Which sounds
nice. I’m not a fan of wasting money, and I think that the government should
know where its money is going. If we are being inefficient or wasteful or if
people are committing fraud with the government’s money, we should totally stop
that. In short, the government should be a good steward of the tax dollars it
spends.
My problem with this process as it’s being performed is
not the quest for more efficiency. My problem is the idea that public service
is inherently wasteful, that working for the government is not valuable at all.
The idea goes thusly: Private businesses create value by creating profit.
Public services do not create profit and therefore cannot provide value.
Because public services cost money and because they don’t return a profit, they
are wasteful.
This is certainly one way to judge the value of something,
but it isn’t the best way. Let’s use the National Parks as an example. The
United States of America is a huge and beautiful country. To that end, we have
63 National Parks. While most of the parks are free to visit, they are not free
to operate and maintain. It takes a lot of people a lot of time to keep those
parks suitable for their visitors. By the profit definition of value, these
parks are an unnecessary drain on federal tax dollars. They are value-less. But
I hope you’ll agree that National Parks are actually very valuable. They
preserve some of the natural beauty of America so that coming generations can
enjoy them and be proud of the land they call their home.
I also want to look at the Navy because it’s near and dear
to me. The Navy costs money (a lot of money) to run. A navy needs to pay for
sailors and boats and fuel. The Navy doesn’t turn a profit though. The federal
government spends a lot of money putting people on boats and having them float
around in the ocean. And the ocean, being composed of water and salt, tries its
best to turn those lovely boats into piles of rust. If you want boats floating
around in the ocean so that you can call it a Navy, you’re going to have to pay
people to fix them.
In both of the above cases, the government had needs (to preserve
the epic grandeur of America’s national treasures and to have sailors float around
in the ocean) and they hired people to help meet those needs. The people they hired
are not valuable in the profit centric view of the word, but they are doing
something valuable in that they’re providing services (providing access to
America’s most epic scenery and providing satisfactorily floaty boats,
respectively).
Unless you’re an anarchist, you want the stability and
services the governments offer. A well-run government is essential to a prospering
nation. And I get that what constitutes a well-run government varies from
person to person. There are reasonable debates to be had on how large
government should be and how much impact it should have on your life. And I
agree that our current government has a lot of room for improvement. What I don’t
agree with is maligning the people who accepted the job offers provided to them
and who do those jobs to the best of their ability.
When people rail against the bureaucracy, they’re not yelling
about some faceless, amorphous blob. They’re talking about park rangers and boat
welders and courtroom janitors. They’re talking about engineers maintaining
ships and aid workers helping people around the world. They’re talking about
the thousands of people who provide the services necessary to make America run.
It is my prayer that we, as a nation, will treat people
with dignity and respect. The people who are losing their jobs are not villains.
They’re just people who did the job that was asked of them. We should not cheer
their firings. We should not rush them out of their buildings without enough
time to gather their things. At a minimum, an absolute minimum, we should thank
them for their work.
Sincerely,
Me
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