In defense of public service

In a time like this, let's remember there are good people in government

Who would boast of wanting to cause trauma to other human beings?

The director of the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would.

Speaking in 2024, Russell Vought, the man who now runs OMB, said: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

I’m angry. And we should all be angry. Public servants are not bumbling bureaucrats or knaves. They are people who went into government to make life better for all Americans.

You can’t protect the Great Lakes without public servants.

Nowhere, in my experience, is this any truer than in the agencies that conserve our natural resources and protect the environment and our health. These people are not paper shufflers. They feel a mission to deliver a clean, robust environment not just for today but also for future generations.

I’ve known countless agency staff who toil long hours for little reward, enforcing environmental laws, keeping our air and water clean, and working to save precious wetlands. They rarely get public recognition for their work.

And yet Vought is firing federal employees across the whole gamut of agencies, from EPA to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from the State Department to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The problem is that special interests who don’t want to be bridled by rules designed to safeguard the public interest have spent decades and millions of dollars to convince Americans that public employees are lazy or evil. And worse, that they are on the dole because the public pays for their service.

It’s so much easier to demonize them than to understand them and their work.

Sure, a nation founded on resisting tyranny has a tendency anchored in tradition to be suspicious of government. But reason should play a part in our views of that government.

I have had cause recently to reflect on the nobility of public service, rendered by both agency personnel and elected officials.

I thought of Bob Delaney, the scientist in the former Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) who tried for years to call attention to the menace of PFAs chemicals. I thought of the DEQ employees who risked their jobs to warn the public about legislation that would damn the environment. I thought of the DEQ employee who refused to respond to pressure to allow a wealthy political donor to build in the public’s shoreland and block it off from public access. And I thought of hundreds of others I’ve met who don’t get public notice but do a conscientious job every day.

I also thought of people elected or appointed to high office. One remarkable Michigander named Prentiss Brown is an example. Brown is best known for his key role in the successful campaign to build a bridge spanning the Straits of Mackinac. But before that he was a member of Congress, the only Michigan U.S. Senator ever from the Upper Peninsula, respected by both allies and opponents for his integrity and ability to work with politicians from both major parties. He took on the head of his own party, Franklin Roosevelt, over the president’s Supreme Court packing plan. He’s the subject of a legal milestone. The governor of Michigan even declared a day in his honor.

I knew another elected official who became a teacher after serving nine terms in the U.S, House. He taught a class that had been titled “Running and Ruling” on the condition that it was renamed “Running and Serving.” This reflected his belief in public service, not public domination.

All in all, public employees are the most dedicated class of people I have known.

But I’m biased.

I knew a “bureaucrat” who worked in government for more than a dozen years and when he passed away, was memorialized in the Detroit Free Press as a man who “gave as much of himself and asked as little in return as any such public servant we have known.”

That man was my father.