Federal Workers May be ‘Bone-Headed,’ But Government Is Not the ‘Enemy,’ Claims President. Honestly, You’re Screwed Either Way.

Speaking at a
town hall in Minneapolis, Minnesota, President Barack Obama
defended, sort of, government employes who have been embroiled in a
series of scandals and shenanigans—not all of them, by any means,
the fault of his administration. Basically, he said that government
workers may “do bone-headed things,” but that doesn’t mean
“government is the enemy or the problem.”

What’s interesting is that the president felt compelled to argue
that the federal behemoth’s minions are stupid rather than
malicious, when all he’d been asked is if they could expect regular
paychecks.

His comments came in response to Katie Peterson, a 29-year
employee of the Defense Contract Management Agency, who noted,
“there’s been a few rough patches with three years of pay freeze
and sequestration and furloughs. And we’re just kind of wondering
what you foresee for the next fiscal year for government workers.”

Obama then went into an extended and slightly off-subject riff
on the merits of government and its staff.

Well, let me make a couple of points.  First of all, folks
in the federal government, the overwhelming majority, they work
really hard doing really important stuff.  And I don’t know
why it is that—(applause)—I don’t know when it was that somehow
working for government—whether the state or local or federal
level—somehow became not a real job. When you listen to some of the
Republican rhetoric sometimes you think, well, this is really
important work that we depend on.

OK. We’ve all heard the president’s “government is good” schtick
before, even to the point of denigrating private initiative
(“you
didn’t build that“). But soon the response gets a
bit…defensive?

historically, it’s been the private sector that drove the
economy, but it was also a whole bunch of really great work done by
agricultural extension workers and engineers at NASA and
researchers at our labs that helped to create the platform and the
wealth that we enjoy.  And so this whole idea that somehow
government is the enemy or the problem is just not true.

Now, are there programs that the government does that are a
waste of money or aren’t working as well as they should be? Of
course. But I tell you, if you work in any company in America, big
company, you’ll find some things that they’re doing that aren’t all
that efficient either. Are there some federal workers who do
bone-headed things? Absolutely. I remember the first week I was on
the job I talked to my Defense Secretary, Bob Gates, who’s older
and had been there a long time. I said, do you have advice for me,
Bob? He says, one thing you should know, Mr. President, is that at
any given moment, on any given day, somebody in the federal
government is screwing up.  (Laughter.)  Which is true,
because there are 2 million employees. Somebody out there—if 99
percent of the folks are doing the right thing and only 1 percent
aren’t, that’s still a lot of people.

Yeah, but companies “that aren’t all that efficient” can’t make
their customers keep paying them so their doors stay open. And
“federal workers who do bone-headed things” have the means to turn
lots of people’s days to shit, awfully fast—and they’ve done so
with astonishing frequency.

That’s sometimes literally true, as with the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) employees who
crap in the hallways of their own buildings. Yeah that’s who
you want
raiding your business because you’re supposedly befouling the
environment.

And shitty days a-plenty, generally in a less literal sense,
resulted from Veterans Health Administration officials cooking the
books on waiting lists for care,
denying treatment to vets even as they guaranteed themselves

glowing performance reviews.

Even if we suspend all rational judgment for the moment and
accept that it was mishap and incompetence, not malice, that

caused the loss of potentially sensitive emails sought in the
investigation of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official for
politically motivated targeting of non-profit groups, how is that
supposed to be reassuring? Is the IRS now going to accept
dog-ate-my-homework excuses from records-shy taxpayers at audit
time?

Is bone-headedness contagious? Because EPA officials apparently
contracted the same strain, with
similar consequences for their electronic storage of
potentially awkward communications.

When all is said and done, it doesn’t matter whether government
officials intentionally choose to be your enemy, or just fuck
things up through bone-headed stupidity. If you’re on the receiving
end, you’re screwed.