The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
In early April, as the planet’s richest man chainsawed apart the livelihoods of thousands of hard-working Americans, I was back in Princeton, New Jersey, where I once attended high school, to visit my dad and cover the local “Hands Off” protest against President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions.
Michael Lewis was speaking at the university that week, along with Dave Eggers and journalist Casey Cep, to promote a new book titled, Who Is Government? Lewis had recruited these and other authors to profile unsung heroes toiling behind the scenes in the civil service. These were talented, selfless, innovative, people whom nobody ever would have heard of, but who had nonetheless done incredible things on behalf of the public—improving services, saving money and lives, and generally making America greater.
So we went to the event. Lewis, colorful as always, set about telling the story of his main character, when all of a sudden, it struck me: I know these people!
His protagonist had grown up in Princeton and I’d been to his house many dozens of times. Christopher Mark was the eldest brother of a kid I hung out with regularly. My friends and I used to sit around in their living room, listening to music, smoking pot, and pilfering his dad’s liquor. I don’t think I ever met Chris, and certainly never knew he’d ended up working for the federal government, where his out-of-the-box thinking led to a way of reducing mine cave-ins that has saved countless lives in the United States and around the world.
We rarely hear these stories, in part because they get drowned out by the small-government, anti-labor rhetoric of the right. Instead, when we think about civil servants, we often think about inefficiency, DC gridlock, maybe some imagined IRS auditor—or the tired DMV clerk who barely acknowledged our presence that time.
It’s easy to depict a faceless bureaucracy as a monster. Historically and otherwise, the Republican Party has aimed to do just that—and the Trump-era scapegoating amounts to extreme assholism. But the right-wing haters have got it wrong.
Federal workers are, as a whole, heroes.
From staving off pandemics to tracking down loose nukes to compiling key economic data to predicting the paths of killer storms, they serve thousands of critical functions that we—as least until the Trump administration started breaking them—have taken for granted. They are also our neighbors, scattered all over the country—the vast majority work outside the DC area. We need them and their talents. They shouldn’t have to deal with all this bullshit.
Let’s rewind a bit. The conservative establishment has railed against the federal government since at least the mid-1970s—too big, too bloated, etc. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address, adding that America’s woes “parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”
“It’s not my intention to do away with government,” Reagan went on. “It is rather to make it work…Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”
In fact, it is the government that needs smothering, said Reagan acolyte Grover Norquist, who founded the antitax group Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 (at Reagan’s request, he claims), and later launched the Reagan Legacy Project to memorialize him. “I don’t want to abolish government,” Norquist told NPR’s Mara Liasson in 2001. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
That’s where we’re at now: The bathtub drowning.
The federal workforce actually increased by 195,000 (about 7 percent), under Reagan, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those gains were wiped out during the 1990s, mainly under President Bill Clinton. The civil service began to grow again on President Joe Biden’s watch, but as Trump took office in January, federal workers still comprised just 1.8 percent of the US labor force, versus 2.5 percent at the end of Reagan’s presidency.
And then came the chainsaw.
Elon Musk “doesn’t understand context… He’s the one trick pony,” and his trick doesn’t work in government. “Breaking things is not actually the road to productivity.”
Past Republican politicians assailed the size and scope of government but were generally respectful of its employees—despite griping that a federal job was a “job for life,” as Newt Gingrich put it. It was too hard to hire and fire, they said. “The civil service system,” New York University expert Paul Light told the Washington Post in late 2016, after Trump announced plans for a federal hiring freeze, is “very slow at hiring, negligent in disciplining, permissive in promoting.”
These are fair criticisms, and ones that federal workers also would like to see addressed.
I spoke not long ago with Max Stier, CEO of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit whose mission is “building a better government and a stronger democracy.” Every year, his organization conducts a massive survey of workers across the federal government—more than a million participate—and “employees think that poor performers are not dealt with effectively,” he told me.
I had reached out to talk about the Trump administration’s assault on federal workers, rhetorical and actual, which was unprecedented—and the onslaught of egregious management behavior: Loyalty tests. Creepy DOGE demands that distracted people from their work. Mass firings by email and tweets. And an utter lack of transparency about what was happening and who was calling the shots.
Improving hiring and promotion, and dealing appropriately with bad apples and deadwood—these are solvable problems. But broadly demonizing public employees, of whom the majority care deeply about their missions, and who work as hard as anyone—often for low pay and certainly with less recognition—is no solution.
Try telling that to Russell Vought. As Trump fended off lawsuits and criminal charges (with mixed results) en route to his second term, Vought, Trump’s former (and current) Office of Management and Budget director, was hatching a diabolical plan.
In speeches unearthed by ProPublica, he called Trump’s candidacy a “gift of God” and spoke of changes that would facilitate mass layoffs of workers who enjoyed civil service protections. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said, a tad gleefully. “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. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
Other Trumpy conservatives embraced similarly hateful vibes. As Mother Jones‘ Anna Rogers notes in her recent story about resistance from public sector unions:
Amid DOGE’s assault, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a nonsensical tirade suggesting that federal jobs are not “real jobs” and federal workers “do not deserve their paychecks.” Such sentiments were pervasive long before Trump’s minions started kneecapping the federal workforce. In a May 2024 proposal to reduce federal employee benefits, House Republicans asserted, “The biggest losers in this system are hardworking taxpayers who are forced to subsidize the bloated salaries of unqualified and unelected bureaucrats working to force a liberal agenda on a country that does not want it.”
Musk, shoving empathy into a wood chipper, suggested that slaving away for billionaire owners is somehow a higher calling than government service.
It’s not that business principles shouldn’t be used to run government better, Stier told me. They should. Yet government can’t—and shouldn’t—be run like a business, because it has “phenomenally large” constraints that don’t exist in the private sector. Thanks to shifting politics, for one, agency budgets change abruptly and funding often isn’t appropriated on time. (We spoke well before the latest shutdown.) Also, as I pointed out to my colleague Garrison Hayes a while back, the government performs all kinds of services whose value cannot be quantified on a balance sheet.
Federal agencies are massive, and the talent to run them does exist in the private sector, Stier says, but it’s a “small subset” of leaders who can grapple with that shift in context—leaders who “know what they don’t know, and know they need to learn, and know they need to rely on the people who are there to succeed.”
More often, especially under Trump, the people who come in are more like Musk: “He doesn’t understand context. He doesn’t understand the difference and doesn’t care. He’s the one trick pony, and that trick I don’t think really worked in the private sector, and it doesn’t work at all in government. Breaking things is not actually the road to productivity, and it has very large public consequences,” Stier says.
“When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership. You’re losing guidance and mentoring. “
Part of our problem is weak PR: Political leaders within agencies are terrified of criticism, so they control access to their workforce in ways that prevent good news from getting out. (Trump’s agencies tend to just pump out trollish propaganda.) But Stier, who has come to understand the federal workforce better than just about anyone, gets to see the positive aspects. And contrary to Trumpian rhetoric, “the reality of the culture of the place is one of service. They’re not clock watchers. They’re not lazy. They’re people who are there for purpose. If they’re in NASA, it’s because they want to explore the universe. If they’re at the VA, it’s because they want to serve veterans,” Stier says.
“And the place where the federal workforce exceeds private sector norms is around that sense of purpose, the willingness to go the extra mile,” he continues. “Where they fare most poorly against the private sector is around the quality of leaders, and that’s a longstanding problem created by the fact that the people in the top don’t care about management—and that has huge implications for the entire organization.”
That is, when things go wrong, it’s often the political bosses fucking them up.
Since January, for instance, Trump has had seven different people—seven!—overseeing the IRS. The latest acting commissioner is Scott Bessent, who is also Treasury Secretary—because managing enormous agencies is so easy, you can just double up.
For his second term, President Barack Obama appointed as IRS chief John Koskinen, who had deep experience turning around large organizations in the private sector. Koskinen spent his first three and a half months on the job visiting two large IRS offices every week, holding lunches and town hall meetings with rank and file staff. “My theory has always been, if you want to know what’s going on in an organization, go talk to the people doing the work,” he told me back in April. “And I was just delighted with the level of [commitment].”
By contrast, three and a half months into Trump’s second term, tens of thousands of IRS workers had read the tea leaves and accepted a DOGE buyout. This exodus would include “a significant number of very experienced managers and executives,” Koskinen predicted. “Over 30 percent of the IRS has always been eligible for retirement, but they don’t retire, because they’re committed to the mission. When, literally overnight, you lose that many people, you’re losing leadership. You’re losing guidance and mentoring. You really are disabling the IRS.”
Trump’s deputies also fired nearly all IRS employees hired under President Biden, again decimating the agency’s ability—only recently regained—to pursue wealthy tax cheats and complete sophisticated audits of billionaires and private partnerships with opaque ownership structures.
This is gonna cost us dearly. In late 2023, Democratic members of the congressional Joint Economic Committee cautioned (unsuccessfully) against IRS enforcement cuts, noting that every dollar spent auditing high-income Americans brings in $12 in revenue. Under Trump, the agency’s unstable leadership, decimated workforce, and gutted budget—not to mention the prospect of his toadies illegally weaponizing the IRS—bode poorly for revenue collections and for the prospect of a smooth 2026 tax season, with Americans getting refunds on time.
This was all a management failure that would never be tolerated in the private sector. “Having spent 20 years doing turnarounds of large, failed enterprises,” Koskinen told me, “the last thing I ever thought was: Well, let’s starve the revenue arm! The salespeople—cut them back!“
When our government screws up, we freak out—and yet we rarely bother to recognize the career people who work tirelessly, and without any fanfare, to keep things functioning as they should. “I would say the vast majority of people rely on social programs, some of which they don’t even realize are funded by the federal government,” Koskinen told me. “All of those are at risk. When you cut park rangers, suddenly there are long lines trying to get into a park.”
That was a prescient example. On December 16, the Washington Post wrote about an internal Forest Service report showing that public lands are now rapidly deteriorating as a direct result of the Trump administration’s decimation of staff.
Earlier that week, too, the Post had reported that the VA planned to abruptly eliminate 35,000 open positions for doctors, nurses, and other medical roles, bringing VA staff cuts to 65,000 for the year—about 10 percent of its workforce.
The administration claimed the positions were superfluous, but one mental health the Post interviewed said that veterans in her area were already waiting 60 to 90 days for an appointment, and that she and her colleagues were desperate for backup: “We are all doing the work of others to compensate.”
Back in 1981, during his inaugural speech, Reagan had said something else: “Those who say that we’re in a time when there are not heroes, they just don’t know where to look.”
We sure do now.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.