{"id":139830,"date":"2025-03-17T15:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T15:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/activist\/federal-workers-deserve-respect-not-cruelty\/"},"modified":"2025-03-17T15:00:35","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T15:00:35","slug":"federal-workers-deserve-respect-not-cruelty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=139830","title":{"rendered":"Federal Workers Deserve Respect, Not Cruelty"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Traumatized. That\u2019s how Donald Trump\u2019s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, has said<\/a> he wants federal employees to feel. \u201cWhen 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 to put them in trauma.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Villains. These are the public servants who were hired to handle the tasks Congress authorized and provided funding for them to do. They process social security claims for seniors and loans for homebuyers and small businesses. They provide health services for veterans, inspect food, and test water safety. They develop vaccines to prevent the next pandemic, control air traffic, safeguard our nuclear arsenal, and much more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Elon Musk and his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) team have been doing Vought\u2019s dirty work for weeks now, beginning with the \u201cfork in the road<\/a>\u201d email invitation to all federal workers to resign immediately. This was followed with thousands of firings\u2014many of which had to be reversed because the excised workers performed critically important national security<\/a> or veterans\u2019 health care<\/a> jobs. Through it all, federal civil servants across the country have been mortified, waiting to see if they\u2019re next.<\/p>\n

A few days ago, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Musk, dressed in black, brandished<\/a> a very large chainsaw above his head, and screamed, \u201cThis is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.\u201d And on Saturday, February\u00a022, after Trump pushed him to be \u201cmore aggressive,\u201d Musk posted<\/a>: \u201cAll federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.\u201d An email sent by the Office of Personnel Management followed, giving workers until 11:59 p.m. on Monday, February\u00a024, to list five things they accomplished in the past week.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This patently absurd command, issued to millions of civil servants, was met with<\/a> disbelief and immediate pushback, including from the Trump-appointed heads of multiple departments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Common sense, the quality so glibly invoked<\/a> by our current President, tells us that a worker\u2019s worth should never be predicated on what they happened to do in a given week. If any more evidence was needed to prove conclusively that the Trump\/Vought\/Musk assault on civil servants is mean-spirited, counterproductive, and, frankly, clueless, this may well be it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m an attorney who served the last eight years of a thirty-nine-year career with the Department of Labor as a member of the federal Senior Executive Service. My duties included serving on the department\u2019s Performance Review Board, which is charged with overseeing the evaluations of the agency\u2019s senior executives. I can attest that the evaluation process at all staff levels in the department, from top to bottom, focused on employee efficiency and effectiveness in conducting those activities identified as most likely to advance the agency\u2019s mission. This painstaking evaluation process, though doubtless imperfect, is designed to assure accountability and deliver results.<\/p>\n

To me\u2014and, I would expect, pretty much any other supervisor responsible for evaluating a subordinate employee in any federal agency\u2014this latest OPM missive is a cruel joke. It evidences the reckless retreat from rationality in government we\u2019re seeing every day, part of a break-it-and-make-chaos approach that would seem clownish if it weren\u2019t so destructive.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Labor Department administers and enforces<\/a> more than 180 federal laws that benefit and protect 165 million workers at eleven million workplaces. Congress passed these laws with the goal of keeping workers safe and healthy and able to provide for their families, enjoy the retirement benefits they earned, and assert the rights the laws give them. Taking care to ensure those laws deliver what they promise\u2014with the resources Congress provides\u2014is a sacred mission for Department of Labor workers. After almost four decades working with them, I know they honor it as such.<\/p>\n

These public servants, and their counterparts in every federal agency, deserve our appreciation and respect\u2014not the trauma induced by a man wielding a chainsaw.<\/p>\n

This column was produced for\u00a0<\/em>Progressive Perspectives<\/em><\/a>, a project of <\/em>The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\n \t\"MichaelFelsen.jpeg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael Felsen<\/a><\/h3>\n

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Michael Felsen, a former longtime attorney with the U.S. Labor Department, currently serves as a senior advisor to legal nonprofit Justice at Work and as Strategic Enforcement Advisor at Rutgers University\u2019s Workplace Justice Lab.<\/p>\n

Read more by Michael Felsen<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

February 28, 2025<\/p>\n

3:24 PM<\/p>\n

<\/time>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Traumatized. That\u2019s how Donald Trump\u2019s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, has said he wants federal employees to feel. \u201cWhen 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":139831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[5796,15530,11337,12795,18920,11558,59550,21046,37632,14786,11098],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-139830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-cruelty","tag-deserve","tag-doge","tag-donald-trump","tag-elon-musk","tag-federal","tag-michael-felsen","tag-opinion","tag-respect","tag-worker","tag-workers"],"yoast_head":"\nFederal Workers Deserve Respect, Not Cruelty - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=139830\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Federal Workers Deserve Respect, Not Cruelty - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Traumatized. That\u2019s how Donald Trump\u2019s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, has said he wants federal employees to feel. \u201cWhen they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains . . . . 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