Should Federal Workers Be Treated Differently Than Private-Sector Employees?
In consuming the news, one could easily conclude that, as we said earlier in the week, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are carpet bombing the federal government. The wails and screeching breakdowns over the injustice of federal workers losing their jobs are ear-piercing. They are, we’re told, under attack.
After all, these are no everyday workers toiling for large corporations and small businesses – they’re federal employees who apparently are so indispensable to life as we know it that if they are no longer employed at taxpayers’ expense, America and maybe even western civilization will collapse.
Why else would there be so much fuss, so many tantrums, over a few of them losing their jobs?
We noted earlier that even if 100,000 federal workers lose their jobs, that’s a tiny 4% haircut off of nearly 2.3 million federal workforce. Yet we hear about an angry mob – our term – “getting fired up for the fight,” the birth of “fresh grassroots energy (that) came after a wave of layoffs hit government workers in recent weeks” and grousing about the administration’s “extreme, illegal, and unconstitutional actions.“
“It really is a witch hunt that is happening regarding our federal workers,” Maryland Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks said.
Federal workers have sued to keep their jobs, there have been obligatory protests, and in a letter to department and agency heads, more than 100 Democrats showed their desperation to save the bureaucracy that works for them and not the American people. They bellyached about “Elon Musk’s public threat to dismiss any employees who” don’t respond to his email asking them to explain what they do at “work”; called his “threat” “reckless, cruel, unlawful, and unenforceable”; and demanded “immediate action.”
The media can’t resist the personal stories of those who’ve lost their jobs, framing their coverage in a way to lead readers and viewers to believe the federal workers who’ve lost their jobs are victims. Of course, the media ignore the drag the bureaucracy puts on this country.
The polls show, however, that the public supports lopping off the bureaucratic fat. In the latest Harvard-Harris poll, two-thirds said Democrats should take more of a wait-and-see attitude toward Trump’s actions and even “join the mission of cutting government waste.”
Instead, Democrats are enlisting left-wing activists to protest spending cuts in Republican districts, a ploy meant to create the impression that Republicans are rebelling against these cuts, with the mainstream press happily playing along.
Washington should not be running a jobs program, handing out employment for life. Nor should there be any references to federal employees’ “public service.” Not all but surely most are there to serve themselves and their party, which they have generously funded with their taxpayer-provided salaries. (Nearly 84% of all federal worker donations to presidential candidates in 2024 went to Kamala Harris.) It’s a mistake to assume that just because someone draws a federal paycheck that they are wise, hardworking, incorruptible, never driven by their own interests but only those of the people they work for. They are humans, not angels.
The Democrats and their media machine are clearly in a panic over the loss of their federal workforce, the one that keeps them in power even when the GOP has held the White House and both chambers of Congress, and expands it when Democrats are in the majority and occupying the executive branch. They want federal workers to be treated differently than private-sector employees, who, with minimal exception, must compete in a meritocracy.
The political left doesn’t want federal employees fired or even having to show up for work. In the minds of Democrats, the bureaucracy is there solely to expand and consolidate their political power, and in some cases to help them (as well as a few Republicans) become rich through a slush fund bankrolled by taxpayers.
When a private business is struggling, operating inefficiently, or running deeply in the red, the workforce has to be trimmed. The same must be applied for government, which in Washington is struggling, operating inefficiently and running trillion dollar annual deficits. To give federal workers a special status is to devalue every employee who doesn’t work for the public.
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