I apologize in advance for the ramblyness of my comments, it's 3am, I have a beer in my hand, but for all who stick with me, thank you.
I am a federal employee. I'm sure I'm not alone on this site. You know, I didn't mind taking one for the team when President Obama enacted a two-year pay freeze for federal employees a couple months back. I understand these are hard times, thanks to the irresponsibility of the Bush Administration, but we are where we are today. We can't turn back the clock to the days of fiscal responsibility, you know, the days of President Clinton and budget surplusses...Soooo to get our country back on track, we have to share in the pain. It's my patriotic duty. I get that.
But then things started to go south during the Lame Duck. The luster of taking one for the team started to tarnish. Why the HELL should I take a pay freeze to save $2 billion for the government, when the Congress AND Obama agreed on extending a 3% tax cut for millionaires which costs the government something like $200 billion? Makes no sense. At least to me.
Surprise! Obama's gesture of freezing the pay of federal employees did absolutely nothing to quell the appetite of Republicans to punish Federal Employees for the excesses of the Bush Administration. And you know what, Boehner and Co have done a fantastic job of painting Feds as lazy, tenured, overpaid bureaucrats who just sit on their Herman Miller chairs and suck up taxpayer dollars.
Being on the inside, I find a problem with that. Some of the people I work with are the hardest working, most productive people I've ever known (and I've spent plenty of time in the private sector). They believe in the mission, and they believe deeply in helping to save lives and property. I personally work for the National Weather Service, and we work round the clock to watch out for tornadoes, snowstorms, windstorms, or even more benign things like fog. There are over 4000 people in our agency who are driven to protect life and property. But we are just one agency. There are many others, such as the FAA, CIA, FBI, wildland firefighters with the Dept of Interior, food testers with the Dept of Agriculture, drug testers with the FDA, and more and more...all folks whose main goal is to help their fellow Americans stay safe. They are all federal employees.
We are just one agency. But the Republicans in Congress have suggested a continuing resolution which would cut 28% to NWS funding for the rest of this fiscal year. This would have a bunch of impacts on numerous things we do to help protect Americans. No hurricane hunter flights to investigate Katrina, less forecasters to handle tornado outbreaks or floods, and don't even think about having any extra resources to devote to investigating climate change. No doubr under the Republican plan, there would be federal furloughs...wreaking havoc on our employees' budgets.
This is the new world we're entering, I fear. Unless our Democratic President and Democratic Senate get a backbone and stand up to these wanna-be John Galt types, we're going to turn into a figment of the worst-case imagination our ancestors could ever dream of.
Please, Mr. President, and Senator Reid, stand up to these assholes who are trying to tear our country apart.
Thank you.
SeaChange.