By now you've surely heard about President Trump’s federal hiring freeze. It does not apply to the military, however. How effing noble of him! Take that, you damn feh-eral gubmint!
Guess no one told Trump that veterans make up 31% of the civilians in the federal workforce. To be fair, I didn’t know either, not until I got an e-mail from VoteVets earlier today.
It’s a fact easily corroborated by an article in the Military Times:
Veterans make up almost one-third of the federal workforce, up 5 percentage points since President Obama took office, according to new data released by the Office of Personnel Management on Veterans Day.
That translates into more than 623,000 veterans working in civilian federal posts, 31 percent of the 2 million individuals working in civilian government jobs.
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In 2009, Obama signed an executive order mandating increased hiring preferences and efforts for veterans, calling it both “a sacred obligation” for the country and an important model for private sector businesses.
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About 12 percent of the federal workforce -- about 241,000 individuals -- are disabled veterans. Of those, about 146,000 have a disability rating of more than 30 percent.
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About 4.3 percent of veterans in America are currently unemployed, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released earlier this month.
It stands to reason that there are recently discharged veterans who would have liked to continue to work for the federal government in a different capacity. Now they won’t have that chance.
There might even be veterans who, bamboozled by the message of Trump’s goofy hat, thought they could help “make America great again” as civilians. If they now expect Trump to help them find private sector jobs, they’re going to be bitterly disappointed.
Maybe Führer Drumpf does support our troops. But to our veterans, he might as well be saying “Thank you for your service, now go [expletive] yourselves.”