Across the federal government, Americans who have dedicated themselves to public service now find their entire careers are dependent on America's new worst bosses.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has invited staffers to his grand office overlooking the Mall to imbibe IPA beer from his home state of Montana and has trumpeted a new policy of allowing employees’ dogs to roam the department’s hallways on selected days. But as soon as government rules allowed, he reassigned dozens of Senior Executive Service career staff members without consultation or notice, relocating some to other parts of the country.
The good news: You can bring your dog to work. The bad news: You're now working for a department you've never worked for, on issues you've never worked with, in a state you've maybe never been to, for a boss who legally can't fire you but can do almost anything else he can think of to destroy both your will to live and the carefully built-up competence of your old department. But hey, have fun with the dog.
Well, at least you know your boss values your input. He wouldn't be reassigning you to an entirely new, unrelated department unless you had made a name for yourself doing things he no longer wants done. You could have a boss who isn't sure why you're even there in the first place.
[W]hen the agency decided to reconsider a controversial HUD policy granting transgender people access to sex-segregated shelters of their choice, [Secretary Ben Carson] surprised the staffers who had crafted the policy by excluding them from the discussion.
But what's important here is that Trump's newly appointed ultra-rich scions and industry apparatchiks are just regular folks.
Unlike her predecessors, [Education Secretary Betsy DeVos] no longer uses the private, express elevator to reach her seventh-floor suite, taking the same ones that everyone else uses, and has given up the agency’s private chef, according to spokeswoman Liz Hill.
She may have reversed protections for transgender students and be angling to turn the education of American children into the next great American profit center, but never let it be said she wasn't willing to share an elevator with you peons.
So the next time you think you're having a bad day at work, just reflect on an entire federal government full of career public servants now under the thumb of people who have based their own careers on opposing everything those employees ever worked for.
But no. No, you still have to show up. You still have to show up and smile to your boss when you meet them in the elevator in the morning. Just you, them, and the most gassy and incontinent dog the local animal shelter would let you adopt last weekend.