When I entered public service nearly a decade ago, I thought I'd do this work until I retire. Today, while I am many years from retiring, I am leaving public service.
To be clear: I am being forced to leave public service. Or, as leadership advised in one email, “Employees are encouraged to consider the Deferred Resignation Program as a voluntary option to mitigate involuntary separations." (Emphasis is not mine.) In other words: Leave now or we'll make you go.
Leave to where, though? If it's up to DOGE, to the private sector. Or, as they explained, "The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector."
That's total bullshit, of course. (This time, the emphasis is mine.)
Public servants support the people who need it the most: hungry kids, disaster survivors with nothing but the clothes on their backs, people with disabilities, senior citizens barely surviving on their Social Security checks. Not to mention our military service members who risk their physical and emotional health, and then depend on a woefully underfunded healthcare system staffed by more underpaid, overworked federal employees.
It is ugly work, being a public servant. You have to love this job to do it. You have to believe, with your whole heart, that humanity is worth caring for even as capitalism grinds it into dust.
And I do believe that.
Because in my time as a public servant, I have never met so many kind, smart, incredible people working together for the greater good. People who try to build equitable solutions within inequitable, oppressive systems. People who know that true change prioritizes humans over corporations, seeks justice for the violence that built this country, and protects natural resources for generations that don't exist yet. People who believe in the promise laid out by our constitution, and are acutely aware of the barriers that stop us from meeting that promise for the people who reach toward it every single day.
I've long believed I could fix these injustices from the inside. By some measures, I've succeeded—there are people in America who benefited from my work. But then, by other measures, things are worse than they've been in quite some time.
Don't get me wrong—I'd do it all again, knowing how it ends. I am incredibly proud of the work my coworkers and I have accomplished.
But there's so much work that still needs to be done. There are still so many people who deserve more than the injustices of the systems we've given them.
We don't have to be federal employees to do that, though. All we have to do is care.
Care, even as automation replaces humanity. Care, even when apathy is replacing kindness. Care, even when it's easier to stare at your phone for another hour. Care, despite every billionaire's best efforts to get you to stop.
My job is being taken from me, but my deep belief that we can do better by each other cannot be stolen.
Thank you for letting me serve you, America. It's been my honor.