Elon Musk has, if only by accident, done one good thing. He’s made millions of Americans begin to realize that maybe some of the dedicated public servants who have ended up being caricatured as layabouts in the federal workforce do something vital after all.
It’s been a pet peeve of mine for about 20 years that Democrats have largely failed to defend the civil service. Back when I was at The American Prospect, co-founder Bob Kuttner wrote a piece during the 2004 election arguing that if John Kerry won, he should highlight one federal worker every month—a scientist, an engineer, an educator, what have you—and stand with that person at a press conference explaining how that person had, that month, saved taxpayers money or come up with some innovation that made life a little bit safer or better. It was a great idea then—and it’s still there for the taking, J.B. Pritzker (or whomever).
It would drive home a crucial point that your average person just doesn’t understand: The public sector makes vast and vital contributions to the economy. They’re just not as visible as private-sector contributions.
Everybody understands what the private sector does. It builds things, it makes things, it innovates, it employs people. All that stuff is very visible. The public sector’s contributions, though, are largely invisible. The public sector contributes to the economy by preventing bad things from happening. The most obvious example here is the Federal Aviation Administration. There are 45,000 domestic flights a day in the United States. About 99.999 percent of them reach their destinations safely. But drop that to 98.5 percent, and we have 675 airplane crashes a day. No one would get on a plane. The economy would grind to a halt.
Expand that out to meat inspection, drug safety, floodplain management, highway safety, various forms of consumer protection, the safeguarding of forests and agriculture—a major crisis in any one of these areas would have profound economic and public safety consequences. There would be screaming headlines about disaster and death. But by and large, these things don’t happen. Those stories don’t get written. And that’s because the people of the federal government are there, manning their posts and keeping watch.
The unhappy irony for these faceless protectors of the common weal, which is exploited by right-wing politicians and shock-jocks and so forth, is that they make the news only on the very rare occasions that something goes wrong. They are, as author David Zweig celebrated, the Invisibles—the people whose excellence is measured by the fact that you never learn their names, never know what they’re doing to keep the world spinning. As Mary Boyle, a Democratic commissioner on the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), told me over the weekend: “We always say, we’re doing our job the best we can when no one knows we’ve stopped something.”
I quote Boyle for a reason. Last Thursday, after working at the commission for 15 years and serving as a commissioner for the last three, she was abruptly fired. Boyle told me that a couple of DOGE boys showed up at the offices Thursday afternoon. Shortly thereafter came an email from the acting chair, a Republican, asking the commissions to agree to a dose of DOGE oversight. At 6 p.m. that evening, she said no, she wouldn’t support that. At 6:45, an email came from the White House informing her of her termination (I should say that Boyle is a friend, and the wife of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne). “It was clearly just a set-up for us to say no,” she told me.
The CPSC is a perfect example of how the public sector makes valuable but invisible contributions to the economy and to people’s lives. Until 2008, baby products in the United States underwent no safety review. That year, the commission worked on a bipartisan basis to establish safety standards for car seats, cribs, and the like. The result, Boyle said, has “clearly been a decline in injuries and deaths.” Similarly, the commission regulated those powerful fidget-toy magnets (sometimes called Buckyballs, for Buckminster Fuller), which caused injury and occasional death to children who swallowed them. Before regulation, CPSC estimated that there were 2,300 emergency room visits a year related to ingestion of these devices. After regulation, that dropped to 1,300.
World-changing? Maybe not. But to those 1,000 parents who didn’t spend a freaked-out night in an emergency room wondering if their kid was going to die, I’d say their work is pretty important.
This week, the Trump administration is finally going after an executive branch agency the right has hated since the day of its creation: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren. A document began circulating last Friday, which was slated to be published in the Federal Register today (I have a copy, but it’s a pdf and isn’t linkable), from acting CFPB chair Russell Vought (Mr. Project 2025), ordering the bureau to dial back on nearly 70 pro-consumer opinions and guidances it has issued in recent years. The bureau, Vought wrote, “is reducing its enforcement activities in light of President Trump’s directives to deregulate and streamline bureaucracy.”
I talked over the weekend with a Biden-era bureau official, to whom two of these new edicts especially stood out. One was a 2022 CFPB guidance concerning nursing home debt. When a resident dies, nursing home corporations sometimes track down other family members to pay any debt, often in aggressive ways. This harassment is illegal, under a 1987 law (it’s all explained here). Another was an effort by the CFPB to crack down on predatory lending to members of the country’s armed services, who are surprisingly frequent victims of this unscrupulous practice.
In other words: Donald Trump is telling corporations that they can resume screwing over dying old people, and people who wear the country’s uniform. “It’s open corruption,” the Biden-era official said. “They’re just saying, ‘We don’t really give a shit about people.’”
It’s high time the Democrats pick up my old colleague Kuttner’s idea of celebrating federal workers. Given Musk and DOGE’s unpopularity, the opportunity is there in a way it’s arguably never been in my adult lifetime (which roughly coincides with Ronald Reagan’s attacks on the government) for Democrats to shift public opinion and get people to see that they should be glad that dedicated and honorable people like Mary Boyle are looking out for their interests, and that Trump and Vought and their minions are creating a country in which more military people will get ripped off and more babies will die.
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