An Open Letter to the Democratic Presidential Candidates
As the Democratic debates continue, not a single question has been posed to the candidates regarding a major component of the President’s job — managing our federal workforce.
If elected, you will be the head of our federal agencies and their more than 2 million employees, 85% of whom live outside the Washington D.C. Metro region. Your title won’t just be Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, you will be the CEO of the largest employer in our country.
Donald Trump is failing our federal workers. An independent report shows that 60% of federal offices have reported a drop in job satisfaction under his leadership. It’s no surprise that employees feel this way. We are witnessing a systematic effort to dismantle our government from the inside out.
From its inception, Donald Trump’s administration has set out to inflict harm on our public servants and the vital role our federal agencies play in serving the American people. He undermined our federal agencies through executive order, appointed agency heads who are overtly hostile to the missions of the agencies they serve, and is responsible for the longest government shutdown in our nation’s history. This administration has launched attack after attack on the nonpartisan civil service — severely undercutting workers’ rights, deliberately leaving agencies understaffed and key positions unfilled, and using employees as bargaining chips in budget negotiations.
Secretary Sonny Perdue is blatantly suppressing scientific research at the Department of Agriculture by forcibly relocating two key agencies whose objective research clashes with the political agenda of this administration. Employees were given 33 days to move 1,000 miles or lose their jobs. As a result, staffing at those agencies plummeted by 75%, critical research reports have been left unpublished, and millions of dollars in grant funding has stalled. We’re seeing similar efforts being undertaken at the Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Labor Statistics — relocations in the name of bureaucratic efficiency that are just a pretext to suppress objective research and decimate the federal workforce.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has advocated cutting billions of dollars from her agency’s budget, including funding for public school programs like textbooks and mental health counseling. In March of 2018, the Department of Education unilaterally imposed a collective bargaining agreement that drastically diminished workers’ rights. When union representatives tried to appeal this action as an unfair labor practice to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, they were unable to obtain relief because the agency lacked a general counsel and couldn’t issue any rulings. This is still the case.
The administration is purposefully hollowing out federal agencies, driving out career experts to make our government less effective and efficient. Whittling down the federal government strengthens their argument that government is incompetent, empowering them to outsource critical government missions to special interests, virtually erasing accountability and oversight.
Federal employees are often the best of us. They are scientists, FBI agents, postal workers, air traffic controllers, and national park rangers. They believe in the work that they do, often forgoing more lucrative careers in the private sector to serve the country they love.
They deserve a government that believes in them. Instead they’ve been met with outright hostility by this administration.
In the House, we’ve been fighting back, but what this President is doing will have lasting damage to the integrity, morale, and retention of our federal workforce. It will be that much more difficult to recruit and retain the talent you will need.
Federal workers are the people who will make your policy agenda real. Americans, regardless of political affiliation, rely on their work every day to ensure the food they purchase is safe, to get their Social Security checks on time, and to provide our veterans with the best possible care.
Federal workers make America work. What will you do to reinstill faith in our nation’s best and brightest that a career in public service is one worth pursuing?
Jennifer Wexton is a freshman congresswoman for Virginia’s 10th district, representing tens of thousands of federal employees, and is an undecided Democratic primary voter who will cast her vote on Super Tuesday.
