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If the American government is slow-moving, it’s because rapid change is deadly when you’re talking about healthcare, social security checks, market regulations, food safety, or any of the other countless critical functions it performs. Those federal agencies are, quite simply, infrastructure. And as Deb Chachra showed in her excellent book, infrastructure is how a society invests in its future: in its ongoing economic, societal, and political stability.
In government, that infrastructure is built by laws, policies, and regulations. But regulations alone do not infrastructure make. Regulations require workers to become infrastructure: those workers who labor to understand new policies, how best to enact them, and then work to make them legible and understandable to the American public — and, yes, to enforce them. Without those federal workers, and their labor, these systems fall apart. And the architects of this assault on the federal workforce are keenly aware of that fact.
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For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.
Technology is political.
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It’s a testament to Forest Service workers’ belief in the fundamental value of our jobs that so many of us stuck with it, even when cushier options presented themselves, even when our work so often felt invisible and unappreciated.
As someone with deep ties to a rural area of Colorado, where much (most?) of the land is National Forest, National Monument, National Park, or generally public and BLM-managed, I fear for the long-term affects of the cuts to the U.S. Forest Service and related agencies.
Public land is one of the most amazing things about the United States. And the work these folks do is so often worse than underrecoginzed: it’s completely invisible to most Americans. But we’ll miss it when it’s too late—when under-staffed park resources are damaged, when under-managed forests are polluted, and when nobody has been checking in on the public lands we use for agriculture, resource gathering, and recreation.
Assurances that we’ll all find other jobs before too long miss the point. We don’t necessarily want other jobs. We don’t want sympathy. We want our work, and the places we’ve done that work, to be recognized and valued.