Sarah Vowell and Dave Eggers Celebrate Public Servants in ‘Who is Government’
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From KQED in San Francisco, this is Forum. I'm Mina Kim. As the Trump administration attempts to slash the federal workforce, a new essay collection edited by Michael Lewis asks, who is government? Who makes up the, quote, vast complex system Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss and celebrate?

Essay contributors Dave Eggers and Sarah Vowell join us to talk about the scientists who discover new planets and the archivists who safeguard the nation's historical records. We'll also get an update on the legal effort to get federal workers' jobs reinstated. What public servant would you like to shout out? Join us. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

As federal workers suffer the ordeal of being hastily fired by the Trump administration, then maybe fully reinstated under court order, a new essay collection, written before the chaos but published yesterday, aims to recognize and celebrate civil servants. Called Who is Government?, it offers insight into their contributions and motivations for working on behalf of the public.

We'll learn this hour from Sarah Vowell and Dave Eggers, who contributed essays to the collection about scientists at NASA and record keepers at the National Archives. But first, we get an update from NPR Stephen Fowler about the status of fired probationary workers now that two federal judges in California and Maryland ordered their jobs reinstated late last week. Stephen, welcome to Forum.

Thanks for having me. So, Stephen, tell me, what did the judges order exactly in these two cases?

Well, it's first important to step back at the big picture. There have been numerous different actions taken at just about every single federal agency in the government in the last seven or so weeks. One of them was the termination of probationary employees, which are people that are either brand new into working for the federal government or brand new into their role.

Not necessarily brand new people period. They could have been and yeah, yeah and with these terminations there have been allegations that the termination process for probationary employees was not followed and so there have been Complaints filed with the Merit Systems Protection Board which governs things like this and in several different federal court cases so what we had was back-to-back rulings and two different federal courts or

ordering two different buckets of agencies to return

thousands and thousands of terminated employees back to their jobs and to give certain evidence of that within a certain amount of time. And so it's more than tens of thousands of workers across many agencies, not all of them, with different deadlines for potentially how to do it, all while it is being appealed by the government. And the judge's rationales were that these people were not fired lawfully, right?

Yes. I mean, there is a very specific process. It's very hard to fire government workers. It's very hard to hire government workers. And so there are specific procedures in place for how you can go about firing employees. Probationary employees for the federal government have fewer protections than other workers, which is why they were kind of the first to go and first targeted. But even then, the lawyers argue that, and the judge agreed with, that these procedures weren't followed.

And so the Trump administration has filed appeals of these judges' decision, but will they still have to reinstate the employees the way that these two judges have required them to do while the case goes through the courts?

You know, that's where just the added layer of complication with just how fast the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency led effort to restructure things, revamp things has. This is kind of a side effect of it. Excuse me. It is incredibly easy to

say you're fired we're firing these people we're cutting everything off but as we're finding it's very hard to kind of put the genie back in the bottle there have been declarations from different people within different federal agencies saying we are putting these employees back but on administrative leave because we need time to find places for them to work to restore their security badge access to restore their email access and so on and so forth and so

you know, part of the government's argument in these appeals and in these requests to not have these employees be reinstated this way is they say, you're going to have to ask us to do all of this work yet again, and then the appeal could be successful and people could be right back out of a job. So it is incredibly complicated, incredibly confusing. And, you know, there have been reports trickling in that that hasn't fully been followed and people just don't know what the status of their job is. But in the meantime, so they're

So many of them are on paid administrative leave. And so they're essentially being paid not to work. It was one thing that a federal worker told CNN where they said the whole fraud, waste and abuse thing. It's kind of hilarious now because they're wasting money by paying us all not to work. I've also been hearing, though, Stephen, that many probationary employees have received no word from their agencies about whether they're going to be reinstated. Have you heard that, too?

It has been a little bit of a piecemeal response that those of us that have been focused on restructuring have been hearing from people across the different agencies. A lot of the agencies collected and have then been sending this information to the personal emails of employees affected because

If they were terminated from their job, they don't have the government emails anymore. But, you know, for example, I was just reading something before going on air from Reddit that I haven't been able to reach out to and confirm yet. But people saying, oh, they were sending this to the government emails that we don't have access to and we can't check. So we don't know if we're being reinstated because we don't have the emails. And so it is not a uniform process. It is not an organized, orderly process.

And, you know, it's, you know, you can push a button, so to speak, and fire a bunch of workers. But like I said, it's very, very hard to do things properly back together orderly. With everything up in the air with regard to what the ultimate outcome of these court cases could be with people getting a piecemeal response from the administration with regard to these court orders and whether they're being reinstated. What are you hearing about how these fire workers are doing, how they're coping if they're

raring to go back or if they've already, you know, made new plans in their lives? It runs the entire spectrum. I mean, in addition to the probationary workers that have been terminated, the Trump administration has asked agencies to make larger plans for large scale reductions in force. And in many cases, we're seeing agencies propose

cleaving entire offices off of their organizational charts and moving forward with plans to ask people who might be eligible to retire soon to take an early retirement or to take a buyout and leave. And, you know, so the state of the federal workforce right now is very much in flux.

And we have heard from people who are trying to figure out how to return to an office that they've never been to. We've been hearing from people who are talking about cramped return to office spaces because they didn't plan for having everybody show back up at once. People who

are trying to take the retirement options and saying it's being denied because their positions are critical but yet they're on administrative leave and so you know chaos is a word to describe what we've been hearing but it just really it runs the entire spectrum of emotional response from people who you know didn't ask for all of these changes to be made this quickly that's the through line that we've heard

We're talking with Stephen Fowler, NPR political reporter, covering the restructuring of the federal government. We're getting the latest developments in the legal challenges to Trump's federal workforce firings. And so you were saying that essentially the administration is, in addition to these probationary workers being fired or attempt to fire them,

is asking agencies to identify more ways to reduce staff, right? And so far, some of these agencies have submitted plans. So what do you know about what the plans are and at which agencies, Stephen? There was a sort of on-paper deadline of last week for agencies to submit their beginning steps for initial cuts and reductions that basically boiled down to identifying what functions the law requires

and what people the law requires and basically asks them to find ways to figure out how to get rid of everything else we have seen it at smaller scales play out in much more dramatic effect with some independent agencies and organizations like the u.s institute for peace usaid and others where there is this effort to go in and kind of strip it down to the studs of no more than what

the Trump administration says is legally required. We have also seen initial reduction in force plans put into place at the education department, for example, where between the early retirements, the buyouts and notice of planned rifts,

The headcount is slightly less than 50% reduction from when Trump took office in January. And so, again, it's not a uniform thing. It's not like we woke up last Friday and suddenly the federal government is 25% less.

lighter there are rules and procedures and timelines in place that govern the timing of doing a reduction in force and who's eligible and what kind of notice they're supposed to give and how it interacts with unions and things and so this is kind of just the next phase

of an ongoing process that really will last until the start of the next fiscal year in October. And we will start to see those things shake out over the summer. Another wrench thrown into those plans, of course, is the court orders. Part of the figuring out how to reduce force and reduce offices is complicated by having to add people's jobs back that were terminated from the probationary status. So it is all a very dynamic process.

slow-moving process that at the same time is moving at lightning speed. Right. So this will play out over a long period of time. And then meantime, a judge ruled that the way Elon Musk and Doge dismantled USAID was likely unconstitutional. Will those fired workers be reinstated or is essentially it saying that USAID in its current form will be protected?

It's hard to fully know what the full effects of that ruling is going to be The judge has ordered a number of steps to be taken Including dealing with some of the workers that have been terminated personal service contractors that have been terminated and things but it is not the final step in the process because there are appeals and in some cases like when dealing with contracts you can't just go back and say

hit the undo button and uncancel a contract that easily or restart services that easily. And so, you know, there will not be, you know, USAID in the form that it was at the beginning of the Trump administration. But what that form looks like after the judge's ruling and then ultimately after the legal battle ends and, you know, plans at the State Department

uh make to try to absorb some of that work who's we don't really know what it's going to look like but we do know that the judge's order

Order is trying to put a halt and reverse on a lot of those changes But again, it's it's much easier to shut everything off and shut everything down than to turn it back on again And so that's what we're gonna be watching in the coming days and weeks to see what that exactly looks like Steven we just have less than a minute, but we'll be talking about NASA later in the show Have you heard anything about what NASA plans to do?

NASA has announced a few reductions in a couple of offices, especially the Office of Chief Scientist, and they say there's going to be more to come as part of the larger cuts being ordered. But we don't know what that'll look like either. Stephen Fowler, NPR political reporter covering the restructuring of the federal government. Thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you.

We were talking about the latest developments in the legal challenges to Trump's federal workforce firing. Stay with us. We're going to talk about who these civil servants are who have been affected, the federal workers who make up the government and the work that they do that's been chronicled in a new book called Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service. Essay contributors Dave Eggers and Sarah Vowell will be with us. So stay with us, listeners. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union, now offering real-time money movement with instant pay. Make transfers and payments instantly between financial institutions, online or through Star One's mobile app. Star One Credit Union, in your best interest.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Berkley Rep. Presenting here, there are blueberries. Unearth the chilling truths hidden within a Nazi-era photo album and what they reveal about our own humanity. Playing April 5th through May 11th. Learn more at berkeleyrep.org. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

As the Trump administration attempts to slash the federal workforce, a new essay collection asks, who is government? And two of the essay contributors are with me. And also you, our listeners, are as well. Tell us what public servant in your life that you would like to shout out. Or if you are or were a government employee, what you wish people understood about government.

Thank you.

as well as being the voice of Violet in The Incredible. She wrote a piece about the National Archives called The Equalizer. Dave Eggers is with us, author of many books, including The Circle and a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, The Eyes and the Impossible, founder of McSweeney's and co-founder of 826 Valencia. His essay for Who Is Government is on NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and called The Searchers. Dave Eggers, welcome to Forum. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. So glad to have you. Sarah Vowell, welcome to you as well. Hi. So you were both with me as we were listening to Stephen Fowler's update. Dave, how have you been reflecting on these efforts to slash the federal workforce, having just spent time with federal workers at their agencies? Well, and I have a lot of friends that work in D.C. who have been really dedicated civil servants for decades. And I

go to bed every night not knowing what's going to, if they're going to have a job in the morning. And, you know, when Michael Lewis proposed this idea maybe a year ago, there's already been this sort of inherent distrust, I think, of civil servants and federal workers and the government. And he was trying to get at where does that come from? Can we sort of re-educate people to understand

to properly give credit to those that work for the government. And we had no idea it would be this prescient, of course. But it's so sad to see just how chaotic the whole thing has been, how indiscriminate. And it's fitting that Elon Musk shows up with a chainsaw because

It's that kind of indiscriminate, sort of unthinking, sort of willful, and kind of cuts that

I'm babbling. Sarah, you go ahead. Well, I mean, just in terms of thinking about the magnitude of the federal government and what these people do and the problems they solve or prevent from happening, it's just such a, it is a huge, huge entity and

And I could see how someone who, you know, invented a car might think, I can invent a car. I can solve government. But he didn't invent the car. Somebody else did. He bought that company. But, you know, the government does these very complicated things like trying to prevent terrorism and thinking about how to prevent wildfires and just all the coordination that goes into these huge projects.

Huge things they do for us, the people. And I guess part of the project, the quaint, you know, brief we got from Michael Lewis and the Washington Post who sent us out into the government was just go find a federal worker and explain what they do.

And because I think a lot of Americans are fairly unfamiliar with what the government does at scale and are, I guess the bright side of what's happening now is it's very educational about what the government does for us, the citizens. Well, let's talk about what they do. Dave, tell us about Vanessa Bailey at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and what she accomplished there.

Well, I've always been a NASA fan and got to see the last space shuttle launch and got a really deep understanding of the agency. And I was so it far surpasses your wildest expectations in terms of how NASA runs and JPL, too, in terms of how humble everybody is, how hardworking and how

reluctant they all are to take credit for anything. And so I thought, well, you know, I didn't know I would be allowed to write about the JPL for this series, but they are government workers and our tax

our tax money goes to these incredible projects of exploration in space. And I went on the website and I saw this woman explaining something called starlight suppression and how they had to use starlight suppression to see beyond certain stars to find exoplanets that might have life on them. And I thought, such a beautiful phrase, right? There's so many great phrases in NASA and JPL and space exploration that

And so this woman was named Vanessa Bailey, a young scientist at the JPL lab down in Pasadena. And I got in contact. And, you know, a few weeks later, I was given a tour of JPL and met a lot of the other scientists down there and

It was, you know, one of the more mind-blowing days of my life. And learning over the next many months of everything that they're up to and how within, you know, maybe it might be within a decade, we might know...

not just is there life on other planets, but which planet it's on. So within our lifetimes and our kids' lifetimes, for sure, we'll know where there's life. And they're working on that right now. So it was incredibly inspiring. And Vanessa actually discovered or saw life

An exoplanet, right? She was in graduate school at the University of Arizona. And at that point, they've found many, many exoplanets, but they've only seen, at that moment, they had only seen 14. There's a lot of different ways to infer that there's an exoplanet, because like shadows that, you know, near a star, all of these things, but to visualize it with a telescope and...

She was... She found the 15th one at that point and got to... I thought maybe she'd get to name it, you know, the Bailey exoplanet, but it has this, like, you know, bunch of numbers and letters as a name instead. But...

Again, even then, she found the 15th one. Barely any hoopla, no big credit, no big promotion. She said there was like a little article in the school paper about it. But then she went on after that to work at JPL, and she's been working on a telescope that will be sent into space in the next few years that will be –

get us much further into finding where those exoplanets are that can sustain life. Because it will do starlight suppression, right? Which is also how you met another person at JPL named Nick Siegler. Am I getting... Yeah, there's two ways. So to see... You want to find a planet that's in the Goldilocks zone, close enough to the sun to support life, like our planet here. So it's easy to find the planets that are really far away because they don't have this bright sun around.

eclipsing or, you know, so bright that you can't see behind it or beyond it. So they have to dull or somehow suppress that light to see beyond it. Does that make sense? Like if you're looking into a lamp and you want to see what's on the wall next to it, you sort of have to block out the light of the lamp. And so they have to figure out a way to do that. And so there's two ways. One is putting a little like block in the telescope itself, kind of like a little...

star-shaped block, microscopic almost. And the other way is two spaceships, a giant telescope in space and then a huge flower-shaped unfolding...

device 60 meters around that would go 50,000 kilometers ahead of the telescope and block the sun from there. So it's like coordinating these two objects in space. So one of them is a microscopic, incredibly delicate, coordinated electronic thing. And the other one is like old time NASA giant ships in space. So

Those are the two ways that they can do it. Incredible. Well, Sarah, give us a peek into what's happening at the National Archives and Records Administration and tell us about Pamela Wright, who she is and why you call her the equalizer. Well, I was looking for someone with a democratic spirit in general. I was also looking for a federal worker who comes from west of the Mississippi. I live in Montana and my theory is

You know, we want our stories told. We have to tell them. And so I found this woman, Pamela Wright. She's from Conrad, Montana. She grew up on a ranch up in north central Montana and graduated from University of Montana. And her job at the National Archives, which I quickly figured out, her background completely informs how she does this research.

very technocratic job, which is that she was in charge of digitizing the archives and sharing the federal records that we all own with everyone in the country. And because most of the actual, you know, there are 13 billion records in

And most of them are in D.C. or Maryland. Some are at a few satellite branch archive places where, you know, like where she's from, it's a 32-hour drive to the archives. So she's trying to share by digitizing the records, putting them on the website, putting them on the Internet, etc.

sharing records with Wikipedia was one of her projects. She's trying to make it completely democratic, the access to the records we all share. And one of her projects also is this thing called History Hub, which is really fun to tool around on where anyone anywhere can ask a question about history.

And there have been, you know, tens of thousands of questions asked about the records. The question will be answered by an archivist or some other federal worker or an army of volunteers. And one of her big accomplishments at the National Archives was

establishing a citizen archivist corps of volunteers, because the archives are perennially underfunded. And one way she got around that was by recruiting volunteers to help scan records, help transcribe them, which is, you know, you can scan a record, but

Let's say you're a 14 year old who can't read cursive. How do you make that accessible? So there are just, you know, thousands and thousands of volunteers who transcribe the records from anywhere, you know, in their kitchens.

and type those up. And also these volunteers on History Hub. And some of the questions are just all over the place, but a lot of them are just, you know, military service people looking for their discharge papers, that kind of thing, or practical, you know, people researching their families. The other thing she did was...

help put the censuses online, the federal census, which sounds sort of boring until you start digging in there and looking for your own family, looking for your, and, you know, I learned some things I didn't know about my own family, looking at these censuses that are online. And another way she saved money was partnering with these

websites like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch, which could be controversial, I guess, but these records would not be scanned or digitized without all this help from these private companies. Because, you know, one thing she talked about, I asked her about how her background growing up on a ranch in north central Montana affected how she does her job. And she said, you know,

just using the resources you have to do something new. Like she grew up gathering water from a cistern and canning vegetables and knitting her own hats in the winter, you know, and she uses that background to try and, you know, be more efficient and get what she can with the money she had to work with so that every single American, no matter where they live, can access the records that we all jointly own.

Well, listener Scott writes, my main concern is the historians within the government. The time that we're living in is unique. It will be studied 20, 50, 100 years from now. The quiet work of gathering and storing documents is bipartisan and it will pay dividends for the future knowledge of this country, whatever it looks like.

It really is incredibly moving to be able to look at these old historical documents. I think you described these documents, these original documents, as having a certain charisma, Sarah. But I'm wondering if you could tell the story of...

looking at the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created the work-study program. I was a work-study kid as well. You were? So tell me why it moved you. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, one thing I knew right away was when I was going to try to tell Pam Wright's story is all of our stories are in the archives. And I could use, you know, she's a homesteader's granddaughter, so we looked at the Homestead Act.

And then I asked her, one of the first questions I asked her was, were you a work-study student at University of Montana? Because I was a work-study student at Montana State. We're rival schools, by the way. That's how much I like this woman that I'm profiling a grizzly. But she got into archives because she got a work-study job at the University of Montana's archives transcribing tapes of oral histories of the smokejumpers. And

One thing the federal government does in a lot of ways, the work-study program is one of them, is helps train the next generation of workers. And part of that program from the Higher Education Act of 1965 was giving students money to help pay for their educations, needy students needed.

but also giving them work experience. And for someone like Pam or someone like me from these working class families, it's sort of our first introduction to a middle class professional life. And we were looking at the Higher Education Act of 1965. And I say, like, she wouldn't have been standing there looking at it without the Higher Education Act of 1965, nor would I. I was Pell Grant. I was work study. I was Stafford Loan, all those things.

And there are so much of what's in the archives. You know, you can go a lot of different directions depending on what you're looking for. But certain government programs do help build the workforce more.

Yeah.

Let me go to caller Linda in Redwood City. Hi, Linda, you're on.

Hi. I was just thinking about the federal workers I encounter or deal with the most often, and I'm a frequent visitor to the USGS website after an earthquake happens, and got thinking about the fact that that's a service that only government will provide, that there's not enough profit in maintaining the network of sensors and things that provide the data. And one of the problems that I see with the decisions that are being made now is

is that it really is undermining the fact that there are just some services that government provides at a reasonable cost, and the workers I know who work for the federal government, state and local governments are all hard workers, believe in their jobs as a teacher. I know most of my colleagues put in hours that didn't get paid for, but I...

You know, I see it whether I was just in the courthouse, the people working in the courthouse are busy doing their job. And the perception of these people as being unnecessary just minimizes the fact that we're now a country of 430 million people and we have a big system to run. And I just want to add one other thing is

relating to what Sarah said about work students learning their jobs. I was the career technical ed coordinator for a local school district and

We got money from an act that was created in 1940 to train, give students the equipment and materials they needed in technical classrooms, career classrooms. So, you know, whether it was typewriters or computers or stuff like that, we gave, you know, that grant gave money so that schools could afford to help kids develop job skills. And the gutting of the Department of Education seems...

Horrific from my perspective, because as somebody who monitored that grant and made sure money that came into the district was used for career ed programs, getting rid of those workers who were few, there weren't a lot at the state level and there are not a lot at the federal level. Not overseeing that program means those dollars don't go where they're needed.

they should be are supposed to be directed by the law. Yeah. Well, Linda, thanks so much for those reflections and multiple agencies as well. We're talking about and honoring the contributions and the character of federal workers this hour with Dave Eggers and Sarah Vowell and with you. We'll have more after the break. This is Forum. I'm Mina King.

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Learn more at phrma.org slash IPWorksWonders. You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about a new essay collection called Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis. And it talks about the role of civil servants in our federal government.

Government, the work that they do. Two of the essay contributors are with me now. Dave Egger's essay is on NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and called The Searchers. Sarah Vowell's essay is on Pamela Wright of the National Archives and is called The Equalizer. And Dave and Sarah will appear tonight with W. Kamau Bell and Michael Lewis at 730 at the Sidney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco as well.

And you might recognize Sarah's voice as Violet in Pixar's The Incredibles. You, our listeners, are sharing your thoughts and reflections on the role of government employees and shouting out public servants in your life. And this listener writes...

I joined the VA 11 years ago. My grandfather, my father, and my uncle all served in active combat. It's been my privilege to serve veterans' mental health since January 20th. It's been shocking and so demoralizing to be treated by this administration with such animus and disdain.

I don't think my team will survive this. Another listener, Judd, writes,

My hardworking government-employed parents created a warm, loving, secure life for their three sons. One of the things that really stood out to me, Dave and Sarah, in reading both of your essays is that you both note and have noted it here already that the people you profile were so modest that they were unwilling to take really any individual credit. How did that play out at NASA, Dave?

And it's really hard to do a profile of one person when they constantly deflect and say, every time I would talk to Vanessa Bailey, she would name 12 other people that I must talk to next. And that she was so embarrassed. It was a big struggle to get people.

To get it down to basically three people that I profiled. But even then, the PR head, Calla Cofield, was like, oh, you have to talk to this person. You have to talk to this person. And so it makes a profile impossible. You couldn't figure out who should be in the photographs. You know, everybody...

I mean, it was maybe 100 people in the end that they really sort of wanted me to include somehow. And I said, well, that's not really how journalism works. I can't put 100 people in a 7,000-word article. But I think that that pervades everything with JPL and NASA. You don't know names of people.

This head scientist of this or the head, the director of that program. You don't know who created, you know, this lens for the Hubble telescope. We don't because it's always a team project. And I even found this woman, Nancy Grace Roman, that the telescope that's going up in a few years is called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

And she was like one of the absolute top tier scientists at NASA in the 60s. And she was a woman that just

carved a path of her own making amidst all kinds of obstacles. And we haven't heard of her. There isn't a movie about her, but you would think that there would be because she grew up in a hardscrabble life in the 30s and then rose to being sort of what they call the mother of the Hubble telescope. She was the one that championed space telescopes that could see far beyond our terrestrial ones. And again,

And again, incredibly inspiring story that we don't know because they're always totally reluctant to take credit.

I think, Sarah, you wrote that the closest that Pamela came to bragging was about her cousin working at a gas station. Yeah, I made a joke about Town Pump, and she just perked up. Like, oh, my cousin worked at the one in Conrad. But we're getting her, like, the whole National Archives website is just full of all her programs and, you know, documents that her volunteers and staff have put on there. And she, it was so hard for her.

to tell her story because, yeah, she just introduced me to like dozens and dozens of people because she wanted me to know what they all did. And she, you know, she was their boss. But I would have to so often ask her if she's talking about some project that we did or some one of our

our accomplishments. And I just kept having to say, Pam, was that your idea? And she would say yes, but reluctantly. I mean, the other thing, and that's sort of like really admirable. And you can see how these people are great leaders, because a great leader makes you, you know, talk to every single one of their underlings and wants you to know what these people contribute. But I think

This the dark side of this and also we were working for the Washington Post and so the federal government You know gets a little nervous when the Washington Post shows up. So no one was exactly excited. We were there And these things I think combined to explain some of this predicament we're in right now because the federal government didn't do a great job of telling the American people what they were up to and

And now we're in this situation. You know, they could have maybe bragged a little bit more because now we're all finding out, oh, that's what they do. That's why I'm being mauled by a bear because they, you know, fired the employee who's supposed to tell the hikers where the bears are that day. You know, we're all going to learn the hard way what they do.

So maybe if ever things go back to some semblance of normal, there can be a rethinking of the public relations process in federal agencies. Well, I think this listener is sort of getting at your point, Sarah. They write, my family wholeheartedly embraces the notion that the government is wasteful, filled with highly paid, underperforming staff who couldn't get a real job. They see nothing but harmful regulations meant to repress businesses and wasted tax dollars. Right.

Tank writes, my mother spent most of her career at various California DMV public counters in Sacramento at a time when there were no chairs or waiting for one's number to come up, only long lines, no online services, and few mail-in services. Even registration renewals were in person back then. She weathered routine verbal abuse, occasional bomb threats, countless bribery attempts, and witnessed child abuse and neglect on the regular, all while raising her own two kids.

She forever shaped the way I relate to and interact with anyone in a customer service job, especially civil servants. You know, when Matthew Barzun was the ambassador to the UK under Obama, and I

I happened to meet him right after Trump was elected the first time, and he said the same thing. He said, we need an ambassador from D.C. to the rest of the country to explain what happens in D.C. and also what happens with federal employees, period, because they don't do a good job. And then you do have this wave from Reagan on of denigrating the entire federal workforce and government, period.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Right. That's what Reagan said. Yeah. So it has pervaded in a way that... We can now translate that to, I'm a super billionaire and I'm here to help, I guess, but...

It's very strange because like one of the – that person that wrote in, everybody knows a federal worker. Everybody knows somebody or they – everybody in any family. There's a cousin. There's a parent. There's a grandparent that directly interacts with or works for the government in some way. And yet we still find ourselves –

taken in by this virus that... I mean, every single American wants the government to work better, to be more effective, to be more efficient. And like when I was a kid in Cold War Montana, I mean, one thing I really perked up about when Pam Wright told me on her ranch in Montana, the

The Cold War in the Plain States, we had all the missiles. So we like went to bed every night just cowering about those missiles. And she had one on her ranch, you know, like the scene in the day after where the the the missile pops out of the ground and spooks the horse. That was her ranch. And and.

You know, when I was a kid in Cold War Montana, one of the things my friends in the anti-nuclear group and I did was hand out pie charts of the defense spending budget at the supermarket because we were like, maybe we're spending too much money on this.

Everybody has like some bugaboo, something in the government they'd like to work better, to be more affordable, you know, to be less expensive. So it comes from a pretty logical place. It's just being taken to some extreme netherworld of illogic. Well, the other big similarity between your two essays is that you both noted how, I think, Dave, you put it,

exquisitely aware they are that they're spending taxpayer dollars. And I think your example, Sarah, of the History Hub being, you know, a slew of volunteers. There are thousands of retired people who want to serve, who have knowledge, who love these federal records, and she's tapped into them. They don't even know her name. They, you know, but she

because of them, they're helping all these people find their ancestors and, you know, discover like things are interested in or helping military people get their military records and stuff. And, and,

Those people work for free. She's saving the taxpayers untold millions of dollars with some of these programs. And those military records can mean whether or not you get services. Getting insurance. Yeah, getting insurance. Like say you have cancer and you don't have your Air Force discharge papers. I mean, one of the things a lot of these people we write about are doing is

is trying to fix problems within the government. And I assume like one of the reasons History Hub is so popular is, you know, getting an answer from the Department of Defense can be hard. And so they're just like typing in, where do I get this? And an actual human being will write back, you go to Kansas City and, you know, you ask Kansas City. Yeah.

And at NASA, Dave, those incredible technological advancements that they are working on, those have a direct role in technological advancements on the ground too, right? Well, right. When you get a tour of JPL or NASA, they always talk about the byproducts of their research and the ways that they're applicable from Velcro on down. They're very, very aware of it.

They also employ tens of thousands of subcontractors. So, you know, if they need some sort of like weird, you know, shield or netting on a, you know, part on a telescope that's going to be shopped out to some company in Indiana, then that employs 100 local folks. And so it's.

They are, every time I've gotten a tour, they are, and I never knew this about NASA, that they were feeling defensive often. That they're, you know, I remember an older, uh,

scientist at NASA. About contributing to world knowledge? I mean, they said, well, we're not just shooting money into space, this guy said to me. And we were watching the last space shuttle launch, and I thought, no, who would ever think that? It's the best of us. It's the most inspiring work we can do. It's the origin of the universe. There are people at Jet...

at the Jet Propulsion Lab, whose title basically is Origin of the Universe. Like, that's their job. That's their purpose. It's right under their name on the website. These are, you know, enlightenment projects. This is like, this is the work of an enlightened and, and, uh, uh,

a society that wants to know the answers to the most basic existential questions and we're willing to pay for it. That's the best we can do as a society. An investor never would. Yeah, there's no money in finding life on another planet like what they're doing with the exoplanets. There is no way to ever monetize that. So it would never be done by the private sector and we would never know. And

And I don't know if we'll ever make money on the moon either, but the Apollo mission would not be a private sector project. We have got to know. I mean, that is one of the points. Michael Lewis has a great piece in the book about this woman who works on...

finding cures to rare diseases. There is no money in that. And it's about this child. It's a really fascinating piece. But, you know, so much of what the government does, the profit sector can't do, you know, because there is no money in that. But like one thing that's happening that I

I literally cried when I read this, but ProPublica has this reporting about how a NASA administrator sent out an email to the employees saying, don't

Be careful about wearing your badge, your employee ID badge in public because one of the employees was like in a Starbucks wearing the NASA ID badge and they were badgered by a fellow citizen who wanted to condemn them for being a government worker. And that...

Yeah. Let me... They should be so proud of what they do, and they are. And here now, because of, you know, this social situation in this country, they're being threatened or harassed because of who they are and what they do for us. Let me remind listeners, you're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Well, Casey says...

Frankly, I'm just really mad. I work for the state with some of the smartest, hardest-working people, and our work is largely invisible to the everyday person. Though Stephen wants to share, about 30 years ago, I received a letter from the IRS stating that there were discrepancies in my tax return and I needed to file an amended return. An IRS taxpayer specialist quickly reviewed my return and identified some deductions I had not claimed. I left with a larger refund than I'd expected. I've never forgotten the integrity and helpfulness of that nameless IRS employee.

Robin writes, we would like to honor Rico at the North Berkeley Post Office. Rico always on the job and always professional with great wit. As we were saying, the workers' view profiles were so aware, so modest and so aware of the fact that they were spending the people's money. But you also point to two things.

That I was really touched by that you really can't put a price tag on. And in Sarah, in your case, it was Pam saying how the records play a role in forming a more perfect song.

What did she mean by that? Because what she was doing is thinking about every American and how can we serve them. I mean, one of the things that's changed over the last 50 years at the archives with Freedom of Information Act and after Watergate, things changed. And, you know, this distrust of the government is built into, you know, the archives functions now. And

We are like to be suspicious of the government is the most American feeling you can have. And these are our records. And I mean, one reason I wanted to write about that

is because, you know, the archives were in the news because of the then former, now current president's, you know, battle to keep his own records, which, you know, they're ours. And so between like working with the public to put the records online so that the public can access the records online is there's just such a beautiful symmetry to that. Yeah.

And it's our stories. It's not just, you know, something like the Department of Energy is up to the, you know, some like pesky reporter needs to find out about. It's like my family's in the census. My family is in Indian treaties. My family, well, me and my cousins all use these federal programs to go to college. Yeah.

Pam Wright's grandfather, you know, got his homestead because of the Homestead Act. They're our stories and they belong to us. And she wants us all to have access to them. And Dave, in your case, when Nick Ziegler told you that NASA and again, something money can't buy is also in the inspiration business. Well, I think, you know, they call the JPL Disneyland for nerds. It's and and Nick said,

was in the private sector until his 40s, basically. But he paused in his own life, and he said, what do I really want to do in life? And he thought space, and he thought NASA. So he went back to school, finished a new undergraduate degree, a new graduate degree, got his PhD, and he started at NASA at 43, because he knew that that was the most inspiring place on Earth for him, and for a lot of us. We look to it. Engineers...

Scientists of all kinds look to NASA and look to the JPL for inspiration. We love seeing the photos of the rings of Mars that the Cassini rover went through. We want to see what happens next on Mars. And so, yeah, the inspiration business. If it's a business at all, it's the inspiration business. Yeah.

Well, this isn't right. It might make a difference in people's perception to refer to our government and not the government. The book is Who is Government? The essay contributors I've just been talking to are Dave Eggers and Sarah Vowell. And my thanks as well to listeners for shouting out your public servants and to Caroline Smith and Dana Cronin for producing this segment. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Berkley Rep. Presenting here, there are blueberries. Unearth the chilling truths hidden within a Nazi-era photo album and what they reveal about our own humanity. Playing April 5th through May 11th. Learn more at berkeleyrep.org.