If Elon Musk and the Donald Trump administration prevail as planned, there will be an estimated 200,000 government employees laid off before the end of 2025 arrives. It would be a mistake to assume these are isolated individuals. Most likely they are people with family, friends and communities who depend upon them in some capacity or other.
Imagine the impact on people in proximity of one or two degrees apart from any laid off federal worker. The number of adversely affected civilians could reach one million, judging from a conservative extrapolation.
Aside from those considerations, this crisis has opened a door to address what I consider the scourge of alienation between government employees and the civilians of the nation they serve. While most experience government as a nameless, faceless monolith wielding heartless indifference, there are real, thoughtful individuals devoting their utmost efforts to myriad tasks comprising our functioning nation.
Get to Know Your Gov’t is a podcast that interviews laid-off government employees, offering a lively and wide-ranging discussion about individual roles and systemic impact of the public sector workforce. The ultimate goal is to bridge the understanding and consciousness gaps between rank-and-file citizens and the government labor sector.
It could be argued that the reason for the relative ease with which the downsizing DOGE-Trump scheme has so far succeeded, owes to the general distrust of government that pervades our culture.
Sowing bad faith in government is the typical stock and trade of many conservative politicians and activists. This has been the case at least since Sen. Barry Goldwater’s days in American politics in the 1960s. The mistrust of government abounds these days, having gained greater influence after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
It is the hope of Get to Know Your Gov’t that the work begins to bridge the immense divide between this nation’s citizenry and the class of people who work the levers and pull the strings of the government. There’s so much misinformation and mistrust for us to overcome, as well as a crucial opportunity that would not otherwise have been possible without the DOGE-Trump bull-in-the-china-cabinet trampling.
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Previously Published on Medium
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