Dedicated hard working federal employees deserve our respect, dignity and American support.

In defense of federal employees: Echo opinion letter published in the Las Vegas the Courier Journal: 

https://www.recordcourier.com/news/2025/apr/09/april-9-2025-r-c-letters-to-the-editor/

Editor:  First, full disclosure, I’m a retired federal employee. I worked for the Air Force as a Financial Manager for 25-plus years. (Maine Writer- Thank you!)

What Trump and Musk are really doing to destroy our country reported in Slate

Outraged❗ The attitude about federal employees can be traced almost directly to the Republican Congress, using them as a scapegoat for their failure to properly monitor, fund, change regulations or responsibilities of those agencies. 

What Congress doesn’t want you to know is that these agencies are only doing what Congress authorizes them to do. They can limit activity by appointees of one administration, but usually don’t do that because they don’t want those activities limited by the other party when administrations change. 

They just create political theater by calling agency leadership to congressional hearings that don’t produce anything substantive because agency leaders generally aren’t doing anything illegal.

There isn’t one agency or organization that is part of the federal government that wasn’t created, funded, and approved annually by Congress. That extends to the civilian and military employees of those agencies. Most federal employees aren’t political, as a matter of fact, there are laws that prevent political activity by those employees. Some senior leadership at most agencies are specially created and approved as political appointees; they regularly change with the change in administration, by design. These are the positions that set the agenda for the agency and can change agency political direction based on the party in the White House. Again – by design by Congress. When Congress creates a new agency, it defines what that agency can do, what its responsibilities are, etc. Most times, Congress intentionally makes those rules pretty flexible, to allow for changes in policy depending on elections. Congress also has the responsibility to monitor activities and performance in those agencies by calling them to testify before different committees in the House or Senate.

This administration’s, and especially Musk/DOGE’s random and indiscriminate firing of federal employees, most of the time without even knowing what functions they support in the agencies affected, is cruel and really ignorant. It is not getting rid of fraud, waste, inefficiencies – there’s no what they could have done the intense analysis required to find those things. And I guarantee you ❗the 19 year old tech bros don’t understand the mission about the agencies they’re attacking, much less the service these employees provide to the American public. It’s insulting and cruel – these are people that have families, mortgages, just like us. Many are truly dedicated, patriotic, and want to build life long careers in these agencies because of their personal beliefs and interests. Many have worked long and hard to get their jobs, just to have them eliminated for some cruel political stunt. Too bad we don’t have a Congress that take back their Constitutionally assigned power and reverse this senseless activity.

From Deborah Huelsman in Gardnerville, Nevada