"Shut It All Down": Largely Kept in the Dark, Many Federal Employees Are Itching For a Fight
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On Thursday morning, one part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration held an "emergency" all-hands meeting. The gist, according to a source who attended, was more or less that leadership had no idea what to expect of the pending government shutdown.
"Even less than usual," the source said (though another NOAA employee said they did receive broad guidance the next day on how to manage a shutdown's immediate aftermath). "No guidance yet or knowledge what the OMB memo means for us. Of course the fact that we have a 'usual' pre-shutdown routine is itself 🙃."
The OMB memo refers to a Russell Vought-led warning that a shutdown, which will arrive at 12:01 Wednesday morning barring a deal with lawmakers, will result in even more gleeful (one assumes) mass firings than federal workers have already been forced to face down. And in spite of that threat, a number of federal employees I heard from in recent days continue to urge Democrats to grow the spine they have failed to show in the past and fight — even if that means a shutdown.
"Shut it all down," said one source at the National Institutes of Health. "Make the general public hurt. Make them understand what civil servants do. Vought wants to illegally fire us regardless. We need the Dems to stand against this BS."
Obviously, as usual, this is anecdotal, and opinions across the millions of federal employees clearly will vary widely. But there is at least some sense that with the months of pressure and reductions-in-force and impounded funds and constant threat of retaliation and so on, just keeping the government open without some meaningful pushback against the overreach of Trump and Vought and the rest would be meaningless.
"[I] very much think that Democrats need to actually fight, even if that means a shutdown," a source at the Census Bureau said, adding that in their area there is a healthy degree of worry regarding the large-scale RIF Vought has threatened. They too have received very little guidance on what's coming.
"We hear most things from the news before we hear anything from leadership," the Census Bureau employee said. "They haven't contacted us at all about a potential shutdown & what the process will be if there is one, which has not been the norm in the past." In previous shutdowns, guidance has been available one to two weeks ahead of time, at least. "But our managers don't know anything either."
Meanwhile, with the president setting and canceling and then resetting meetings with Congressional Democrats while announcing plans to invade Portland and bring 800 generals to Washington for a possible purge/terrible speech, leadership of the party is still out there workshopping the same terrible political messaging. It has not, in general, inspired a lot of confidence inside the agencies.
"I am fully expecting them to cave," one source said. "Because that's what they do. Over and over again. It's quite dispiriting."
