'A Sense of Dread' for Civil Servants Shaken by Trump Transition

NY Times ^ | February 11, 2017 | Michael D. Shear and Eric Lichtblau

[Zakeet]

Across the vast federal bureaucracy, Donald J. Trump's arrival in the White House has spread anxiety, frustration, fear and resistance among many of the two million nonpolitical civil servants who say they work for the public, not a particular president.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, a group of scientists strategized this past week about how to slow-walk President Trump’s environmental orders without being fired.

At the Treasury Department, civil servants are quietly gathering information about whistle-blower protections as they polish their resumes.

At the United States Digital Service - the youthful cadre of employees who left jobs at Google, Facebook or Microsoft to join the Obama administration - workers are debating how to stop Mr. Trump should he want to use the databases they made more efficient to target specific immigrant groups.

"It's almost a sense of dread, as in, what will happen to us," said Gabrielle Martin, a trial lawyer and 30-year veteran at the Denver office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where colleagues now share daily, grim predictions about the fate of their jobs under Mr. Trump’s leadership.

"It's like the movie music when the shark is coming," Ms. Martin said, referring to “Jaws,” the 1975 thriller. "People are just wary - is the shark going to come up out of the water?"

[stevio]

It’s all good.

[Albion Wilde]

“What do you do,” asked Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, if you work at a place where the leader “avowedly renounces the work of that agency?”...
The intensity of feeling was already raw in late December, when members of the Digital Service gathered for drinks... to say goodbye to Mikey Dickerson, their boss and the Google engineer first hired to rescue HealthCare.gov, the government’s Affordable Care Act website.

The jokes just write themselves!

[Albion Wilde]

Folks, this is vintage loony leftism:

At the Defense Department, where uniformed men and women work with civilians, several rank-and-file employees expressed outrage that Mr. Trump would announce the travel ban at the Pentagon, a building filled with people from different faiths and countries. That same day, the Defense Department posted a message on Twitter about a former refugee who became a Marine. “From refugee to #Marine. @USMC Cpl Ali J. Mohammed takes his fight to the doorstep of those who cast his family out,” it read.