Nine weeks with the Census

Back in 2020, I worked for the Census during the summer and early autumn. It was interesting work and COVID played its tricks. There was so much that I did not know about my neighborhood and the surrounding counties. The stories would be entertaining and instructive, with all sorts of characters and even a climax of sorts…and I cannot tell you a word of them without breaking my oath or courting five years at Club Fed. I asked if I could tell them without identifying information — my coworkers said no.

All Federal employees, even temps, are required to take an oath which follows:

“I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

One-third of federal workers are veterans. In a few cases, challenge coins like those given to members of the military to commemorate an accomplishment are unofficially offered: people use their own money to get the coins designed, stamped and painted. If you received a blood transfusion, chances are very good that a federal worker donated it.

Federal employment is largely believed to be a sinecure, that is, money for almost nothing. Park rangers wrangling tourists away from the cute buffalo and black bears and discouraging them from trying out those lovely hot springs made of battery acid kept at 200 degrees may disagree. Overstretched air traffic controllers may also disagree — we saw what happens if they make mistakes: perhaps a jet sinking into the Potomac with 67 passengers or something smaller crashing into a residential part of Philadelphia, killing six.

The cloud of contractors, multiplying

A recent phenomenon in DC is the swarm of contractors orbiting the place. The Federal government fell into the fad of contracting everything out. Somehow the number of people working as contractors has been so tremendous that the DC area extends into four states now including DC. And where there are contracting firms there are CEOs and their entourages drinking deep from the stream of money headed to the multimillionaires who run the firms and shareholders. The New Republic described DC as a workaday place where the streets rolled up at 10 pm and commuters read news on their way to work — the current DC is a place where parking can easily exceed $100/day and homes worth over a million dollars spread out in every direction.

Research

Related to the contractors is the way that research is done. Most of the research is done far from DC, in hundreds of universities. Typically, a primary: investigator (PI) competes for grants from one department or another. Should they get the grant, the professor’s employer gets a large cut (roughly 50% at Purdue) and a team may be assembled with grad students working as apprentices and postgrads serving as the journeymen, plus supporting actors; the PI supervising a team of research workers. So cut out a department that does research, and jobs disappear from dozens of colleges and thousands of people on modest pay lose their appointments.

Final Notes

And yes, federal employees sometimes have a stick up their butt. They can be extremely doctrinaire and rigid, wedded to the way things used to be (in their minds). In business, failure is expected; in government, it can ruin a career or kill a program, if it is caught so not getting caught gets priority. And like any institution, previous mistakes lead to policies designed to keep the mistake from being repeated, which backfires when the mistakes and consequences are tabulated over a department employing thousands in twelve states leading to pages of rules covering situations that happen once every decade somewhere in the department. Some of that stick is the possibility of embarrassment, career ruin, fines and incarceration should one policy or another be violated or something crash in unexpected, fiery ways.

A last note: the data gathered by governmental agencies is the property of the American taxpayer and citizen. When Musk and his minions make data go away, they rob the American people of what we purchased through taxes.