Support our government workers? What? After New Orleans?

We say, "we support our troops," but last night I realized that our "troops" don't always carry weapons. Sometimes our "troops" carry the law and rules and regulations in their hands. Sometimes they merely make a call and action takes places that saves lives through an act of mercy. But they have to have the means. They have to have the tools.

I had dinner with a career civil servant of a senior rank. She was sick at heart. She spoke with pain about how she had watched program after program get dismantled by administration after administration. The machinery to make things happen, gutted. She saw staff reductions and funding reductions. The staff, reduced to half the original number of people, works longer hours with a greater over-all case load. There is mandatory over-time without pay and still it is popular to say that the government is "bloated."

She said that when she joined Civil Service, it was a calling. She could have made a lot more in the private sector. It was a career she was proud of. She joined to help. She was proud to say she worked as a [ ] at the Department of [ ]. Over the last several years she learned it isn't cool to work for the government. The government is a bad thing, or so people seem to say.

I said that Americans had maybe turned the corner, but she was really demoralized. She held out little hope that there was a will to do what it takes. Everything is getting done on the cheap. The buzz word is "metrics" and running government on "six sigma," worthy concepts in business, perhaps, but how is justice met out with six sigma? How is fairness established by having a higher through-put of cases? Instead of sober reflection on how to solve something that will affect millions, the decisions are pushed down the line and dealt with in way bordering on the perfunctory. The work is being passed through with less attention to detail.

The same government that cuts civil servant resources is the same government that will not supply amour or bullet-proof jackets to front line troops.

Over the last 25 years we have been offered a "new" government - the "Emperor's new Government," and like the parable, we see it for how naked it is.