Writer Michael Lewis (profile here) describes what he does:
“[W]e had our government shutdown in December 2018 and … I asked for a list of people who’d been sent home …. It was not a random sample of federal employees. It was federal employees who’d been nominated for one of the awards they gave out every year by someone who thought they’d done something good.
“So I took this list and picked … a guy whose name was on the top of the list: Arthur A. Allen. He won the alphabet contest. So I call him up and asked him if I could come visit him and just see what he’s doing. He had nothing else to do. He was sitting at home with nothing to do.
“This is a guy who spent his whole career as the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard search-and-rescue division …. There was a particular problem he was working on by himself, and the problem was … people being lost at sea. The Coast Guard didn’t know how they drifted in the ocean. …
“The problem is that if you fall off a boat into the ocean, you’re going to drift differently than if you are in a life raft, or if you’re on top of an overturned sailboat, or if you have a life vest on …. So if the Coast Guard knows where and when you started, as they often do, they should be able to predict where you are in the ocean four hours later …. But they didn’t know the drift, until Arthur A. Allen figured it all out. …
“That all sounds boring and tedious …. But he reduced the drift to mathematical equations and embedded them in the search-and-rescue software program, and instantly they were able to find people they never would’ve found before. Thousands of Americans are alive because of Arthur A. Allen. … No one knows who he is. No one pays any attention to him. They furloughed him as if he’s useless.”
(Read story here.) What’s my point? Why am I posting about this?
When Reagan, in his first inaugural speech, famously said “government is the problem,” he slammed people like Arthur A. Allen (already a federal employee by then); much later, Republicans would use the sobriquet “deep state” to describe the federal bureaucracy of which Allen is one tiny cog. The term has a negative connotation, implying corrupt power and useless baggage. I wouldn’t describe him that way, but they do.
This is, unfortunately, how most Republicans view government. Historically, as a group they’ve favored limited government, but in recent years that ideology has evolved into outright hostility toward all government, as when they eagerly shut it down and federal workers like Allen get sent home, unpaid, with nothing to do. People like Allen, who know what they’re doing, and do something very useful — his salary is a very cheap investment of tax dollars, in relation to the returns — are mindlessly painted as a burden on taxpayers and a threat to society by a political party that’s too lazy to think.
That brings me to our responsibility as voters. We should want our government to work for us and do good things for us. Blind hatred of government and unthinking disdain of those working in government isn’t for the better.
I vote in support of the Arthur A. Allens of the world, not the government-haters, because I want to keep people like him on the job.
Photo: Coast Guard meteorologist Arthur A. Allen, unsung hero