Gratitude Monday: the government functionary

As we head into the second week of Shutdown ’13, brought to you by those [insert modifier here] men and women of the Senate and House of Representatives, I’m thinking about the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who aren’t suiting up and going to work.

You know—loan processors, prosecutors, patent examiners, park rangers, auditors, civilian support personnel for the military—even if, as of this writing, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has announced that he’s recalling most of the latter. (Ironic, isn’t it—if Aaron Alexis had held off a couple of weeks before going on his shooting spree in the Washington Navy Yard, he would have come into a nearly empty Building 197.) The people who push paper, check boxes, crunch numbers, investigate fraud and all the rest of the quotidian operations that underlie a functioning organization, especially one the size of the United States.

You can bitch all you want about it being cumbersome, maybe overstuffed and under-efficient in some areas, and blah, blah, blah. The only businesses that aren’t overstuffed are start-ups, except with egos; and they’re still not immune from inefficiencies. So give it a rest.

I’m thinking back to the beginning of 2012, when I faced nearly $100,000 in medical bills because my COBRA administrator had (as it turns out) illegally cut off my coverage based on alleged non-receipt of one of my premium payments. And then they denied my appeal—basically because they thought they held all the cards.

But a US Department of Labor employee—don’t even recall what his title was—responded within a day of my email to him, took down all the facts as I could explain them, and made a few phone calls to my former employer (self-insured; so it was essentially their money that was at stake). I was so dubious—not only because that corporation basically snacks on the SEC and eats the EU for lunch, but because we’re talking federal government bureaucrat…

And yet—a few days later, suddenly the employer found my explanation of the situation acceptable, reinstated my coverage, and I felt immeasurably relieved.

Because a government bureaucrat did his job, his mundane, paper-pushing job. I imagine he’s considered non-essential these days, and has been barred from working. And while—in the never-ending kaleidoscoping world of Congressional politics at least he’s going to be paid for his time away from the job (so what was the point, again, about shutting down the government?), the current stalemate means that his work won’t be done.

That could mean that other people in situations like mine are not having their cases resolved, and they’re carrying around the kind of burden of worry I was.

So, there’s the cost of this mess: work not being done, piling up, maybe deprioritized on the return of the workers. But it’s reminded me of how grateful I was that ET, the DOL guy, was there and did his job competently and thoroughly when I really needed an advocate. I was thankful then, and I’m thankful again now for him and all his fellows, on Gratitude Monday starting Week 2 of the shutdown.

I am not, however, grateful for those yahoos in Congress who think scoring political points with their most extreme constituents is more important than having a functioning government serving the people.