Motorists at the northern terminus of 16th Street, where it meets Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland may see a large sign in front of a church that tweaks a well-known New Testament verse. The reworked quote says, “Well done, good and faithful civil servant.”
This has been a hard year for federal employees, with many agencies having faced steep job cuts, some eliminated outright (like the U.S. Agency for International Development), “probationary” employees – not just new hires, but anyone who transferred to a different government job less than two years ago – getting axed, untold others who’d been fired, only to be told later to report back to work the next day, and union bargaining rights stripped from thousands upon thousands of them.
In times like this, the new book “Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service” comes as a welcome salve. Michael Lewis, the author of such best-sellers as “The Blind Side,” “The Big Short” and “Moneyball,” served as editor of this compilation of profiles of government workers who, by just doing their jobs, change Americans’ lives for the better.
To tell these unheralded all-stars’ stories, Lewis assembled his own team of all-star writers. Among them are such best-selling novelists as Dave Eggers (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”), Sarah Vowell (“The Wordy Shipmates”), Geraldine Brooks (the Pulitzer Prize-winning “March”) and Peabody Award winner W. Kamau Bell. Their essays bring to life the devotion to duty of the federal workforce, and the rewards it reaps to all Americans.
Casey Cep, another best-selling author (“Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee”) profiles Ronald Walters , head of the National Cemetery Administration. “There’s no Republican or Democratic way to bury a veteran,” he says. Walters for a while considered the priesthood, but was called to something different, and took a seemingly arcane job in a seemingly arcane federal agency. But try telling that to the next of kin of someone who has just died and may be eligible for a burial plot in a national cemetery. One of Walters’ colleagues calls him a “servant leader” – a phrase one would more likely hear describing a member of the clergy, and probably a bishop.
Bell chose his goddaughter, Olivia Rynberg-Going, a paralegal in the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, who got the job straight out of college. London Review of Books contributing editor John Lanchester interviewed members of the team that calculates the Consumer Price Index at the Bureau of Labor Statistics – whose director, Erika McEntarfer, was fired in August by President Donald Trump hours after the August jobs report showed weaker than expected new jobs figures and lower numbers than originally reported by the bureau for previous months.
Also profiled: a Food and Drug Administration employee who plucked out one rare disease from a group of nearly 2,900 and was able to retrieve the research paper describing how to combat it and save not only a little girl’s life, but the marriage of the child’s parents, who were on the precipice of divorce, so riven were they by grief over the likely demise of their daughter.
Lewis saves one of the most compelling tales for himself – that of Christopher Mark, who had eschewed the idea of college after having grown up in Princeton, New Jersey, assembled cars at a Detroit factory, then worked as a coal miner in West Virginia.
Roof and wall collapses killed so many miners that their fatality rate was just below that of soldiers in Vietnam, Lewis says. This prompted Mark to go back to college. He wound up getting a Ph.D. to see if he could figure out what elements contributed to mine walls collapsing. He did. The year 2016 was the first year that not a single miner died from a roof fall.
Last year, Mark – who hired on as a ”principal roof control specialist” and worked for the Mine Safety and Health Administration of the Department of Labor – won the Paul A. Volcker Career Achievement Medal, one of the “Sammies,” awards conferred each year since 2002 by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service to celebrate excellence in the U.S. federal civil service. They’re not named for Uncle Sam, but after Samuel J. Heyman, the industrialist-philanthropist who founded the organization.
If any of these stories sound familiar, it’s because they were published in the Washington Post on selected Sundays over the past year. If you want more such stories, just ask one of your neighbors.
(Mark Pattison worked for 33 years at Catholic News Service in Washington, including 30 years as media editor.)
