From the Daily Caller, an anonymous alleged employee of the administration*.
The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall. It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good. On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. I wish I could give competitive salaries to them and no one else. But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t...
But President Trump can end this abuse. Senior officials can reprioritize during an extended shutdown, focus on valuable results and weed out the saboteurs. We do not want most employees to return, because we are working better without them. Sure, we empathize with families making tough financial decisions, like mine, and just like private citizens who have to find other work and bring competitive value every day, while paying more than a third of their salary in federal taxes.
I believe every word of this came from an administration* official. The contempt for public service is pure modern Republicanism. The superiority complex about how families "like mine" are scrapping to make ends meet is pure modern conservatism. And the paranoia about weeding out saboteurs is pure Trumpian boob-bait. This is bullying dressed up as empathy.
I don't know where the people who work with Native Americans, and especially those who work in the various health clinics that service our indigenous peoples, rank on this person's sliding scale of essential employees. Maybe this person thinks the people who work those jobs are part of the 15 percent of federal employees worth their salaries. But, in any case, those particular employees are in deep trouble because of the shutdown. From the AP:
In New Mexico, a lone police officer patrolled a Native American reservation larger in size than Houston on a shift that normally has three people, responding to multiple car wrecks during a snow storm, emergency calls and requests for welfare checks. Elsewhere, federally funded road maintenance programs are operating with skeleton crews and struggling to keep roads clear on remote reservations. Tribal members said they can't get referrals for specialty care from the Indian Health Service if their conditions aren't life-threatening.
Native American tribes rely heavily on funding guaranteed by treaties with the U.S., acts of Congress and other agreements for public safety, social services, education and health care for their members. Because of the shutdown, tribal officials say some programs are on the brink of collapse and others are surviving with tribes filling funding gaps.
About 9,000 Indian Health Service employees, or 60 percent, are working without pay and 35 percent are working with funding streams not affected by the shutdown, according to the Health and Human Services department's shutdown plan. That includes staff providing direct care to patients. The agency delivers health care to about 2.2 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives.
The agency gets money from the Interior Department, whose budget is snared by the shutdown. For many tribal members, IHS is the only option for health care unless they want to pay out of pocket or have other insurance. Benefits under programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are unaffected by the partial government shutdown.
And even more tragic is the effect in Montana on the search for dozens of Native women who have gone missing. The United States government is letting Native peoples down. That's truly hard to imagine.
