What do you do?
I do administrative support at a national lab. I’m attached to a group of scientists, and help them navigate the paperwork. Right now, that falls into three areas: purchase card purchases, tracking accountable property, and general paperwork. Helping with paperwork when applying for an official passport, approval for attending conferences, stuff like that.
How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?
Basically, I needed a job, and a friend knew about an opening at the lab, so I applied. At the time, I was waiting tables after being laid off from being a paralegal. Way back in the Bush administration, I applied several times for the Foreign Service, but never got past the personal interview. The things that can make you a good FSO (Foreign Service Officer) also slow down the background check. If I remember correctly, I think it’s easier to get into Harvard.
What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?
We do important basic research, and, in particular, research that protects the country. In the past, we helped develop stuff like radar, and GPS, and stealth materials (I don’t want to be too specific about what my specific group currently does, but most people would say it’s darn useful). I help scientists by making sure they have what they need to do research. It’s not sexy, but someone has to buy the screws and the oscilloscopes, and you can’t do research without equipment and materials.
When it comes to the federal government, there’s a lot of paperwork that has to be filled out for spending money. This makes DOGE exasperating. Wired reported that DOGE ordered purchase cards at GSA and USAID have their limits set to $1, with hopes of rolling that out across the government. That shuts down any purchases under $10,000.
As an example, normally, anything that costs under $10,000 is purchased with a purchase card. Like, everything. Journal fees, software, computers, hardware, metal stock, electronic parts — these are all orders that I now have on hold. We often build our own experimental equipment, and that gets paused if we can’t get the parts. If you don’t have the equipment, you can’t run the experiment. This purchase card is not a credit card – it gets paid in full every month. It also has lots and lots of paperwork. Each order needs three approval signatures before I can order anything, and the purchase file ends up with a half-dozen documents when I’m done with it. What Musk says we need to implement in order to prevent fraud is already implemented.
What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?
We do basic research that’s too risky for the private sector to handle, and when it pays off, it pays off big. Historically, the lab built the proof of concept satellite for GPS. We currently do some neat stuff in robotics and metamaterials, which I am vague about, because I don’t understand it very well, more than anything else. The lab is also big, so, I don’t even know what, say, the chemists do, beyond “chemistry”.
What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it’s all going to impact your work and your mission?
It mostly pisses me off. I unfortunately now get the line from Red Dawn: “the hate keeps me warm“. Last week, we had an all-hands meeting to discuss the firing of provisional hires. The head of research started to get emotional, which was like watching Mr. Spock cry.
Fortunately, the exemptions our administration pushed worked, and when the announcement came down, none of our probationaries were fired. I know people who qualify for retirement and have said they’re staying through January 2029 just to spite the bastards. So, in general, there’s a lot of anxiety, and a lot of anger for being yanked around. I was here at the end of the last Trump administration and the feelings are way, way more hostile to the guys in charge than I’ve heard before. Guys at the top of the executive branch, the lab leadership, clearly have our backs.
The freeze put some projects on hold as we wait for parts. There have been some workarounds, but I don’t want to say what they are. We use purchase cards to make payments easy — Amazon doesn’t take checks. Travel has also been frozen. That’s caused us to cancel some conference appearances, and some lecture visits. Luckily, field experiments haven’t been affected, yet.
Often, the reason why government seems so slow is because we have internal business rules that are written by Congress, and have the force of law. There’s paperwork that I think is silly, but I have to do it, because it’s a federal crime if I don’t!
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 