The thing you need to remember about the government is that it helps a whole lot of people
Even the U.S. government. Even with all its imperfections. Even when it's under attack.
I am extremely bad at predicting the future, so I can’t tell you where we will be a week from now. Will the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze Federal grants and loans (currently paused by a Federal judge) end up proceeding? Will ICE raids increase in both volume and cruelty? Will the executive orders directly targeting my trans family members, neighbors and love ones reach a fever pitch? Will I have even more friends worried that the jobs and programs they depend on will be on the cutting block?
I don’t know. Nor do I have a perfect piece of advice on how to oppose whatever it is we’ll be facing in a day or a month or a year.
What I do know, though, is that I am sending this on a Wednesday morning and that yesterday there was so much chaos. A memo was sent from what should be an anodyne government agency and people across the country were made to fear that a service they depend on may be cut off. Temporarily or permanently? Partially or completely? None of it was clear, except the why behind it all. Governance by fiat. An extra-Constitutional loyalty test. A further attempt to remake the government in one man’s image.
People have been panicking, because that’s what you do when the government might pull the plug on a program that keeps you alive.
I hate that Americans whose lives depend on government services have to weather that fear, even for a day. I hate even more that many if not all of those fears may very well come true. I am not one to harp on “silver linings” or “unintended benefits.” The grant freeze was and is a bad thing, fully and completely.
And also, I hope that we remember why we are so frightened in this moment.
We are frightened because, in spite of being told for my entire post-Reagan lifetime that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help…”
… in spite of a generation of conservatives outwardly declaring that their goal was to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub…
…in spite of months of predatory DOGE-snarling from a billionaire who was not elected to anything but just keeps hanging around, a Nazi-saluting barnacle on the troubled ship that is America…
… the government actually helps people.
Even today. Even after decades of the New Deal and the Great Society being hacksawed to bits. Even with our nation’s original sin serving as a wedge, over and over again, from building the kind of social net that other countries take for granted. Even with austerity, even with Clinton and Obama and Biden too frequently preaching the gospel of the third way rather than the just way, even with Trump 1.0 and George W. Bush and his daddy and Reagan, that cursed saint of governmental cruelty and disappearance.
…the government actually helps people.
It does so, of course, because even with all of its failings, a meaningful percentage of the U.S. government was created to help people.
You would not know it from consuming political media, especially in an election year, but there are thousands of government services that both keep people alive and make life more bearable.
We are frightened right now not because we are afraid of losing acronyms. Our affection is not for SNAP or HHS in the abstract. It is for what those under-funded and over-scrutinized programs do for us.
We are frightened of attacks on the government because the government teaches poor kids how to read.
We are frightened of attacks on the government because the government ensures that home-bound seniors receive a warm, healthy meal.
We are frightened of attacks on the government because the government answers the phone when a veteran calls a suicide hotline.
We are frightened because, in spite of all of our efforts to not expand this basic human right to more of us, the government does provide healthcare to millions of Americans.
We are frightened because our government sends checks to Americans with disabilities who can’t work, to moms trying to put food on the table, to dairy farmers who we say are the backbone of America but whose farms would otherwise disappear.
We are frightened because the government researches cures for diseases and then shares those cures with the world. It tries to stand in the breach when credit card companies pummel us with fees or when labor-busting bosses break the law or when an epidemic of murdered and missing women haunts Indigenous America.
Look at this list. Here are 2600 programs that the Trump memo scrutinized for elimination. Or try to look at it. It’s so overstuffed with efforts to take care of us that every time I try to load it my Internet browser stalls. My internet, by the way, is accessed on a for-profit browser that isn’t that great, is delivered to me by an actively hostile for-profit telecommunications company, and welcomes me to search engines that used to work just fine and now, thanks to venture capital and its rapacious addiction to technologies we don’t need, primarily delivers me ads and AI-powered inaccuracies. Behind all of those technologies are billionaires who don’t give a crap about me or my community. But long before that, the fact that the internet exists at all is thanks to government research grants, to frequently maligned bureaucrats who cared quite a bit, to public-sector wonks who imagined a world in which we’d be more connected.
None of these attempts by our government to help people are perfect. They have been subject to death by austerity, bogged down by meddling of both the benevolent and malevolent variety, and held back by the same core human limitations as any other institutions. We need so much more than they can offer and they deserve so much more support than they receive. They are the frayed fabric of our body politic— not always in style, always stretched far too thin, but without which we’d be naked and exposed.
Earlier in this essay, I said that I can’t predict the future. That’s mostly true. I don’t know what programs will be cut. I don’t know if elected Democrats will ever muster an effective opposition. But here’s what I know for certain. Millions of Americans actually love the hell out of government, at least when it’s at its best. We don’t love it when it detains our neighbors for speaking Spanish. We don’t love it when it spends millions on bombs that level schools and hospitals thousands of miles away. We don’t love it when it makes it harder for parents of trans kids to tell their kids “it’ll be all right” without bursting into tears.
But we love it when it helps. And it does help. In spite of decades of efforts to keep it from helping.
We love our government at its best, and we will miss it when and if it disappears.
That love that millions of us have is not yet an opposition movement, but it could be. And if the worst comes to bear, it will need to be.
There’s only one sector in America whose core function isn’t to part us from our money, but to make sure we’re OK.
Let’s love that part of our government. And let’s fight for it, wherever that fight takes us.
End notes:
If this strikes you as a particularly earnest, sappy post (even for me) there’s a reason for that. I’m lucky to have hundreds of public sector employees in my life, many in state and municipal government but a good handful on the Federal payroll. I’m also lucky that my family has benefited from myriad Federal programs. I’m proud to be the nephew of a Head Start program director and an uncle to former Head Start students. I’m proud of my brother who delivers mail, my other brother who does his damndest to keep us from being ripped off at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and my sister-in-law who puzzles through the conundrum that is housing prices at the Fed. I’m so grateful for dozens of friends whose Federal jobs and contracts are care work: for women’s health, for our kids in school, for our Civil and labor rights, to say nothing of the Federal employees who are responsible for the fact that I grew up with vaccines and well-trained teachers and electricity to my rural home and help paying for college. You’re damned right I’m earnest and sappy.
If you’d prefer an essay that is also quite earnest but contains more jokes about the incredibly dorky reason I almost got arrested in high school, I wrote that yesterday.
Quick reminder: enrollment for the next round of Barnraisers classes (free! virtual! lots of time options!) is currently open and booming. Join us! More info here and registration here.
Related reminder: If you’re finding value in the fact that pieces like this and classes like Barnraisers are out in the world, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s what allows me to put (hopefully helpful) resources out into the world for free.
I decided to keep comments open to everybody on this one, because I have a hunch that a lot of us have stories about how the Federal government helps us (or how you, as a Federal government employee, try to help).
On the topic of attempting to be helpful: Yesterday, I put together a companion to this piece and shared it on Instagram and Bluesky. It’s my pitch to not just share scary headlines, but narrate directly what we’re feeling and what we need right now (both on a practical and emotional level). That might not seem like a radically important act, but we’re all learning how to build care and community right now, and we have an opportunity to stretch that muscle.
It would take too long to list ALL the ways I, and my family, have benefitted from governmental assistance, but here's a short list:
1) When I was a kid and we didn't have a lot of money, we went to the food bank, which received a big heap of government assistance. I also received subsidized school lunch. Was it in the era where Reagan argued that ketchup was a vegetable? Yes. But you can get really far on the calories in ketchup, justifiable vegetable or no.
2) When my oldest was still an only and an infant, my ex-husband got a winter layoff from his work as a union bricklayer. He got unemployment (government assistance!), but it wasn't enough to support a family of three and we couldn't pay our winter heat bill. We got assistance paying our heating bill and assistance replacing our old, inefficient refrigerator to control our on-going energy usage.
3) My oldest attended a Head Start pre-school, which allowed us to stop paying MASSIVE child care bills for two kids that basically wiped out the entirety of my income contribution to our household.
4) When my marriage crumbled unexpectedly and spectacularly, my two kids and I survived for a handful of months because of SNAP benefits.
To my mind, the best and primary point of government is pooling resources to take care of the vulnerable. I don't need the government to tell me what to do to be a good and (mostly) lawful person. I need them to do what can only be done well collectively, caring for those left behind by our system and evening the playing field.
Finally subscribed as a way to say THANK YOU for this. My parents were both career feds, I grew up and now live again in the DC area and it is... chaotic and sad and scary here. My kid goes to a Title I school and we have no idea what's going to happen to the programming (including meals) that comes with that. Seeing clinical trial appointments get canceled and not knowing if my sister's chemo will continue (to say nothing of paying for it, since her insurance is through NIH) is keeping me up at night. It's so easy to say "drain the swamp" and to react to how challenging it can be to deal with the bureaucracy on an individual level, but these are people. It's people doing the work, and it's people benefitting from the work.