Hi, Elaine.

So - I’m a civil servant, and I’m also, like any good 80s girl, a huge sucker for glamor. I had the rich boyfriend, the fancy times and fancy duds, the cute jobs in the halls of power. But my training is as a technocrat, an ordinary middle-class person doing the work of making America run, and that’s a much bigger dream than any fancy party is. I haven’t the temperament for leadership of that kind of work, so I’m not an Undersecretary of _____ or division leader or high-ranking FSO. Instead I work mostly at the level of rubber meeting road, where the funding meets the non-government-workers actually carrying out projects that administrations and Congresses and agencies and the non-government people have all decided are so worthwhile for the nation that we’ll peel off some dollars for it, and then recipients will jump through all kinds of hoops to use those dollars.

We do rely too heavily on those dollars now to make our economy go. It’s what we’ve turned to in many areas instead of figuring out what happens after a worldbeating industrial economy, and it’s why these cuts are going to do much more harm and bring much more pain than most people are reckoning. That said, it is good work and on the whole I find that far less money and effort is wasted this way than it is in the nominally private sector, precisely because our rules and ethics constrain us and direct us to consider the public weal.

The everyday work is mundane and the pay doesn’t quite make it to anemic. Today, for instance, I wrote up a meeting agenda and sent memos to graduate students about upcoming changes in procedures. But there’s really nothing mundane about it. Those students are tomorrow’s PhD scientists, and we need them, and they need to know how a large, complex operation should work without driving everyone in it crazy, and without each discipline going off into its hidey-hole and refusing to talk to the others because they don’t know how and it takes time and it’s hard. They need to know what it looks like when everyone in a hierarchy — and it is a hierarchy — is treated with care and respect. How to pick their eyes up from the immediate task and spot exciting themes that bury them in new questions. Every bit of what I do there teaches, or tries to teach, these things while also keeping firmly in mind the meaning and mission of the public dollars we’re using.

Similarly, when I’m working with private clients who wish to work with federal agencies, and they really just want what they think is free money, it is my job to teach them, over and over, firmly, what partnership with public agencies means. How it is noble, and how yes, they will get money, but they will get much more than that. And none of it will come free. Public work is work and you’re not meant to get rich doing it.

When I work with clients who are higher-placed in government or academia, I help them dream and sketch ambitious projects for, again, the common weal. These are indeed glamorous, and sometimes they come true. But in all cases they’ve involved public money emerging from public consensus. Often that consensus says: we want something sort of like ____ to happen — you figure it out. Dream big. So we do.

All of it is not only a privilege but so much more interesting and full of promise than anything a fancy shopping boulevard can offer. And if you’re aware of the importance of the work, and why the rules are what they are, and how the ethics took shape and why, you’re not very easily put off. It isn’t hard to decline gifts or threats. Does that make us an autocrat’s enemy? Sure. Most artists, intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, members of any profession could say the same. Most of us, like Canada, are not for sale. Not because we’re specially good, but because it’s so plainly a bad bargain.