Politico has another one of those stories that demonstrate why we have lifted from them their traditional nom de shebeen. They went around and talked to career government employees about life under the direction of Camp Runamuck. As you might imagine, life under Camp Runamuck is neither a bowl of cherries nor a field of daffodils.

Trump’s frequent attacks on the “deep state” have engendered deep distrust between career and political employees, pushing many long-time civil servants toward the exits and raising the possibility of a government-wide brain drain. And while some workers, such as Border Patrol agents, are feeling newly empowered under Trump, morale at other agencies is so low that some employees said they were suffering from increased anxiety and depression that has complicated their personal relationships and even led to heavier drinking.

Heavier drinking, I suspect, is general, all over the country, as Mr. Joyce might have said.

Several career employees said they were keeping their heads down and ignoring possible avenues for promotions because they have little interest in being subjected to the political infighting that has taken hold in many agencies. “It’s the worst administration and I’ve dealt with all of them from Ronald Reagan all the way forward,” said Jeffrey David Cox, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the country’s largest federal employee union. “The worst with morale of employees. The worst with constantly wanting to take away rights and benefits. And the worst in trying to starve the agencies of resources.”

The most depressing case study is Larry Meinert, who has left the United States Geologic Survey after six years. It seems that, upon arrival of the new administration*, Meinert’s primary job was to find ways to keep Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke from sinking a fracking well into Thomas Jefferson’s nose on Mount Rushmore.

But even before his resignation late last year, there were plenty of other things that got under Meinert’s skin. Administration officials asked his department to supply the topics of each scientific paper it planned to put up for publication up to five years in the future. “From their point of view, they didn’t want to be surprised by finding out that we were looking at subject ‘X,’” he said. “When I pushed back and said we can’t do that, we don’t know what we’ll be publishing three years from now because we haven’t done the science yet, they’d say, ‘Well what are you hiding?’” Meinert says he spent much of his time putting together lists of topics that were so general that they were largely meaningless. “My job was to run interference,” he said. “Make the lists as general as they could be. So we’d say, ‘We’re doing a paper about rocks.’ For anyone who knows what’s going on, it’d be insulting, but these guys were like, ‘Great, a paper about rocks. Thanks.’”

Knowledge, as Emil Faber reminded us, is good. However, under this president*, knowledge is something against which you must be immunized, something between influenza and the mange.

Last year, a team at the National Archives and Records Administration was told by senior NARA officials that it couldn’t put on a program that would have examined the historic context of immigration to the United States because it might attract “unwanted attention” to the Trump administration and put the agency’s funding in jeopardy, according to a NARA employee. “This was a year after we were able to host Black Panthers and a founder of Black Lives Matter,” the employee said. A NARA spokesperson did not comment. The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

It’s easy to make fun of government work and the people who do it. (I was one of those people once myself, and I made fun of me.) But these are the people way down in the agencies currently being run by grifters, incompetents, and thieves who are trying to hold the institutions of government together with their teeth. And now, if they stay, it’s more than likely that they’re going to be marked lousy in their profession for the rest of their careers.

“There are days I want to leave and work for someone who respects me and appreciates my skills and expertise. I’m worried people years from now will somehow associate me with the very worst of this administration,” one State Department official said. “Then there are days where I tell myself that this too shall pass and public service is more important now than ever. I don’t want to contribute to the weakening of our institutions by walking away.”

That’s someone at the State Department, a minor agency of no real policy importance, so what the hell, anyway.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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