Franklin Foer

I felt like I personally, let alone people I talked to out there, even in Washington, were struggling to wrap their minds around the enormity of what has happened to our government.

And I felt like we needed to do something that was both

intimate and that humanized the loss to government, but that also had some sense of scale that captured the way in which there's no department, agency, national park that really has gone untouched in the process of the Trump administration's effort to collapse large chunks of the American government.

When I started to talk to these bureaucrats, I would find people who were doing things that I didn't even know existed.

I've studied politics and policy my entire life.

I had no idea that the government did so many of these things and that they were kind of essential parts of an ecosystem and that if you remove...

One of those things, it has rippling effects through the economy, through our science, through our health, through our national defense.

I lost count, but let's call it like 75-80.

Okay.

There were so many people who took on government service because they had either been veterans themselves, or they'd grown up in military families, or they'd grown up in families where government service was some sort of a tradition.

And

You know, we think of the military as totally divorced from the civilian part of government.

But I think that there's a lot of the ethos that's, you know, not quite the same, but the same spirit.

The level of satisfaction that I think government workers experience is different than most careers.

You think of government bureaucrats as being so gray.

But what I experienced as I talked to these people were people—

who couldn't wait to go into the office in the morning and people who generally thought that they were doing something, you know, transcendently important.

Now, there's a downside to that, right?

You know, if you have all of this power and you consider yourself on this profound mission, you can become arrogant, you can become abusive.

But these were people who love their jobs.