Hannah Rosen

And he's explaining to me how the work that he and his colleagues do helps a person like me, who has no sense of direction, get around.

Or I should probably say he and his former colleagues.

The Earth is not a perfect sphere.

It turns out that it's constantly shifting, in subtle ways.

Hippenstiel's work was keeping up with all this complexity so that the maps would remain precise.

It's a field called geodesy.

Hippenstiel did this work for the federal government.

Before I talked to Hippenstiel, I was not aware that my getting around depended on the work of the National Geodetic Survey.

So do other way more critical things, like precision farming, disaster relief, ships knowing how deep or shallow the shoreline is in real time.

Even, Hippenstiel says, weapons firing accurately.

The work that he and his colleagues did was invisible, but critical.

It kept the ground under my feet stable.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

This is Radio Atlantic.

And this week, one year since Donald Trump was re-inaugurated, we're talking about the federal government workforce that was.

Last April, Hip and Steel accepted a voluntary resignation package.

He joined a mass exodus of federal workers.

In Trump's first year back, over 300,000 Americans left the government.

Many forced out or fired.

Pressured to unceremoniously leave.