Quinta Jurecic
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Quinta Jurecic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Really frightened and angry. And that includes, overwhelmingly, people who are civil servants, who have, you know, their own political views, but who were... extremely prepared to serve this administration as they have served every other administration.
The Justice Department, for example, has a program that's called DOJ Honors that is aimed at kind of pulling in bright young law students and young lawyers to work in the department and kind of bring in talent. It's persisted for many, many years.
People will go into DOJ and that program, you know, whatever their political beliefs under any administration because they want to work at the Justice Department. They want to be civil servants. That was untouched during the first Trump administration.
During the second Trump administration, I think it was within the first two weeks, they announced that they had rescinded all DOJ honors acceptances. It's not clear whether or not they will reopen the program. And the people who are affected by that, they're Democrats, they're Republicans, they're independents. They are not people who were coming in with a particular political agenda specifically.
People who go in through DOJ honors often work for the government for their entire careers across administrations. And so I think there is a real level of hurt that the administration is coming in and treating people in government and people who want to work for the government, people who were...
excited to go into government, even if their political beliefs were completely squarely opposed to this administration, because they really believe in the project of civil service, apolitical civil service, and serving their country. And I think to be treated as enemies in this way is... Kind of radicalizing.
And I think you can see this in public if you look at the Reddit, rfednews, which I think was previously just a subreddit where people posted, you know, hey, has anyone heard about, you know, this program, that program, whatever.
Not one that I had previously frequented. Yeah. And it started being a place where people post, what am I going to do? I have to lay off all these people. I have to rescind all of these offers because of the hiring freeze. I was going to start in this role and I moved across the country and I was so excited. And suddenly it's been taken away from me. And I think that was kind of the first stage.
And now what you see is a real... Anger, but also a... Resistance is kind of a loaded word at this point, but a desire to hold on and kind of not give up the ship through this. And I think that, you know, I am sure that if you are sympathetic to the president, that that may look to you as, you know, these people are hashtag resisting Donald Trump and want to take him down.
I really don't think that that's what it is. I think that these were people who... wanted to engage in the work of apolitical civil service and now feel like they have been stomped on because of nothing that they did and who now have been kind of turned against the administration because of that.
And I don't mean that, you know, they're going to try to undermine it from within or anything like that. I just mean that I think there was a willingness to play ball and that is gone because of the way that they have been treated. And I think you see that in the bizarre sort of fork in the road emails that the Office of Personnel Management has sent out.
So this is kind of clearly an Elon Musk effort. Fork in the road was the title of a subject line of an email that he sent out to Twitter employees when he took over, essentially offering them a buyout program. And he sent the same email to federal employees today.
saying, you know, we will give you this buyout option if you take what they call a deferred resignation, agree to resign, and then leave your position on September 30th. And that part of the problem is that the terms of that agreement keep changing. It's very unclear what people have actually agreed to. As you said earlier, Ezra,
It has now been blocked by a court until there can be another court hearing, so the status is extremely unclear. But there was a really striking post in the Fed News subreddit where someone essentially said, you know, look, I don't think these people understand why we are engaged in the work that we're doing. OPM put an FAQ on their website that said, you know,
We encourage you to find work in the private sector. And, you know, this is the way to greater American prosperity is to for people in the public sector to find more productive work in the private sector. And this person was saying, you know, look, if I wanted to be in the private sector, I could go to the private sector.
I am working a very difficult job for not very much pay compared to what I could make if I left government. And I'm doing it because I believe in this project of public service. I believe in the work that the U.S. government does and what it provides to the world and what it provides to the American people.
And the approach that Musk and the Trump folks who are aligned with Musk are taking of this kind of, you know, we can just come in, these people are enemies, they'll find other work elsewhere, who cares, is just completely orthogonal to the worldview that civil servants take.
Exactly. And I think that at a certain point, once you've been punched repeatedly, why would you approach the administration with goodwill after that, after the bully has socked you in the stomach and taken your lunch?
No. The statistics I've seen are normally about 6% of federal employees leave the federal government in a year just because they're retiring or they decided to move on to a different job. And the number who reportedly took the quote-unquote buyout was only about 3% of federal employees. I would point to, I'll do a little log rolling for my own organization.
Lawfare has been publishing and running podcasts with an amazing professor at the University of Minnesota, Nick Bednar, who studies the civil service and administrative law. I recorded a podcast with him where he said that he'd been speaking with a lot of civil servants, and his impression was that the people who were taking that offer were largely people who were planning on retiring anyway.
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