Unlikely Tales of Bureaucratic Heroism

“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

Some of you will recognize these words from the long-remembered speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln during a ceremony to commemorate the reburial of Union soldiers who died in the Battle of Gettysburg. Maybe, like me, you had forgotten that last part, about the reburial of soldiers.

Casey Cep, writing in the book Who is Government?, reminds us that the Gettysburg Address followed “an extensive campaign to scour battlefields and beyond for hundreds of thousands of fallen soldiers.” 

“Ever since,” she continues, “we have honored those who ‘gave the last full measure of devotion’ by bringing them home to their next of kin or burying them with honor in a military cemetery.”

The place where Lincoln spoke is now known as Soldiers National Cemetery—one of 155 facilities across the United States overseen by the National Cemetery Administration, an agency within the Department of Veterans Affairs. Staffed by 2,300 federal workers in 42 states and Puerto Rico, the NCA buries more than 140,000 veterans and their family members every year. It cares for the graves of nearly 4 million other veterans who gave their lives over the decades stretching from the Revolutionary War to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ron Walters, who has led this organization since 2009, is one of eight people profiled in Who is Government?, which is humbly subtitled: The Untold Story of Public Service. The book is edited by Michael Lewis, a journalist whose work sometimes gets turned into Hollywood movies (Moneyball; The Big Short). It includes profiles of eight federal workers, written by Lewis and six of his favorite writers—Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Landchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell.

Each of these profiles tells the story of a government worker whom Lewis and his co-authors depict as genuine heroes. Together, they slay the notion that our government is fundamentally broken—these are definitely true stories and they are amazing. And guess what? As clunky and inefficient as it may be at times, government works.

“The work Walters does would be admirable no matter how well he did it, but, as it turns out, he and his colleagues do their work better than any other organization in the country,” Casey Cep writes. “Not just better than other cemeteries and funeral homes—better than any other organization, period.” She points out that for the past seven years, the NCA has received “the highest rating of any entity, public or private, in the American Customer Satisfaction Index … the gold standard for measuring consumer experiences.”

I decided to post this appreciation of a book about federal government workers here on California Local (where we usually focus on California, and local issues) because we also see reporting on governance as part of our remit. I was pleased and not surprised to see that one of the book’s chapters deals with a federal entity based in California, and also with the biggest topic of them all: the universe.

Dave Eggers (himself a longtime Bay Area resident, and the creator of dozens of cultural artifacts including his first book, the appropriately titled A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius), contributes a chapter on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is located in Pasadena. I’ll let him explain what it does:

“The lab, a research and development center for NASA that specializes in building unmanned satellites, explorers, and land-based rovers such as the Opportunity vehicle on Mars, is known as Disneyland for nerds. It’s where a good swath of the world‘s best minds in astronomy and astrophysics and engineering work in extremely boring buildings and extreme heat surrounded by jagged mountains, and only 23 minutes from downtown Los Angeles. The campus is very clean and very sunny, the architecture is just short of Gulag, the offices just short of stultifying. But the work being done at JPL is the most inspiring research and exploration being done by any humans on our planet.

“And it’s paid for by you. No billionaires will fund work like this because there’s no money in it. This is government-funded research to determine how the universe was created and whether we are alone in it. If NASA and JPL were not doing it, it would not be done.”

Eggers writes about Vanessa Bailey, an astronomer working in the JPL division looking for signs of life on exoplanets—bodies orbiting stars in our galaxy and beyond. She discovered one of the 82 (as of this writing) exoplanets that have been directly imaged and identified—her’s is named HD 106906 b. 

“‘It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue,’ she says. But it was her find. Still, she shrugs off talk that it was anything approaching an individual accomplishment. … This is a good moment to emphasize that no one at JPL – no one I met, at least – was willing to take credit for anything. Starting with Bailey, there was such a relentless emphasis on teams and groups, and predecessors, and such a deep unwillingness from anyone to put themselves forward.”

This is a theme that shows up in every chapter of this book, and is in fact, the reason Lewis created Who is Government? He points out that he has long been obsessed with an organization called the Partnership for Public Service, which, since 2002, has given out awards “to call out extraordinary deeds inside the federal government.”

“An additional 500 or so entries made it onto this year‘s list: pages of single-paragraph descriptions of what some civil servant no one has ever heard of has done. In most cases, what they’ve done is solve some extremely narrow, difficult problem that the US government—in many cases, only the US government—has taken on: locating and disposing of chemical weapons in Syria; delivering high-speed Internet to rural America; extracting 15,000 Americans from in and around Gaza on October 8, 2023. The work sometimes rings a bell with me. The people who did it never do.”

This problem has led to the proliferation of a false myth–that federal bureaucrats are unambitious at best and lazy or stupid at worst—a myth that has allowed Elon Musk and the DOGE bros to commit violence against this army of committed individuals with, so far, not much pushback. Let's hope that Lewis’s book helps spark an uprising in their defense.