Serving a Nation That Does Not Serve Us: A Federal Worker's Reflection
The views and opinions expressed in this piece are solely my own and do not reflect the views, policies, or positions of my employer, the federal government, or any affiliated institutions. This is a personal reflection on my experiences and perspectives as an individual working in the field of healthcare research.
These days.
These days, the world changes as the Trump administration pushes strange demands and astonishing new orders across my desk. My colleagues are being terminated, contracts expiring without renewal, research funding eliminated or reduced, multimillion-dollar grants screeching to a halt because we no longer have a Principal Investigator to manage study activities and ensure proper adherence to IRB-approved protocols. People, good people who have spent many, many years serving our nation, slip away quietly, and the silent space that they leave behind is dark and foreboding. We find out who is gone by word of mouth, long after their departure.
As a federal employee at the Seattle-Denver VA Center of Innovation, I have been doing my best to put my head down and continue to work on the research I can, the projects I love, with folks who volunteer their time and knowledge to further our mission of improving national healthcare. I work with sick elderly people. I work with experienced healthcare professionals who care for these people. I work with researchers who copiously and meticulously pore over the words and experiences of the American people – who work tirelessly to shine a light on what we did not know previously, to make that knowledge mean something. The research world is a special place. Knowledge is valuable, powerful, essential, and the quest to know something deeply is special and difficult.
My understanding of our nation’s Veterans has grown immensely. When I was younger and before I worked for the Veterans Health Administration, I had many preconceived notions over what it meant to “serve our country”. Truthfully, the American motif of liberty has always been disillusioning for me. Liberty for who? Justice for who? Although I have family members who served, these questions still hung over me.
The way American foreign policy mobilizes bodies for war, colonization, and death has never made me feel more protected. Trillions of dollars of military spending does not make me feel safer. I wonder what liberties are protected by interfering in foreign elections. By building and maintaining weapons of mass destruction. By training young people to shoot; to kill. By funding and arming genocidal campaigns.
I have come to understand that the values I hold and the ways I choose to live my life will never be in alignment with the values of the American military industrial complex. So how do I reconcile that with the fact that I work for a $370 billion system that oversees the care of over 7 million Veterans? How can I work within a broken system while trying to uphold human dignity? Corruption and care, violence and service, the erosion of moral integrity within federal systems… I feel both resigned and defiant in the face of these profound contradictions.
I have come to appreciate that there is the American military, the institution, and there are American Veterans, the people. In the population I work with, they were often young, poor kids, frequently Black and Brown, who signed up or were drafted to “serve their country” in conflicts around the world and came back traumatized, sick, and disillusioned. I thought Veterans were people who believed in war. I was mistaken.
The driving belief, as I have come to understand it, is service. It is a dedication to the virtue of service and freedom for all. To help others. To help their communities. To help other Veterans. To receive education, housing, healthcare. There are many reasons why one joins the military, and rarely is it because one believes that war is the answer. Unfortunately, it is ironic in how the military, ostensibly a vehicle for “freedom”, leaves many of its servants permanently affected by trauma, illness, and neglect.
The Veterans I work with are over 75 years old and chronically ill. At the end of their lives, I invite them to share their ideas and reflect on their experiences with me. We don’t often talk about active duty; I work on grants that focus on their health, their dreams, their hopes for the end of their lives, the values they hold and the ways they live out these values on a daily basis. The way they make decisions about their bodies—and how those choices align or conflict with the decisions imposed by our healthcare system. I have really come to love every minute I spend with them. I have been to Veteran’s homes, to their clinic appointments, to the waiting rooms with their grandchildren. I have interviewed their doctors, talked with their caregivers, watched as they transition to hospice and then ultimately to a place where I cannot follow them.
When DOGE tells me to summarize in five bullet points what I did last week, I bite my lip in frustration as I try to language what I do. How does what I do advance the VA mission? How do I serve our nation? I spend time with Veterans. I talk to them. I think about what they say. I write about it. Research is about dreams. What is possible for us? What can we imagine? What realities are out there, just waiting for us to realize them?
I help people talk about what they have no words for, to dream up a world that doesn’t exist yet. I am an Imagination Facilitator in a place where imagination goes to die. The world they articulate will likely never exist while they are alive. Their contributions are really for those who will come next, and they know this. They contribute anyways. In this way, American Veterans continue to serve their country long after they are discharged from active duty.
I feel, perhaps similarly to other federal workers, that my bullet-point list of job duties most accurately reflects the system in which I work. My work, by which I mean the way I carry out those job duties, is most reflective of the people with whom I work. Work is job-duties. Work is a mission and a value.
Work cannot be captured in bullet points. How do I flatten meaning into metrics? How do I impress upon the Department of Government Efficiency the value of imagination in bureaucracy?
In a recent meeting, a colleague reflected on these recent abrupt changes to the landscape of our work. “The system has started to take on its own identity, it has started to do things for itself. Rather than do the things it was designed for, like care for patients, and help doctors care for those patients, it operates by its own rules rather than trying to be helpful, to be of service.”
We are seeing a system that is meant to be of service become a system that serves only itself. Of course, it has always been that way. But the way that it is being man-handled and re-structured so explicitly, so brazenly, so facetiously, by an unelected bureaucrat and his billionaire cronies is an unsurprising yet devastating heartbreak. The disconnect between American ideals and reality is stark and startling. I work with American Veterans under an administration that has made it clear it does not care about them or the people who serve them. I live in a country that does not care about us. All of us.
However, while I have long been disillusioned with the nature of our federal systems, I fight to keep my faith in the people, from Veterans to civilians alike, who truly honor our nation. Those who honor our nation with their integrity, advocacy, and support of the most marginalized. Who work anyways. Who care anyways. Who love anyways. The American people are not the American government, just as American Veterans are not the American military. Our lives matter. Research matters. Healthcare matters.
We need to remember these things as we enter the senselessness and horror of civil war. Being American on the world-stage has long been a mortifying ordeal and it continues to be so. But rather than shrivel in the suffocating grip of shame, we must hold onto love—we must fight for love. Love of our brothers and sisters, strangers, enemies, and country. How do you love a nation that continuously betrays its people?
Love of your country does not mean love of your dictators. Love of your country means you see the best of us, the possibilities, dreams, and futures that only we can realize, and do the work every day, in ways large and small, to truly reify those quintessential American values of equality, unity, and liberty for all.
Love, despite everything, is our radical and necessary path forward.
View of the Seattle skyline from the VA Puget Sound Hospital.