My column for the San Francisco Chronicle on federal workers

My dad was one of them, and he wasn't a villain.

No, federal workers are not villains. Let me tell you about one

By Jack Ohman

Feb 11, 2025

As Elon Musk unconstitutionally terrorizes the U.S. government with college dropouts and teenagers on Red Bull, I want to tell you about being the son of a former federal employee.

My dad first served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War for three years. He was a staff sergeant, a radio operator and an instructor, and was awarded the Bronze Star with a “V” device — for valor. He met my mom at a USO dance at Fort Carson, Colo., in 1953 and they married six months later.

He then went to grad school on the G.I. Bill and got a doctorate in plant pathology from the University of Minnesota in 1961.

The U.S. Forest Service hired him as a research scientist. His area of expertise was tree diseases of the northern hardwoods states.

I can see your eyes glazing over, but the fact is, thousands of federal employees do essential work that you’ll never see, appreciate or care about.

You should.

The architect of Project 2025, who also now happens to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, said this in 2023:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. … When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

One thing I can tell you about my dad is that he wasn’t a villain. He was a hardworking kid from St. Paul, Minn., whose parents died before he was 19. He volunteered for the military. His parents were second-generation Norwegians and Swedes.

His dad worked at Packard Motors as a steel buyer, mostly for the British Spitfire fighter plane’s engines during World War II.

He was not a villain, either.

Federal employees do a lot of different things. Your mail carrier is a federal employee. Your air traffic controller is a federal employee. Your park ranger at the Lincoln Memorial is a federal employee. Your food inspector at the Food and Drug Administration is a federal employee.

They are not villains.

My dad did a lot of things you never saw. When I mentioned that he was an expert on the tree diseases of the northern hardwood states, that meant he knew a lot about tree fungi and tried to prevent them from decimating and killing forests.

You know what comes out of forests, right, in case you’ve forgotten? Houses. Decks. Roofing. Stuff like that. No wood, no 2-by-4s.

It’s pretty elemental stuff.

So if Dad managed to figure out how to cure a tree disease, you got to buy lumber at a reasonable price and not have it imported.

Boring? Maybe.

Let me also clue you in about the other things he did for the American people.

He would get on hundreds of airplanes every year, fly to U.S. Forest Service facilities in places like Rhinelander, Wis., and Carbondale, Ill., and make sure the government scientists were on track, spending your tax dollars properly. Sometimes those flights were in blizzards, in thunderstorms and in very small planes that would scare the hell out of you.

But he did that for the American people.

You’re probably wondering how much this villain in the federal government who Russell Vought wants to traumatize earned.

He was in the senior executive service and was in charge of all the research in the Forest Service. When he retired, he made about $75,000 per year — probably $150,000 in today’s dollars.

Not that much. He used to say he could have made twice as much at Weyerhauser.

You know something else? He was a Republican for most of his life.

He was an Eisenhower guy. He voted for Nixon over Kennedy in 1960. Voted for Reagan, too. He later became a Democrat when he saw where the Republican Party was going, but his impulses were frugal. He didn’t like us taking long showers, and why would he hire someone to mow the lawn when he could do it himself?

Yeah, a real enemy of the people, my dad. A villain.

When he went on those trips, he also left his two sons and his wife behind, sometimes for weeks at a time. In 1968, he went to Huntsville, Ala., a lot. That’s where NASA built the Saturn V rocket that went to the moon.

He was on a government task force to make sure the American people and, by extension, the Earth, wouldn’t be exposed to potentially deadly bacteria that may have been on the lunar surface.

Villainous.

When the late President Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, he also made a special point of bashing federal employees as part of his campaign promises. This did not endear him to my dad. When Reagan took office, he was also an enthusiastic federal worker abuser.

Reagan used to joke that a phrase you shouldn’t believe is, “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.”

Well, let me tell you something.

My dad was, in fact, here to help. All the Carter org charts, the Reagan jokes and the Vought speeches in the world wouldn’t stop Dad from doing vital, quiet work for the American people.

He finally retired in 1987, and he died in 2011. Honestly, he felt pretty unappreciated.

Maybe even a little villainized.

But he should have been proud.

He did more for the American people on a coffee break than Elon Musk and his IT punks will ever do.

Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist who also writes at https://substack.com/@jackohman

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Good morning, People of YB!: My teeth are OK. I know you’re all dying to hear that. Back to dental tedium…or away from it. Anyway, hope you have a great morning, and I’ll have more content later today, probably. Unless my teeth fall out. Thanks so much for the new paid subscriptions, and I’ll be over in the Bay Area giving talks tomorrow and Friday. Content will follow.—J.