Hello fellow fruit and gardening enthusiasts -
I work for the USDA and am one of the ~2 million federal employees under a constant barrage of threatening emails for 3 weeks now from ‘the new management’ at OPM attempting to make me quit (and also to snitch on fellow employees and just insulting us - sometimes the PDFs sent actually show the author as non-Governmental people known from P2025 & heritage fdn.).
I work as a forest ecologist and maybe that’s meaningless to you, but remember all the areas that the USDA has been a constant help, and the NWS & NOAA, & the NRCS/SCS, on and on. There is an attempt to get as many federal employees to quit and give up their careers (and remaining employee rights) helter-skelter, with threats of ‘reduction’ if we don’t quit now. Best estimates and evidence from a couple agencies is that any positions resigned will not be re-filled.
There’s a lot more, ask me, it’s a nightmare.
The result if carried as far as they can, or even partway, will be something like if you’d done the same at a hospital: depending on who gets scared off or is willing to take the bait, you might be left with, say, a receptionist, two janitors, a dishwasher but no cook, a brain surgeon but no nurses, a billing clerk but no IT support to keep the systems going.
Don’t count on the USDA keeping all those fruit tree varieties and sending you scions, or the NWS being able to operate the networks of sensors and personnel that the country’s weather forecasting depends on, or NRCS helping with erosion or flood control, or anything else we as a society depend on.
So if you think you might miss these sorts of things (and a lot more our country’s security and economy depends on) call your DC representatives - I’ve done it so often in the last weeks (and before) they know my voice. If you can get through call again the next day, their phones should be overwhelmed. I actually get through to staffers on one consistently and another occasionally; else I leave messages beginning with name location telephone number.
Don’t let an ‘app’ do this, and don’t waste time with email or ‘petitions’, which are easily ignored; if you talk to a staffer, and enough do it, the message may get through. Physical letters may also help, by mass. You do not need a stamp to mail them.
Sorry if someone will find this too ‘political’, but this is a completely, 100% political crisis that will definitely worsen if we are passive and let it. We need to be active citizens now.
When the president and his staff calls me; we federal employees, corrupt, enemies, parasites, lazy it is political.
When a guy at P2025 tells them in a speech (see on Pro Publica) attacking the government and federal employees (except himself apparently) “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. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.” and is confirmed as the head of OMB it is political (the trauma is working on me by the way - hell I even wake up in the middle of the night in trauma now - finally, I guess: fatcat rich bureaucrats words are put into action! [Insane words of course; this guy has a sub-literate level of language ability you’ll see of you watch the video]).
When an unelected shadow zillionaire suddenly has unknown and massive power over our institutions and treasury and sends teams of unvetted 20-somethings with no security clearance and no experience running OPM (and writing emails to all government employees sometimes with almost comically poor penmanship) and gaining access to information systems critical to our economy, national security, and operation of government, it is political.
When it affects all our futures n so many ways - in addition to our hobby or business - with little or no accountability or revue, in violation of law, constitution, norms, and public interest, it is political.
And, in our context here, it is also about growing fruit.
In addition to political this also seems to me to be surreal, frightening, and approaches at times satire. Ask who might benefit from this.
If and when my position/I am ‘canceled’ after a career of constantly moving myself to keep doing this work this may be an insurmountable situation. All the fruit I’ve been planting here at my house (first house I bought at age 52 because I live where they’re cheap enough for me to afford, I’m not getting rich here) I might not be able to see bear fruit. I can’t imagine finding another ecologist job in a country flooded with now unemployed field scientists, and I live far from any cities where I could try something else. I could sell my house for maybe $60 or 80k (it’d be worth 400k more than that if it were in a city), but that would’d allow me to move to many other places. I make a fairly low wage but I am frugal having grown up poor. But this is all way bigger than my puny life or job.
I wish I could be asking about a plum variety here instead.