As a resident of the Midwest, I have a dog in this fight, because moving government jobs here would be a huge boon for a region that is in dire need of jobs. I’m thrilled to see federal investment in Kansas City. And if you believe that climate change is a real and pressing issue, you should support government policies that might spur growth and reinvestment in the Midwest, too.

The Midwest is depopulating, despite having tons of infrastructure and the capacity for the kinds of dense, resilient cities I’m told we need to weather the coming climate apocalypse. We have irreplaceable strategic assets that are currently crumbling because decades of federal disinvestment and policies have favored coastal areas at our expense.

So with that caveat about my personal bias, let’s get down to my hot takes:

The culture in Washington, D.C. is toxic and contributes to administrative bloat.

Specifically: there are many highly paid feds who should retire but don’t because they are paid above market wages in positions that are very cushy.

I have worked in four government agencies and all were either overstaffed or had dead weight on staff that should have been cut. In my experience, most federal agencies in Washington are full of useless managers who pawn their work onto subordinates and/or contractors (the contracting racket is a rant for another day).

These managers refuse to retire, because their subordinates are doing their work, and the managers are often “teleworking” while their peons do the jobs of the absentee manager. (Of course, they’re not doing any work while they’re in the office, either, and most of their employees are probably more productive when the bad managers are at home and staying out of their way. But maybe some of them would retire if they had to go into the office…)

These managers have ruined and squandered a generation of talent. They have enabled our bureacracy to grow far larger than it needs to be by lying about how overworked they are. They have failed again and again to perform the most basic aspects of their jobs. But they’re allowed to continue in their roles because of a fundamentally broken culture in Washington.

These are the people who will finally leave government service if we move their jobs to the heartland. Every American should toast their departure.

There is no accountability in Washington.  Every time one of these managers fails to deliver, they claim their failure is because their agency is understaffed and underfunded. Then they receive more money to hire other people to do the jobs they’ve failed to do. I have personally seen this happen over and over, and it’s not limited to the federal government.

My husband worked at a semi-governmental agency before we moved to Chicago. When he left his job (because of an awful manager that HR refused to fire because they claimed it would be age discrimination), they didn’t just backfill his position. They created two new managerial positions (each of which pays over $120,000) and there were plans afoot to hire fifteen contractors to do his job.

My husband may ultimately be replaced by seventeen additional people (in addition to the person who got his old job), and the work he was hired to do still hasn’t been completed. We don’t know how many people were eventually hired: but the fact that replacing him with eighteen people was even a possibility is completely insane.

Of course, his former employer is constantly asking for more money from the federal government, and one of the awful managers he fled recently requested $80 million for an “artificial intelligence” project. (The project is not actually an artificial intelligence project.)

The managers who oversee these clusterfucks in Washington are paid handsomely. And it’s not just the managers who are well-compensated: mid-level bureaucrats in Washington outearn most managers in the civil service in the rest of the country (and, in fact, the world), thanks to bonkers salary inflation that I personally believe is a result of D.C.’s uniquely toxic culture.

Before I dig into this, a little context. Federal employees are paid according to a salary table called the “General Schedule.” This schedule provides for location adjustments (i.e., an employee in New York makes more than one in Colorado.)

The lowest paid federal employee in Washington is a GS-1 (“Grade 1″), Step 1. They make $25,458 annually. The highest paid employee is a GS-15, Step 10 ($166,500.)

In theory, a GS-1 might be a mail clerk (in practice, few positions are ever posted at a GS1 – many entry level positions are a GS3 or higher). A GS-15 should have significant responsibilities, since they are among the most highly compensated professionals in the United States government.

In practice, many of the GS-15 employees I met in Washington were doing less work than their counterparts in the private sector, and being paid more for it. There are additional employment categories for employees with specialized skills: employees in the “Senior Executive Service (SES)” and “Senior Level (SL)” or “Scientific or Professional (ST)” make even more than GS-15s. (You can likely guess about whether most of the SESs I met had any actual skills.)

But let’s get back to the big picture.

The rampant grade inflation in Washington-based federal jobs is proof that the civil service there is unmoored from basic economic reality.

The average federal employee in Washington, D.C. is a GS-12. (The lowest-paid GS-12 in D.C. makes $74,596.)

The average federal employee in the rest of the country is a GS-10. (A GS-10 in Pittsburgh makes $58,209.)

You might suspect that this is because there are more senior jobs in D.C., but you’d be dead wrong. There are more highly graded jobs in Washington, but the pay level does not remotely correlate to the work many civil servants are actually doing (this cuts both ways, and I’ll get into that in another post).

I would bet my life that the average GS-10 in Pittsburgh works far harder than the average GS-12 in Washington. I looked at federal jobs daily in Washington and in Chicago for over a year: the Chicago jobs overwhelmingly had more responsibility at lower pay grades. My year-long job search led me to conclude that there is significant grade inflation in the D.C. area.

Let me give two anecdotal examples of grade inflation:

I worked at an agency’s headquarters in Washington, and interviewed last year for a job at their field office in south Chicago. The contrast between the field office and HQ in DC could not be starker: my position here would have been a GS-5 with more responsibility than I had as a GS-11 in DC, and the hiring manager was a GS-13 with over 300 employees across two states in his chain of command. There are managers in Chicago that are a GS-7. I can’t begin to count the number of useless, nonsupervisory GS-12s back at headquarters. (You don’t have to take my word for it that managers in the government are rarely held accountable: there are tons of federal employee surveys that you can review at your leisure.)

My job search left me with the impression that federal employees in Chicago were more competent, despite having significantly lower salaries than their counterparts in Washington. This impression is supported by the personal experience of another family member who works regularly with regional employees from the Department of Transportation. This family member has said many times (and I’ve heard it repeated by their professional peers) that the caliber of employees in the midwest regional offices was much higher, and that the D.C.-based employees were generally incompetent (and especially so in comparison to the midwest-based employees). Of course, the ones in D.C. were being paid more for similar work.

Here’s another fun anecdote about overpaid employees. A friend writes:

I was a GS-11 working at an *agency* and was essentially a secretary. No real big responsibility, non-supervisory, etc. I worked in a marketing office with roughly 14 employees. They were ALL GS-14s, many of them in their 20s. Non-supervisory, not super significant. The 14 was just something you got if you stayed for a few years.

The managers were all GS-15s and the managers above them were all SES. When I took my current job I took a downgrade to a GS-9…I am now an assistant director with a TON of high level responsibilities. My director is a GS-11. Supervisory.

Some managers are GS-12s (there’s only one for each facility) and they are so fancy that we call them Mr. and Mrs.

There is a GS-14 (ONE of them on the whole entire base, the largest military base in the region) and he is the deputy director of the whole base. This is mind-boggling to me.

In short, while I would love to have my cushy GS-11 that would have eventually led to a 14 without much effort, it just didn’t feel right. And I would be happy to see some of these jobs move out of DC…the government needs a broader pool.

My friend is right: these jobs should be relocated. The rest of the country has never recovered from the recession, while D.C. has continued to boom. Compensation in the federal sector is completely divorced from prevailing wages in the private sector in the region. And compensation in the civil service in Washington is divorced from the compensation civil servants receive in other geographic locations.

Here’s the visual proof:

These two lines would almost certainly be closer together if D.C. salaries were excluded.

Not one journalist reporting on this issue has ever made a compelling argument that there is a benefit to taxpayers from having these jobs in Washington, which forces me to ask the obvious question: Why should the economic benefit of these jobs be concentrated in one of the most affluent parts of the country?

And, a bigger question: why should D.C. remain uniquely insulated from our country’s economic downturn simply by virtue of its status as a historical federal employment center?

In my opinion, the culture in Washington (and the overpayment of civil servants there is a symptom, not the cause) means that continuing to locate these jobs there is a detriment to taxpayers.

Seriously, D.C.’s culture is messed up.

It’s unfortunate that an honest criticism of the culture in Washington is missing from the discourse. I hope my blog can do its small part to shed light on the culture I left. I love living in the Midwest, and I think more jobs should move here, both for the obvious climate and logistical advantages, but also because D.C. is objectively bad and working in that kind of institutional culture damages people on a deep and fundamental level that is rarely discussed.

In my experience, the average professional in Washington is simply not as skilled as the average professional in Chicago, because most people haven’t ever had to truly work (much less work in a functional or high-performing organization). This isn’t just limited to the federal government: it was also clear in my last area of work (public libraries). The District of Columbia Public Library system is swimming in money, but my former employer (Prince George’s County Memorial Library System) consistently delivered better and more innovative services with a fraction of the budget.  So does the tiny one-branch library in my 22,000-person Chicago suburb.

I have examples from my husband’s line of work, too. If you look at the District of Columbia government’s budget for road maintenance, and consider the temperate weather there, you’d would quite reasonably expect the District to have the nicest roads in the country. It doesn’t.

There are roads in Southeast D.C. that are worse than the roads in my broke-ass town in the Chicago Southland. The fact that no one in the District is embarrassed about their failure to deliver basic services via a transportation department with one of the highest budgets in the country just goes to show how broken the city truly is. (Of course, roads in Virginia, where taxes are lower, are much better. It’s almost like having infinite fake money makes bureacracies worse…)

Culture matters, and Washington’s is terrible.

In my opinion, Amazon made a big mistake in choosing a market where they’re going to overpay for people who are used to working in less-than-challenging conditions. Working for a bad boss and not having enough work to do can really mess you up. If I had stayed in Washington any longer, I surely would not have been able to recover my wits. I escaped a year ago, and I’m still not as sharp as I was before I started working for the government.

We all pay the price when a generation of civil servants rots because they work in a fundamentally broken place.

Our government should move these USDA jobs to Kansas City. It should probably move many more jobs away from Washington.

And it should move them to the Midwest.

People in the Midwest are used to working harder for less money: we’re a bargain for taxpayers. We have great universities. Our cities are underpopulated, have tremendous infrastructure, and have baked-in climate resilience.

Give us those sweet federal jobs.

We need them.

In my next post:

I’ll explain career ladders, how federal hiring is terrible, and more (including a brief history of the idea of moving government jobs out of Washington, which predates the current administration). At some point, I’ll also respond to some of the frequent criticism lobbed at these plans, and engage specifically with the matter of the climate scientists whose jobs are moving to Kansas City.

Thanks for reading!

I had nearly forgotten about my application a few weeks after I submitted it, when I was telling a friend about my issues at church, and he told me out of the blue that he’d known my friend Katie (he’d read the post linked above). I had an odd feeling that I’ve only had a few times – the phrase that comes to mind is “somebody walked over my grave” – and sure enough, the next morning, I woke up to an email from the Unitarian Universalist Association informing me that I’d received a scholarship making it possible for me to go to General Assembly. If this wasn’t enough of a sign to stay put at All Souls, the day following, I heard from my colleague, L, in Columbus: she was coming to DC and wanted to meet, so, I didn’t even have to contact her first to ask her about staying at her place!

I was so happy to be able to meet L for the first time in person. Working with her as a client was such a thrill – I could always sense that a person of immense curiosity and intellect, who shared my passion for libraries, was on the other end of the line when we used to have our weekly client phone call, but she is even kinder and more generous and funny than I could have imagined. Here are my favorite pictures from the first time we met IRL, when we did the cocktail flight at BarMini.

I’m glad that I have put in the time at the church. I don’t know if Unitarian Universalism figures into my spiritual path long-term, but in the meantime, it has brought me some wonderful things. I’ve attended IAF community organizing training for a second time, met some very nice people, and have been able to observe different leadership styles and group dynamics than I am used to. Navigating small conflicts within the young adult group has made me a better listener, less inclined to gossip, and more inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt.

I had a nice time at the Service of the Living Tradition, and loved seeing my friends from All Souls on stage singing under the direction of our church’s musical director.

I’m very grateful for the opportunity to spend some time in L’s apartment, too. Being around a new friend who has been so kind has made it clear who in my life isn’t reciprocating the good vibes I try to put forth in all my interpersonal relations.

I am so lucky to have a friend like L. Girl makes me want to raise the bar on hospitality to guests.

I was disappointed to miss two attractions in Columbus that weren’t on my radar until it was too late to visit: first, the significant collection of Dale Chihuly glass at the Franklin Park Conservatory (I really love the Chihuly chandelier in the Renwick), and second, the Lustron House that is permanently in the Ohio Historical Society after a three-year visit to MOMA. Getting to Columbus is pretty cheap, so I’m hoping to make one more trip back there before L moves.

I loved going to see the Columbus Clippers with L’s brother and his wife, and their friends Toast and Stove.

I only go to minor league baseball when it’s PGCMLS/Summer Reading night at the Bowie Baysox, so it was really a treat to go to a game smack in the middle of downtown! Here are some pictures of the stadium, and Toast and Stove’s family and friends.

The main library branch in downtown Columbus reopened just in time for my trip, too. That deserves its own blog post over at the library-specific blog I’m trying to force myself to update. First, though, I want to rave about Columbus’s coffee scene. The city (which has an adorable downtown visitor’s center) distributes little passports for participating coffee shops and craft breweries, and gives you freebies if you bring your completed book back downtown. (Unfortunately, they don’t let you keep the book as a souvenir, but the t-shirt they give out is pretty nice!)

How cute is this, though?

The coffee shop that stood out most for me was the Roosevelt, which plugs back into some social causes and serves Destination Doughnuts, which were SO GOOD.

Something that really struck me was how much SPACE a lot of these businesses had. It was wild having the places go on and on once you got inside. Can’t recall the names of everywhere I went, but man, all the places on that coffee passport were great!

I also enjoyed going to Columbus Fest in the awesome park near the convention center.

Jenni’s ice cream was kind of overrated, but the central market in Columbus was nice. I rode the bike share a lot and loved it.

Thank you to everyone who made this such a great trip, especially to the new friends I met from All Souls and to the loveliest of hostesses, and the loveliest of lemurs.

the light made everything look so beautiful on my screen. and little esposito is so hard to capture….

I even took some halfway decent selfies….(note: my skin DID NOT LOOK THIS GOOD IRL)

this is how I imagine New England, as rendered through LL Bean catalogs.

essence of sunday laziness:

soundtrack for a foggy day:

and a poem:

picnic, lightning – Billy Collins

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” – Lolita

It is possible to be struck by a meteor

or a single-engine plane

while reading in a chair at home.

Safes drop from rooftops

and flatten the odd pedestrian

mostly within the panels of the comics,

but still, we know it is possible,

as well as the flash of summer lightning,

the thermos toppling over,

spilling out on the grass.

And we know the message

can be delivered from within.

The heart, no valentine,

decides to quit after lunch,

the power shut off like a switch,

or a tiny dark ship is unmoored

into the flow of the body’s rivers,

the brain a monastery,

defenseless on the shore.

This is what I think about

when I shovel compost

into a wheelbarrow,

and when I fill the long flower boxes,

then press into rows

the limp roots of red impatiens–

the instant hand of Death

always ready to burst forth

from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

Then the soil is full of marvels,

bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,

red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick

to burrow back under the loam.

Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,

the clouds a brighter white,

and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge

against a round stone,

the small plants singing

with lifted faces, and the click

of the sundial

as one hour sweeps into the next.

Like I said, pretty much all the fun stuff I did at Midwinter was thanks to the Internet. I posted in ALATT looking for advice on finding money to get to Midwinter, and found a really cool librarian to share a room with for super cheap (thanks VK, you are the coolest!). This same post led me to my ALA Bestie, Tiff, who was just as excited as I was to be in Emerging Leaders and who promptly made a Facebook group for all of us and got at least half our cohort to join before Midwinter. Found out through our Facebook group that another woman from our group, Allie, was going to be in town early, too, so we made tentative plans to hang out and adjusted them when this stroke of luck came along:

My (old? new?) friend Amanda, who I haven’t heard from in years, figured out from Instagram that I was in Chicago for librarian shenanigans. We were on a message board together several years ago, and I had no idea she’d 1) left Austin 2) moved to Chicago 3) become a librarian. She was kind enough to offer to give me and another person from the Internet I’d never met a tour of the Newberry Library. (Allie, thanks for being such a great sport about meeting 2 Internet randos on the same day!)

I’ve been promising to share these pictures forever, so here they are. I’ve worked in some pretty cool libraries, but this one was really special (GET IT?).

This lady knows how to give a tour. She lined us up for the obvious photo op right away:

A real Oscar! It was heavy.

There were some seriously cool maps up in there, but they were tricky to photograph, so this is the only one you’ll see. There were also the cool tiny globes that sailors could refer to.

expert-level cardigan-collection coordination

Next, some super-deluxe Milton:

Paradise Lost

I think those are emeralds and rubies.

This is DEFINITELY a snakeskin.

RIP, Kaa.

the lovely lady in action.

I don’t even understand how this is possible.

A few other highlights:

A witch’s spell book (miss lady was not even trying to hide her activities, no decoder ring to be found)

What may be the oldest existing copy of Francisco Ximénez’s transcription of the Popul Vuh…

Popul Vuh.

How do you take books in a covered wagon? Make the books ITTY BITTY. Tiny books (not to be confused with tiny hats)! Everyone’s favorite!

tiny books!

I wonder if people used magnifying glasses for these….

Thanks Amanda and the Newberry for a fantastic day!

cuties

My Emerging Leaders group is great (and adorable). We’re working for the Association for Library Services to Children to extend last year’s EL team’s research on valuation of library services.

2015 ALSC Emerging Leaders

Oh, and I met Cornell West. There were pictures on Courtney Young’s phone, but she probably deleted them because I was some rando who photo-bombed her. Still! Cornell West! He was just as awesome at speaking as you would imagine. Thanks for the photo, Mac!

Me: Soooo am I coming up to the city for NYE or are you coming to DC?

KB: Dude. Work has been so stressful that I haven’t had a chance to think about my plans, let alone buy my ticket home. I wasn’t planning on coming back to New York for New Year’s Eve though.

Me: Maybe we should go camping

KB: DUDE that’s not a bad idea!! or…what would it be to get a little cabin in Shennandoah? Just for that day/night? Seriously. We could bring wine.

Me: I’ll investigate.

I soon discovered that Librarian Skills (TM) and Travel Agent Skills are pretty much the exact same, so I blew up KB’s email within half an hour with links to Killahevlin Bed and Breakfast just outside Shennandoah National Park.

our sweet digs.

Me: check your email. Dude I’m getting kinda pumped tbh

KB: about going to the woods??

Me: we can’t stay in the park but the B&B I just sent you looks choice

KB: I’m just worried about being frozen in a tent…

Me: It has a private Irish pub. It’s so us.

KB: Uh…THIS LOOKS AWESOME. it has 5 stars on yelp, bedandbreakfast.com AND trip advisor

 

the pub in question.

Me: Right? it’s not that expensive either, you can just buy us dinner hahaha

KB: and we can go on a hike on the 31st AND the first!

Me: they have free beer and wine in their “pub”

Me: I’m dyin

Me: it’s on homie

KB: Dude, let’s freaking do it.

KB: Can we please talk about how excited I am for NYE now?

Me: I’m crazy stoked. I talked about it all day at work. I’m beyond excited. Those egg waffles!

Me: Looks like there might not be snow in the park so we can start the new year right with a post-brunch hike

KB: YES

Was it awesome? It was awesome.

for some reason K and I have never gotten a cute picture together – this is close.

I have to give props to our innkeepers at Killahevlin for some solid dinner recommendations. We went to Osteria 510  for dinner because the prix fixe at Apartment 2G was out of our budget (hey, future boyfriends, I want to eat there). The main course was underwhelming, but we had some pretty good fried oysters and the tiramisu was legit.

In the bar, I discovered this wonderful book by Sue Eisenfeld. I agree with the reviews stating that anyone visiting the park will experience it in a new way – when we went back the next day, I realized that all the trails were probably named after families. I talked with Kristen about what a great travel piece a story about the book would make, and the Post ran the exact story I pictured not even a week later. (How did no one scoop me up when I was applying for journalism jobs?)

Pro tip: don’t ever go on vacation with me. I will spend the entire time reading.

(Case in point: me, ca. 23:00, 12/31/2014)

We picked out a trail that goes by a cemetery because of Sue’s book:

thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn

also spotted on the trail:

– some gravel that had somehow risen a few millimeters above the rest of the soil, held together by an ice matrix like some sort of lattice. the trail was frozen and crunched every step but we had never seen frost hold up rocks above the rest of the earth

– fallen berries covered with dew.

Last year was the best year of my life so far, I hope this one will be even better!

Finally got to see the Clean Girls play (can I just say how cool it is that I have friends who get written up in Rolling Stone? Congrats to you, and to Sean Gray for all his work supporting local music), and met everyone cool from William & Mary who didn’t go to TJ. What a fun night.

Friday night: an unexpected visit with an old friend, followed by a sleepover at the O’Connor’s house replete with sleepy time tea, Futurama, lovely gifts from the Philippines, and a little folk magic.

Saturday: helped Sam’s boyfriend move, followed by a pretty gluttonous breakfast with Sam and Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor over at ye olde Original Pancake House. 

Evening was Kristen’s 26th birthday at a succession of increasingly ridiculous Clarendon bars. I am threatening to get back on Yelp because the DJ at this one was so bad, and kept playing such terrible house music while insisting that she didn’t have any Britney. The only saving grace was the bar’s manager, Tony, who told me I was “rocking that Persian attitude.” I was also truly entertained by the overzealous bouncer stationed inside the women’s bathroom. Big ups to Katie, who endured my texts from Sam’s phone about how I was entertaining myself by pretending that the bar manager was actually Tony Stark.

Sunday: blew off a party and a reception for young professionals at the Transportation Research Board conference to watch The Good Wife, set up my website, and catch up on some work (read: making my mom do all my new employee paperwork for the National Archives. Thanks mom, you’re the best).

I’m not sure I made the best call: on the one hand, I had a really solid night of sleep and felt super relaxed this morning, but on the other hand, this was the weakest Good Wife episode of the season (I am not watching Downton Abbey because last week’s premiere put me to sleep). A convoluted case plus heavy handed plot development in the governor’s mansion does not make me a happy camper. Maybe Will and Mr. Big will hash it out more next week and it will be juicy?

Tomorrow I start a new job and TRB begins in earnest. Can’t wait to connect with colleagues in the transportation library subcommittee meeting, and to get settled in at the National Archives!

Weekend jams:

Sam turned me onto this:

and downloaded this to cheer me up before we went out.

The time off has been a blast, but I’m ready to get back to work(ing 65 hours a week). It should be a great term. The student chapter of SLA is finally meeting on a day when I’m on campus with free time! But I gotta chill out with taking on new obligations.

Things I’m looking forward to: covering the Washington Auto Show for Asian Fortune, going to see Speedy Ortiz this Friday.