After years of bashing and pay freezes, federal workers face sequester effects

Federal workers and retirees chose stability'solidly middle-class but not flashily high paychecks from an organization that wouldn't be going out of business and leaving them broke and unemployed. But in the current political environment, that stability is under attack because government itself is under attack. So for these workers, the Washington Post's Marc Fisher reports, there's the immediate concern of how sequestration will affect their lives materially and the longer-term frustration of watching their work and themselves be denigrated.

Pensions aren't supposed to be affected by the sequester, but retirees have to wonder if they will be delayed by furloughs of the workers who process them. Those who are likely to be furloughed themselves, meanwhile, are figuring out where to cut back. A National Defense University professor:

[...] has already cut back in anticipation of the forthcoming budget slashing: He told a carpenter who was going to build bookshelves in the living room that the $5,000 job will have to be put off, and he told his doggie day care provider that he'll have to go without that service when the furloughs kick in.

There's your ripple effect in a nutshell: a carpenter who's lost a job and a doggie day care that's lost a customer. In the Washington, D.C., suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, multiply that by thousands, creating a major drag on the economy.

But that's not all. This creates a long-term drag on the function of government. According to Raymond Won, an engineering manager at the Energy Department's Office of Science, "there's immediate impact on the work I do. What sequestration is doing is preventing the start on new-generation equipment that will create the next wave of American jobs." Bashing government workers and furloughing them and generally making these jobs feel undesirable could have another ripple effect, too; as Won says, "be careful how much you bash federal workers because if you don't attract good talent, then don't be surprised if government becomes much worse than it is today."

The sequester cuts don't just hit federal workers, of course. They hit meat production and scientific research and special education and travelers and public health and weather forecasting. But that's the genius of the war against government workers. It combines two favorite Republican targets'government and workers'so it can be waged through attacks that are about either government or workers. Today, federal workers are hurt by the sequester. Tomorrow, it'll be a divide and conquer pitting private sector workers whose pensions were long ago abolished against government pensions. The federal workers are screwed either way.