Roughly 2 million civilian employees work for the federal government. They are men and women of every racial background and from every state in the country. Yet there is one thing they all have in common: They made a choice to serve, even knowing, in many cases, that they could be making more money in the private sector.

Unfortunately, it appears that we have a president who, rather than leading the nation’s public workforce, consistently chooses to belittle it. The latest example came when the president took to Twitter on Thursday morning, day six of an unnecessary government shutdown instigated by congressional Republicans at President Donald Trump’s behest. In what has become a familiar pattern of politicizing the largely nonpartisan, nuts-and-bolts work of the federal government, Trump tried to exert political pressure on congressional Democrats to fund his ineffective border wall by asking: “Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?”

What the president fails to understand is that federal employees don’t go to work wearing red or blue jerseys. What they do wear are the badges of law enforcement and the hats of park rangers and the uniforms of first responders, and they make up the backbone of our government. They bring their skills and expertise to strengthen our nation and make a difference in the lives of their fellow citizens, regardless of political affiliation.

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The president who declared that he would be “proud” to shut down the government is holding one-quarter of the federal government’s agencies hostage in an effort to get $5.7 billion for a wall that experts say would fail to improve border security – in the process treating 800,000 federal workers like poker chips from one of his failed casinos. Sadly, this is only the latest salvo by a president determined to attack and undermine our country’s public servants.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/dec/28/federal-workers-are-not-democrats-or-poker-chips/