Last month, the Trump administration placed a $1 spending limit on most government-issued credit cards that federal employees use to cover travel and work expenses. The impacts are already widely felt.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists aren’t able to order equipment used to repair ships and radars. At the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), laboratories are experiencing delays in ordering basic supplies. At the National Park Service, employees are canceling trips to oversee crucial maintenance work. And at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), employees worry that mission-critical projects could be stalled. In many cases, employees are already unable to carry out the basic functions of their job.
“The longer this disruption lasts, the more the system will break,” says a USDA official who was granted anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak to the media about the looming crisis.
What the fuck un-American nonsense is this?
I do get it. We’ve normalized the “employer” to “employee” relationship, where you’re sort of a free person but also sort of a slave, and that’s carried over into government service. Fuck that though. You are a person. You’re allowed to talk if you want to, and any separate person who’s trying to tell you they are the one in charge of that decision is probably a big piece of dookie at heart.
I mean, they clearly were free to talk, because they did. The “not authorized to speak to the media” part is more along the lines of “not in a high enough position to give a carefully written (filtered through Public Relations, with whatever spin the government wants to put on it) statement”. There’s a big difference between a government employee speaking as an individual, and a government employee speaking on behalf of the government. The former is just a person expressing their concerns, but the latter is an official stance that the government has taken. They simply quoted the speaker as an individual, and made it clear that it’s not an official government statement.
Keeping their name out of it simply ensures there’s no potential blowback for the employee. Publicly speaking against your employer has historically gone poorly for the employees. But journalists want to ensure that people are still willing to come forward in the future. And putting an employee on blast for speaking against their employer would have a chilling effect on future interviewees. So the journalist protects the employee’s identity, while still quoting them as an individual.