When Do We Worry about the Future Stability of CPSC Staff?

During the shutdown, I often wished that we Americans treated our federal workers better. My concern is less moral or ideological and more practical. Can CPSC – or any federal agency – continue to retain and attract good workers if the present political situation continues?

Could any company or organization do so if its current and prospective employees needed to seriously consider if the jobs were worth putting themselves and their families under perpetual risk of having paychecks delayed?

Could any company or organization do so if this financial threat was coupled with constant denigration of its employees by opponents who used tactics like knowingly exploiting the public’s ignorance about what nonessential really means, who used terms like leech and lazy?

These aren’t abstract questions. I live in the D.C. area. I know many people who work for the federal government. In my experience, many of them are seriously asking themselves questions like: Is it worth it to work for the federal government just to be disparaged? Is doing so financially dangerous?

I’ll leave it to others to argue over whether a damaged CPSC workforce poses risks to consumer safety or whether companies will avoid hurting customers as good business sense. I don’t write for consumers. I write for business.

Rather, I’ll point out that CPSC and other agencies are not going away any time soon and ask these questions:

Do you want to deal with agencies that have an increasingly hard time keeping or attracting employees, where the institutional knowledge that protects you is lost to turnover, where the relationships you’ve forged and the informal processes you’ve helped establish are more prone to evaporate, where regulatory uncertainty due to slow rulemakings and other bureaucratic annoyances is exacerbated by learning curves and periodic work stoppages, where the information and assistance you need to protect both your customers and your company are unavailable for weeks, where your products sit idle on docks at crucial times of the year because laws and regulations are still in place but government workers are barred from clearing your shipments?

Rightly or wrongly, like it or not, government and business are tightly intertwined. Hurting the federal workforce doesn't undo that. At what point does damage to government workers equal damage to industry?