Read on Twitter
Getting a lot of pushback on this, some of it angry, so a few points you can ignore and then yell anyway: https://twitter.com/petersagal/status/1334889052139565057
There are, by some estimates, up to 9M people who work for the Federal government in some capacity. Let's narrow it down to people who have say threes degrees of separation from a WH political appointee. That's still hundreds of thousands.
Many of them just do the daily jobs of management, acquisition, accounting, etc that are in no way different in this than any other admin. You're not going to shun somebody because he did accounts receivable for the GSA under Trump, right?
Let's take people who do more mission central jobs. EPA scientists, health care experts, social service professionals, etc. Many of those people joined the Government, sometimes at a loss of salary, to do good in the world. I've met some of them.
Eg: a person I met in Jan '17 who was working in the XXX Department on a really important project that would improve people's lives in a concrete way. They had made great progress under Obama. Should she have quit in protest or finished the work? I don't envy the dilemma.
There are also political appointees who actually did very good and important work either because the President didn't care or more likely, didn't even know about them. @C_C_Krebs, to take a prominent recent example.
Finally: "If I quit, I would have been replaced by somebody even worse" sounds like a lame excuse for cowardice, but it is (also?) literally true of everyone who quit or was fired from prominent positions. EG, DNI Dan Coats to Richard Grenell.
This is all to say: generalized righteous Manichean judgement is easy on Twitter, it's what it was built for. But be careful about applying it to real people in real life.
