Short Takes #22: Formalized Curiosity
Zora Neale Hurston | Fed Employees Traumatized | Unsafe For Women | Shift Sulking
Research is formalised curiosity. It’s poking and prying with purpose.
…
That’s what I’m up to. Poking and prying with purpose.
Fed Employees Traumatized
Guess what? US federal agency heads characterizing federal employees as ‘the enemy’, trying to inflict ‘trauma’ on them, goading them to quit, and actively criticizing the goals of the federal agencies, results in a highly disengaged workforce. And that, in turn, leads to poor service delivery. So says the Partnership for Public Service in a new report -- the Public Service Viewpoint Survey -- and it reveals a ‘staggering collapse in employee engagement’ at the federal government, as Don Moynihan1 lays it out:
The headline figure is a government-wide Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Index Score of 32 out of 100. To put that in context: prior Best Places to Work scores, even at poorly rated agencies, rarely dropped below 50.
This is not a dip. It is a collapse.
The numbers are awful:
Here are the comparisons between 2024 and 2025 for larger agencies. The Department of the Army registered the highest score among large agencies — at just 48% out of 100 — with only 9% saying Secretary Pete Hegseth’s political team generates high levels of motivation. Every other large agency scored lower, some dramatically so. The average score by agency in 2024 is about 70% and 29.5% in 2025 — just over a 39 percentage point decline.
The picture at mid-size agencies is even worse. In 2024, the average score is 73% and in 2025 it is just over 25% — an astonishing 48 percentage point decline.
Of course, as in the private sector, poor engagement leads to lower productivity, higher churn rates, and worse service to clients. And for those in those jobs, it’s like living in a psychic prison. It may take a decade for the federal government to recover from this crisis.
Elizabeth Linos of the Harvard Kennedy School, comments on the survey results:
By any historical measure, the new data released yesterday by the Partnership for Public Service is documenting the worst employee engagement and workforce sentiment I’ve ever seen for the federal government. To put this into perspective: in a typical year, agencies work hard to get their engagement scores from the high 60s to the mid-70s or even into the 80s (if you’re NASA). This year, the average is 32. No federal agency is a “best place to work” at this point.
Unsafe For Women
In the United States, women are 73 percent more likely to be severely injured in vehicle crashes than men, and 17 percent more likely to die.
Apparently, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has resisted requiring crash test dummies that proxy for actual women. So, terrible stats, and we can’t expect them to get better soon.
Shift Sulking
When hourly workers begin their day already drained, exhausted, and stressed by increasing pressures to work with understaffed teams and subject to unpredictable schedules, it’s being called ‘shift sulking‘. This goes beyond the disengagement typified by the Gen Z stare, deeper into the way the hourly jobs of today are sapping the reserves of hourly workers, especially when coupled with poly-employment: when workers have to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet.
