Apoliticality

The political environment in my office is kind of weird.

At the simplest level, this is a government regulatory agency with a pretty broad mandate, so I imagine it would be very hard to work here without believing that at least sometimes, government regulation is necessary and good. That would seem to rule out the average right-wing nut. But the other extreme is no more likely. There are a lot of current or recently-former people in uniform in this particular regulatory organization, and I assume they tend to lean right-wing and conservative overall, despite normal individual variation of course. And more generally, I think most people don't realize just how much attention government agencies pay to the economic impact of what they're doing. Sometimes the economists won't support something unless we can show that Americans have already died because of a lack of the rulemaking we're working on. A nonlethal injury or theoretical risk isn't enough, damage to property isn't enough, deaths in a country with a different regulatory regime isn't enough, economists won't actively support any regulation except to directly prevent things that have directly killed American citizens. (I exaggerate a bit, of course.) Regulatory agencies are not, in general, proactive, and even those that are have to have the approval of some that aren't. Anyone who truly believed and was emotionally invested in progress on the regulatory mission of this agency would be depressed and/or not remain here long.

So you have to be pretty centrist and mainstream to work here. And officially, of course, it's intensely apolitical. Officially, we are deeply insulated from partisanship. Officially, we are an authority nearly beyond question within our mandate and it's always important, so things shouldn't change much as politicians come and go.

Officially, officially, officially. Really, though, I'm pretty sure almost anything federal is fair game for people in Congress and the White House to show off their tough-talking budget-cutting serious-leadchargetaking, and some leading Republicans openly express the wish to return to the regulatory regime of Teddy Roosevelt. So every so often we get a little reassurance that our office isn't on the chopping block despite what you see on the news, like at one of yesterday's meetings. Like so many things, it makes me chuckle to myself, in this case thinking something like "There's a fig leaf of bipartisanship coming up sooner or later, right? Right?"