I’ve worked in government for 20 years, and I
am aghast at your notion that a manager or department head has some
kind of First Amendment right to trash her bosses in public (HCN,
8/16/04: National parks pinching pennies). Teresa Chambers had
every right to go to the Washington Post and
lobby for a different budget decision — but not to do so and
retain her position as a manager within the administration. Those
kind of disagreements are supposed to be hashed out within the
organization — with her ultimate expression of disagreement
being to resign.
Don’t get me wrong — I think
we need to put more money into our parks and the parks police, but
decisions about how to allocate resources get made every day in
government, and not every decision is the one I would make. There
is no end to government programs that are worthy of more funding
— but there is a decided unwillingness on the part of the
tax-paying public to increase their taxes for all those worthy
programs. You simply can’t say “Yes” to everything. This
isn’t a whistleblower at work here; it’s simply a woman
who didn’t like the management decisions being made —
and she was part of management. She should have resigned, not gone
public with her disagreement. She wasn’t simply, as the union
rep declared, an “employee who deviated from the company line”
— she was part of the company line.
R.
Barry Crook
Austin, Texas
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Chambers was a part of the problem.
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