Not nearly as important as the work discussed here, but I worked for the National Park Service/Bureau of Land Management for five years, in education/interpretation. The people I worked with were some of the most caring, passionate, and committed - because we believed what we were doing mattered. Not only that, but we were all so acutely aware that we were funded by tax payer dollars (including our own!) and we would actively scheme up ways to use less money. For example, I worked in a national park separated into two sides by a geologic formation; some employees lived and worked on one side and sometimes needed to do work on the other side. You could either drive two hours or hike two hours across - we would always hike, even when it was 112 degrees and we had to wear our ranger pants. On our own time, we made paper maché models of the different rock types to teach kids, instead of buying them. We gave lost visitors water, directions, and our own snacks when they showed up at our park housing long after we'd stopped working. I left my job as a park educator two years ago to get my masters, which I finish in two days (fingers crossed). I don't quite know how to describe the feeling of watching the collapse of an entire sector (that's the only way I know how to describe this) that I loved and believed was important. Anyway, I know this has all been said by those who have actually lost their jobs, and is in many ways far less important than everything else going on, but it has made me so angry to hear my former colleagues called lazy/incompetent/unproductive when I know these people put in so many unpaid hours and pour their hearts into everything they do.