My job in the Bureaucracy was to investigate applicants for sensitive government jobs. I had the most fun during the Reagan Administration because he hired so many people who had worked for him in Sacramento when he was governor - and I was doing their clearances. I got on a first-name basis with a number of Republican "old pols" that I deemed to be good sources of information, and I dug up a fair amount of dirt.

Reagan put political comissars in the regional office of every Federal agency to make the agencies "more responsive to the goals of the Administration," but Civil service rules protected me very well and I was able to do my job unimpaired.

Reagan tried to contract out some of our work to corporations, but the corporations did shoddy work and we had to do it all over again. The Clinton and Gore got off on their Re-Inventing Government kick, and our 700-employee investigations division was chosen as a privatization demonstration project. The privatization took effect in July, 1996. On a Friday, I was working for the government; and on Monday, I was doing the same work under the same people - but as an employee of a so-called employee-owned corporation. Our mid-level managers were all sent to the Wharton School of Management at the University of Pennsylvania, and they call came back scared to death of Upper Management - and our upper management came almost entirely from outside organization.

I went from being a fair-haired boy to being a problem employee. As a government employee, I had always been respected for the quality and thoroughness of my work. As a government contractor, we served only the Bottom Line, and my grandfathered-in salary and my slow thoroughness made my work far more expensive than the lick-and-a-promise investigations done by our younger star performers.

So, I got a lot of pressure from management which I did my best to ignore. Once a year, I wrote a letter to the President of the company, telling him what was wrong with our "so-called employee-owned corporation." My boss confronted me one day with a sheaf of emails in which I had said things critical of management - I had no idea they would monitor me like that. So, after 3 years, I quit. But I got a lot of stock in the company, and they sold the company to some rich Republicans shortly after I quit - and I made enough money to support myself for the rest of my life.

About 3 years ago, hackers broke into the computer system of my former employer, and compromised the security clearance records for the entire U.S. Government. My employer lost its contract and soon went out of business. I'm glad I took the money and ran when I did. And the demise of my employer was delicious vindication.

The politicians got their way with us eventually, and ironically it was Clinton and Gore who accomplished what Reagan had attempted. But in the end, I got my vindication.

Oh, and now background investigations are being done by five times as many government investigators than we had when I was a government employee.

-Joe-