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The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.

In early April, as the planet’s richest man chainsawed apart the livelihoods of thousands of hard-working Americans, I was back in Princeton, New Jersey, where I once attended high school, to visit my dad and cover the local “Hands Off” protest against President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions.

Michael Lewis was speaking at the university that week, along with Dave Eggers and journalist Casey Cep, to promote a new book titled, Who Is Government? Lewis had recruited these and other authors to profile unsung heroes toiling behind the scenes in the civil service. These were talented, selfless, innovative, people whom nobody ever would have heard of, but who had nonetheless done incredible things on behalf of the public—improving services, saving money and lives, and generally making America greater.

So we went to the event. Lewis, colorful as always, set about telling the story of his main character, when all of a sudden, it struck me: I know these people!

His protagonist had grown up in Princeton and I’d been to his house many dozens of times. Christopher Mark was the eldest brother of a kid I hung out with regularly. My friends and I used to sit around in their living room, listening to music, smoking pot, and pilfering his dad’s liquor. I don’t think I ever met Chris, and certainly never knew he’d ended up working for the federal government, where his out-of-the-box thinking led to a way of reducing mine cave-ins that has saved countless lives in the United States and around the world.

We rarely hear these stories, in part because they get drowned out by the small-government, anti-labor rhetoric of the right. Instead, when we think about civil servants, we often think about inefficiency, DC gridlock, maybe some imagined IRS auditor—or the tired DMV clerk who barely acknowledged our presence that time.

It’s easy to depict a faceless bureaucracy as a monster. Historically and otherwise, the Republican Party has aimed to do just that—and the Trump-era scapegoating amounts to extreme assholism. But the right-wing haters have got it wrong.

Federal workers are, as a whole, heroes.

From staving off pandemics to tracking down loose nukes to compiling key economic data to predicting the paths of killer storms, they serve thousands of critical functions that we—as least until the Trump administration started breaking them—have taken for granted. They are also our neighbors, scattered all over the country—the vast majority work outside the DC area. We need them and their talents. They shouldn’t have to deal with all this bullshit.

Let’s rewind a bit. The conservative establishment has railed against the federal government since at least the mid-1970s—too big, too bloated, etc. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address, adding that America’s woes “parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”

“It’s not my intention to do away with government,” Reagan went on. “It is rather to make it work…Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”

In fact, it is the government that needs smothering, said Reagan acolyte Grover Norquist, who founded the antitax group Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 (at Reagan’s request, he claims), and later launched the

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