Oath of Ignorance

I thought the following idea was laughable in light of something I heard recently:

[Charles Tiefer, whom Congress appointed earlier this year to the new Commission on Wartime Contracting, which oversees Pentagon contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan] says, federal employees take an oath to [support and defend] the Constitution, while private contractors are just motivated by their own economic interest. It’s a lovely vision, and apparently some people actually believe it.

Of course David Boaz is rightfully skeptical of that fairytale view of federal employees. I have a friend who used to work for a federal government agency. He told me last week that he recently read the Constitution for the first time – long after he quit working for the government. He did take the oath mentioned above, but did so without ever reading the Constitution despite high school and college educations here in the United States. I am not blaming my friend – he’s hardly unusual in what he did except that now he has read the Constitution.

The idea that federal employees deserve some special trust for taking an oath of office is laughable. Most of those employees (like so many elected officials above them) have never read the Constitution they have sworn to protect in that oath. How can we expect them to fulfill their oath and defend the Constitution when they are ignorant of what it says?

Personally, I view federal employees (as a group) just like private employees – they’re just earning a living and doing a job. I don’t think that they have a clearer vision of what they are doing or why they are doing it than anyone else.