On one February day alone, the Trump administration abruptly fired an estimated 14,000 federal workers.

Among them was Brian Gibbs, a National Park Service ranger whose heartbreaking account of losing his “dream job” puts a human face on a crisis that threatens the very fabric of American life. “I am the smiling face that greets you at the front door,” Gibbs wrote. “I am your family vacation planner… I am the Band-Aid for a skinned knee.”

His words reveal an essential truth: Public service isn’t about bureaucracy — it’s about the careful, often invisible, undervalued work of maintaining our society’s trust, connection, and freedoms.

When a park ranger comforts a lost child or a VA data scientist develops a program to help veterans, they’re not just performing tasks listed in a job description — they’re engaging in the profound work of caring for one another that makes our public institutions function.

The implications of the administration’s purge are both immediate and far-reaching.

“There will be nobody to clean the bathrooms, nobody to manage parking, nobody to collect fees,” one ranger warned about the summer season in the National Parks, and “nobody to rescue injured or lost hikers. People will die from incidents that would otherwise be just another Tuesday for us.”

This crisis reveals a dangerous shift in how we value public service. When billionaires like Elon Musk compare federal workers to “weeds” that have to be eradicated by the root, they demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what freedom means in America.

True freedom isn’t just about what we’re against, but also what we’re for — including programs that make it possible for Americans to make meaningful choices about our lives, escape poverty or hardship, and have a good enough grip on reality that we can challenge it when necessary.

Our federal workers are humble guardians of these freedoms who rarely seek the spotlight.

When FEMA workers respond to natural disasters, CDC scientists track disease outbreaks, and Rural Development officers fund vital infrastructure in small towns, they do so not for glory or profit — but because they believe in the promise of collective well-being.

Our freedoms require maintenance, protection, and care — the very work being dismissed as “fat on the bone” by those orchestrating these firings. The Environmental Protection Agency scientist who monitors air quality in our cities, the Education Department specialist making education accessible for disabled students, the IRS worker ensuring corporations pay their fair share — these are not luxuries we can afford to lose.

Beyond the personal tragedies in these firings lies a broader threat to our collective democratic values. When we allow unelected billionaires like Musk to dismantle our public services, we surrender a piece of our democratic control over the systems that maintain our quality of life.

We’re witnessing an orchestrated assault on the very concept of public service. This isn’t merely about budget cuts or government efficiency — it’s about a fundamental attack on the infrastructure of democracy itself. Our freedom to thrive — to access public spaces, to trust our infrastructure, to rely on essential services — hangs in the balance.

When national parks become dangerous or inaccessible due to understaffing, when public utilities face increased vulnerability to cyber attacks, when basic government services break down, we’ll all feel the impact. But by then, it may be too late to reverse the damage.

Do we want to live in a country where public service is devalued and dismantled in favor of private profit? Or do we want to preserve and protect the essential care labor that makes our freedoms possible?

We must stand alongside all the federal workers whose labor has long been the bedrock of our democracy. Their fight is our fight. Their freedom is our freedom. The time to act is now.

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Emese Ilyés is a social psychologist and researcher whose work examines community resistance to authoritarianism. This op-ed was adapted from a longer original version at CommonDreams.org and distributed for syndication

by OtherWords.org.