“Workers across the country responded with anger and confusion,” the Associated Press reported last week, in response to the Trump administration’s layoffs of probationary workers. CBS News tells us “federal workers express shock, anger over mass firings,” and The New York Times writes that federal works face “sleeplessness, anger and tears.”

The media interviews, lawsuits, protests, and open letters all hit on a similar theme: that it is wrong and unfair that taxpayer-funded government workers might have to look for work in the marketplace like ordinary people. Regular workers, after all—the type without federal jobs from which, historically, it is virtually impossible to be fired—often have to change jobs whenever there is a restructuring, merger, bankruptcy, or budget cut. This is life outside the comfortable fantasy world of federal employment. Naturally, federal employees don’t like the sound of that at all.

The legacy media has portrayed this all as a conflict between the hard-working, guileless folk of the federal workforce on the one hand, and the insensitive villains of the Trump administration on the other. There is a third party to all of this that is virtually never mentioned by the media, though: the taxpayers who pay for it all. ……

Nonetheless, the media narrative on this has consistently been that it is the tax-eating class that is the victim here. They are the victims of Trump, or of Elon Musk, or whatever public figure can serve as the nemesis to the presumably selfless “public servants.” The taxpayer, through it all, usually remains invisible.

Fortunately, the same media narrative convinces us that we need not be too concerned about the workers who have been let go. We have been told for years that federal employees are the cream of the crop: exceptionally competent, hard-working, highly educated, dedicated servants of the public interest. If this is the case, then these laid off workers will have no trouble finding new jobs very soon.