Government Works Late Too

The government is up before the farmers, preparing farm reports. Treasury analysts toil all night, their inner clocks tuned to the time zones of faraway lands. IRS workers will bend your ear with tax advice at the wee-est of wee hours.

Washington may be the real city that never sleeps. Tucked into nooks and cubicles all over government are more than 400,000 federal workers whose hours defy the 9-to-5 conventional wisdom.

The eclectic assortment of federal employees who live a slice of the “24/7” life includes platoons of on-call workers who may sleep, all right, but not always soundly. They’re in shotgun marriages with their beepers and cell phones.

“I haven’t been off-call in seven years,” says Jamie Finch of the National Transportation Safety Board. “That’s just the nature of the job.”

It’s not the nature most Americans are familiar with. The government they know works weekdays, period, and never seems quick to answer the phone.

But in Washington and farther afield, the government consumes a lot of midnight oil.

Computer screens flicker post-midnight in 24-hour command posts all over town. Beepers rouse Food and Drug Administration employees who’ve already put in a full day’s work.

A child is perilously ill; a doctor wants to try an unapproved drug treatment and asks a government physician for a middle-of-the-night OK.

Snowfall or not, government forecasters in every time zone churn out a blizzard of weather advisories, with a big blast around 3 a.m. timed to get out ahead of morning drive time.

If a slaughterhouse works 24 hours, so do its federal inspectors.

If a federal drug agent pulls off a sting in Thailand, on the opposite end of the world’s time zones, counterparts in Washington may be keeping tabs at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 24-hour command post.

“Drug dealers don’t normally work 9 to 5,” says the DEA’s Michael Chapman. “We do what we have to do to capture them during their work hours.”

Like their counterparts in industry, some night workers in government pull odd hours by choice, others for the stable paycheck. Each weighs trade-offs: easier commutes versus crimped social life, extra days off or pay differentials versus tedious shifts, more time in the sun versus fewer hours of sound sleep.

Overall, about 17% of salaried, full-time workers in America pull night or irregular shifts, compared with about 14% in the federal government, according to Labor Department figures from 1997.

“I do wish I could live a little bit more of the normal life,” says 28-year-old Terry Shaffer, who works 4 to midnight at the Government Printing Office, “but the job security is great and the pay is good.”

Sprinkled around town are enough round-the-clock command centers to run a small country: No self-respecting federal agency would be without one.

At the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, a “watch team” is on the lookout for ballistic missile launches. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” reads a plexiglass message from Thomas Jefferson.

The Army, Navy and Air Force have their own 24-hour command centers.

So does the Justice Department. (Staffers there woke up top officials in the middle of the night when the White House sent word that outgoing President Clinton might pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich.)

It’s Often Slow, Then a Crisis Hits

The White House, the State Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency all have 24-hour operations. Ditto for the FBI, the DEA, the NTSB and a host of others in the government’s alphabet soup.

“It’s a fireman job,” says Brian Huddleston, pulling the 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. shift at the NTSB communications center. He stands solitary watch for airplane crashes and other transportation accidents. “Most of the time it’s nothing, but when something does happen, your performance really counts.”

In the middle of the night, the various command posts “talk” to each other, trading faxes, cables, calls and e-mail.

In the morning, government big wigs come in to find tidy summaries on their desks of what’s transpired overnight.

FEMA’s report, for one, lands at the White House at 7 a.m. each day, cataloging potential disasters from anthrax scares to nuclear power mishaps.

Even the Treasury Department has a boiler-room operation. From a windowless office, analysts track stock and currency prices around the world.

Sometimes, it’s machines that make the call on when to wake the humans.

Follow this chain of events until it reaches a life form: Earthquake sensors around the globe transmit data to satellites, which relay the information to the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., where pagers summon workers from sleep only for tremors of significant magnitude.

At the FDA, on any given night, four pagered people back one another up should someone call with an emergency about drug reactions or the like.

Maybe once or twice a year the pagers stay blessedly silent all night. When something big is going on, 50 to 100 calls may come in. Two to 10 are typical.

Even that is “still a lot when you’re waking up in the middle of the night,” says Sarah Pichette, part of FDA’s beeper battalion.

At the Tsunami Warning Center in tiny Palmer, Alaska, some workers are required to live within five minutes of work. They average 10 minutes from the time a beeper sits them up in bed till they’re at work sending advisories across the West Coast.

Usually, the advice is: Forget it, go back to sleep, the tremor you felt is no big deal.

But one day, says director Thomas Sokolowski, it may provide just enough notice for people “to get up to the hills” before a giant wall of water comes crashing through.

Prison guards, air traffic controllers and park rangers are among the legions of federal workers working odd hours well beyond Washington.

Forecasters are always on duty at 121 National Weather Service offices, joined by reinforcements for big storms, floods and tornadoes.

“Some of us have very tolerant, understanding spouses,” says Dennis McCarthy, who spent 27 years in forecasting before taking charge of the 14-state central region from its hub in Kansas City, Mo. “Sometimes you have to maybe buy some flowers or go out to dinner the next day to make up for it.”

This time of year, whatever the hour, there’s bound to be someone stumped by a tax return. And there’s someone at the IRS to take the questions--call centers in Fresno and Atlanta are open around the clock.

“Once in a while it’ll slow down for maybe a second, but then the phones start lighting up again,” says Julia Cardenas, who fields calls on the graveyard shift at the IRS service center in Fresno. “It’s really refreshing to hear taxpayers say, ‘Oh, we really got a live person.’ ”

The handiwork of some anonymous wee-hours workers is anything but unseen.

At the Government Printing Office, workers clock 24 hours a day, five days a week to typeset and print the Congressional Record, a verbatim transcript of yesterday’s talk in Congress, and the Federal Register, the fine print of government regulators, among other reports.

Here too the Starr report on Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was printed under armed guard. In an earlier time, these presses spit out the Warren Report on the Kennedy assassination.

“There is history here,” says press chief James Howell, who works 4 p.m. to midnight and met the woman who became his wife at the presses. “There is a certain pride in it.”

Down the hierarchy, workers get less philosophic.

“It’s a job, just like everyone else has,” says Shaffer.

Just not like everyone else’s hours.

The 24-hour IRS tax number is (800) 829-1040.