Rick Perry earned the ire of federal workers unions Wednesday when he told an audience that he would send them to a “God-awful place” if they disagreed with his restructuring plans, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Responding to a question at a New Hampshire town hall meeting, the Republican presidential candidate said that “government should do a few things, but do those few things really, really well” and would deal with people who resist his plans.
“I don’t think you can fire federal bureaucrats, but you can reassign them. So reassign them to some really god-awful place,” he said to audience laughter as quoted by the Houston Chronicle.
The National Federation of Federal Employees, however, saw no laughing matter in Perry’s remarks.
Perry “sees a political opportunity in painting federal workers as a symbol of big government, and he is exploiting it to the fullest,” said union president William R. Dougan.
“If Governor Perry wants to know what ‘a God-awful place’ looks like, he should imagine Texas without thousands of dedicated federal employees defending its border, staffing its VA hospitals, and extinguishing its wildfires,” Dougan added in his statement as quoted by The Washington Post.
Colleen M. Kelly, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, shared Dougan’s sentiments but added that Perry was wrong on firing federal employees.
“It is patently false to state that federal employees cannot be fired for failing to implement policies established by political leaders, but perhaps that is a fact that Gov. Perry forgot along with what federal agencies he would like to eliminate,” she said as quoted by the Houston Chronicle.
