Compared to Niger, transitions of executive power in the United States generally go pretty well. Incoming and outgoing presidents and their teams don’t exchange roses under moonlight. But neither do they shoot, poison or jail one another. Yet many feds express worry about the Trump administration.

There’s a certain piquancy to the upcoming transition, precisely because the incoming team has pledged to cut the ranks of federal employees. The letter from President Joe Biden to the workforce certainly helped sharpen the contrast between the outgoing and incoming.

Lots will change after Monday. Now it’s just wait and see what actually happens on Schedule F, telework, pension contributions, budgets, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence — you name it. Love him or hate him, it’s fair to say Trump is likely to change a lot of norms.

My only advice for when changes in leadership bring uncertainty: stick to the work, if only because that’s something you can control.

Most federal employees will keep on doing exactly what they’re doing now. Many do exotic and amazing stuff.

One case in point: Bernie Kelm. Unknown to the general public, he’s worked for the Naval Research Laboratory for 33 years. He says NRL was his “safety interview” after graduating from the University of Maryland in 1991 with an aerospace engineering degree. Now he’s superintendent of the NRL’s Spacecraft Engineering Division and acting director of the Naval Center for Space Technology. Pretty good run.

His team’s work advances something few think about but couldn’t live without. Namely, the operation of geosynchronous satellites, nearly 7,000 of them orbiting 22,000 miles up. They support telecommunications, weather observation and forecasting, and many military and intelligence activities.

Helm has been leading a project with DARPA funding and contracting with Northrop Grumman’s SpaceLogistics to do something that’s never been done before. They’ve built a robotic apparatus to launch into space. It can inspect, move, and upgrade existing satellites. This is revolutionary because until now, once a satellite that high hits orbit, it could never again be touched. This project will therefore change how future satellite planners design satellites.

More detail in an upcoming interview, but that’s the kind of work that sounds so focused, so absorbing that it can sustain a career.

Then there’s Brandi Bynum, deep in the web of bureaus that make up the Homeland Security Department. People from 16 components work together to form the Center for Countering Human Trafficking. A lot of this type of human rights abuse occurs right under our collective noses, traveling across out borders, over our highways and through our airports.

The center creates training materials to help training materials so ticket and gate agents, Transportation Security Officers, local law enforcement and others can spot suspected trafficking and call a DHS hotline. Lots of eyes focus on the public in motion, each pair a potential spotter of human trafficking.

Imagine knowing your work saved someone, perhaps a child, from the clutches of smugglers or pimps. You wouldn’t stop caring about federal employment policies, but maybe you’d only give it the psychic oxygen it deserves.

As Biden noted, “Your talents could have taken you many places, but you chose to serve our country.” You still will.

‘Tech-industrial complex’ can get absurd

In his farewell speech to the nation, President Joe Biden borrowed to the oft-cited Eisenhower comment about the military-industrial complex.

Biden said, “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking.”

He was talking about social media, and the petabytes of nonsense that flow through it daily. A faraway donkey doesn’t know it has produced oligarchs.

Videos on one of my social media accounts shows a man living in a rural, hilly region I’m guessing is somewhere in Eastern Europe. Facing the camera, he’s sitting at a wooden table outdoors, cutting up fruit and feeding it to a white donkey standing beside him. You watch (and hear) the donkey chewing it up, the man smiling contentedly.

More than a million people watch these 45-second videos! The man-feeding-animal genre at least depicts reality, however trivial. Millions of images and videos are so clearly graphic productions you wonder why people bother. And even in the real videos, most of the situations depicted are ginned up for drama, or simply acted out to look real. They often have underlying social or racial messages. This all applies to much written material in social feeds.

I have a specific use for this particular platform, and carefully limit what I post and whom I follow. Still, the ads and items appearing in my “feed” show the astonishing power of the algorithms. This media platform also “knows” I like motorcycles, fountain pens, 1960s era cars and mafia movie clips. Now that I’ve stopped and watched a donkey chew, I can reliably expect a daily dose of such material, and the ads that go with it.

The media scene is disarrayed, and too many people perhaps don’t know how to stay reasonably informed. Or they stay misinformed by staying glued to this or that platform or a certain set of so-called influencers.

The government is a big daily publisher of information and social media postings, too. I urge (shoveling against the tide) the incoming administration to play it straight with the avalanche of press releases and announcements the government puts out. Avoid sounding as if Donald Trump personally made this grant, or launched that initiative. As the late Mike Causey used to complain, administration jargon often makes if sound as if a president hung the moon on the way to saving humanity.

Restraint, giving just the facts, sparing people the messaging or spin (words I loathe) — that’s how to have real impact. But I’m not counting on it.

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