Federal workers may soon face moral dilemmas — looking to history can help

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With radical policy shifts looming in Donald Trump’s new administration, many federal employees are surely debating a difficult question: Resign? Or stick around for an agenda that troubles them? This moral calculus — whether to try to make a difference from within or leave in protest — has long challenged government workers, particularly in moments of ethical crisis.

Eight decades ago, federal lawyers wrestled with this same dilemma as the government imprisoned more than 100,000 innocent Japanese Americans from the West Coast on account of their ancestry. Their responses — ranging from principled resignation to strategic accommodation — offer powerful lessons about the space between simply following orders and walking away entirely.

For four years during World War II, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) managed the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans. The agency’s own lawyers recognized the moral weight of their work — one attorney later acknowledged that it “unnecessarily caused immeasurable and irreparable suffering, hardship, and loss to the minds, bodies and properties of Japanese Americans. The agency itself conceded that the camps ‘were bad for the evacuated people and bad for the future health of American democracy.”’

In 1943, one WRA lawyer chose to take a stand. Maurice Walk of Chicago resigned in protest, writing to his boss: “I am unable to collaborate in defense of a policy of which I so strongly disapprove.” He charged the agency with laying the legal groundwork for “future fascistic persecution of racial and political minorities” and wanted no part of it.

Walk’s resignation, while inspiring, remained singular. No other WRA attorney followed his example of protest. It’s easy to condemn them for staying on the job — perhaps too easy. Walk was a consultant to the WRA who maintained a private law practice alongside his agency work. The others were full timers whose salaries were their livelihoods. Resigning, for all its moral allure, is a luxury for most working people.

The protection of Japanese Americans’ property and economic rights became a crucial battleground. At the Gila River camp in southern Arizona, Jim Terry fought relentlessly against West Coast interests trying to fleece prisoners of property they’d been forced to leave behind. His advocacy extended to a fiery public display at a 1943 meeting of the Arizona Corporation Commission, where he took on bigoted state officials trying to drive the camp’s prisoner-organized stores and services out of business.

The lawyers also sometimes worked to give prisoners more control over their daily lives at the camps. At Heart Mountain in northwest Wyoming, Jerry Housel defied his agency’s rules for punishing petty crimes, which called for a sort of drumhead court before the camp’s senior white administrator. Instead, he helped the prisoners create their own tribunal. When WRA headquarters in Washington objected, Housel stood his ground and the tribunal survived, issuing judgments more reflective of the community’s values.

Yet these same lawyers often responded differently — even contradictorily — when faced with decisions about camp conditions. When the Army announced plans to add another barbed wire fence tightly encircling the residential barracks, responses varied dramatically. At Heart Mountain, Housel — the same lawyer who had fought for prisoner self-governance — passively allowed the fence construction despite knowing it was unnecessary and offensive to the prisoners. Meanwhile, at the Poston camp in Arizona, Ted Haas actively resisted, leading the staff in a denunciation of the fence that halted its construction.

These contradictions extended to individual lawyers’ treatment of the prisoners themselves. Terry, despite his fierce defense of economic rights, showed little patience for what he viewed as “troublemakers” resisting the WRA’s authority. His aggressive handling of loyalty hearings sometimes left prisoners in tears. Such inconsistencies revealed how even well-intentioned officials could perpetuate systemic injustice while trying to mitigate its worst effects.

The WRA lawyers were far from heroes. They gave their energies to a system they knew to be unjust. But in their best moments, they nourished an awareness of the suffering of the Japanese Americans around them. They kept their eyes open to the power they held to diminish it.

Perhaps. But his story and those of his WRA colleagues offer insights for today’s federal employees. There is a space between resigning your job and “just doing your job.” If your work begins veering away from your values, that’s the space to occupy — where awareness of injustice remains acute; where ethical choices, however small, still exist; and where individual acts of conscience, even within an unjust system, can make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.