Government employees (non-fictional ones, at least) have no comprehension of real-world at-will employment?
Geez! Update your resume' and start searching via Monster, Linked In, etc.. Like ordinary people do. BTDTGTTS, a drawerful.
Rifling through my drawer of layoff T-shirts ... Back in 1992, several companies had voluntary attendance events featuring Bill Clinton. Among those companies were Tandem Computers (not Radio Shack's parent), Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems.
In 1993, my employer Tandem, once a high-flyer, had a large-scale layoff, many/most laid off being long-termers, myself among them. I won't whine about how painful that was, but will mention my schadenfreude at Tandem being bought, a few years later, by Compaq, which was bought by HP, which ... . Tandem and its whole product concept died in the 1990s, courtesy of manglement arrogantly refusing to listen to their customers' wants.
Silicon Graphics also did not survive the 1990s, plus or minus existence as a shell, though I don't know the details.
Former employer Sun survived a bit longer (bought in 2010 by Oracle), but it was dying already by 2000, due to WIntel (an object of Scott McNealy's derision) eating their desktop workstations lunch and switching to a server focus years too late.
Maybe Tandem's SG's, and Sun's manglement should have paid attention to their own marketplaces and customers instead of playing power broker for a POTUS who didn't give a @#$% about the companies or their employees.