NYT (“Trump’s Moves to Upend Federal Bureaucracy Touch Off Fear and Confusion“):
An Education Department employee was attending a funeral this week when she got the call: She was being placed on administrative leave because she works on projects that connect Black students, among others, to federal government programs.
A disabled veteran employed at the Department of Veterans Affairs grew emotional when he heard about the rescinding of telework options, unsure whether it would mean the end of his job taking care of fellow soldiers.
A Federal Trade Commission employee was so anxious that he told family members not to talk about politics on unencrypted lines. Across government agencies, workers eyed one another nervously, wondering whether a colleague would report them, accusing them of resisting the new administration’s move to end certain programs.
President Trump’s rapid push to overhaul the federal bureaucracy in his first days in office has been met with a mix of fear, fury and confusion throughout the work force.
Dozens of employees across the government, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of worries of retribution, described agencies gripped with uncertainty about how to implement the new policies and workers frantically trying to assess the impact on their careers and families. As the nation’s largest employer, the upheaval in the federal government could reverberate in communities throughout the country.
Starting on Inauguration Day, the orders and memos came down one after the other, many crafted in the pugnacious tone of a campaign speech: the shuttering of “Radical and Wasteful” diversity programs in federal agencies; the stripping of civil service protections from a share of the federal work force; the end to remote work, which, one administration memo claimed, had left federal office buildings “mostly empty” and rendered downtown Washington “a national embarrassment.”
All new hiring was frozen, job offers were rescinded, scientific meetings were canceled and federal health officials were temporarily barred from communicating with the public, a directive that some understood as so broad that it even extended to making outside purchase orders for lab supplies.
For the more than two million federal workers, roughly four-fifths of whom live outside the Washington area, change is inevitable whenever a new administration takes over. But few had expected it to come at this speed and scale.
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Federal employees looked to their supervisors for guidance, but said they often had none to give, as they tried to interpret brief orders and memos with few specifics. For example, the return-to-office memo said employees with a disability could be exempt, but it was unclear what kind of disability might qualify. Some managers said they knew nothing beyond what was in the news. Adding to the panic were remarks by the president himself, who suggested on Friday that he might consider shuttering the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which employs 20,000 workers around the country.
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Inside federal offices, the mood has been tense and anticipatory. One employee at the Homeland Security Department said the staff felt at risk of being fired at any moment. At the Commerce Department, employees were terrified whenever a meeting was called, one worker said.
The isolation is deepened, some federal employees said, by the fact that most of their fellow Americans see the federal government as bloated and inefficient. Some said that reform, if it were well thought-out, would be healthy and welcome. But many noted that they had accepted significant pay cuts to work for the government because they believe in public service — issuing Social Security checks, keeping air travel safe and inspecting food, among other roles.
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Compounding the anxiety was a directive from the Office of Personnel Management instructing agency heads to turn over by Jan. 24 names of those who were still in their probationary period, typically within one or two years of their hiring.
The directive noted that such employees “can be terminated during that period without triggering appeal rights,” and that managers should determine whether they should be retained, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.
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One of the most sweeping changes made by Mr. Trump in his first week was to order federal workers back to the office full time by later next month, ending years of a flexible telecommuting policy, which in many offices dated to well before the pandemic. For some who want to keep working for the government, this could mean selling homes, changing children’s schools and moving hundreds of miles in a matter of weeks. New mothers are debating whether they will be able to return from maternity leave, and couples have been forced to choose who gets to keep their current jobs.
Many offices do not currently have enough room for all of the employees to come back. This, some contend, is the whole point. Shortly after the November election, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the men tapped by Mr. Trump to remake the government, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
POLITICO (“‘I am terrified’: Workers describe the dark mood inside federal agencies“):
President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting the federal workforce have injected a fresh wave of anxiety among employees across the bureaucracy — stoking fears the president is coming for their jobs.
Just a few days into Trump’s second term, some federal workers are contemplating quitting. Others are preparing to file grievances with their unions or moving communications with each other to secure platforms like Signal. Some, fearing they’ll be caught up in the White House’s purge of diversity programs, are leaving their names off of memos and documents they worry could be labeled as DEI-adjacent.
As federal employees searched this week for clues within the orders to see how they’ll be affected, a staffer with the Environmental Protection Agency said they were cleaning out their inbox and waiting for information about early retirement and buyout programs.
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POLITICO spoke to almost two dozen federal workers for this article and granted anonymity to many in order to protect them from retribution for speaking out.
It’s too early to tell if a mass exodus of federal workers will occur. The vagueness of the president’s orders has many workers waiting to see how they will be implemented once political staff is in place. But what is clear is that the new administration intends to follow through on its threats to purge and dismantle the federal bureaucracy.
My wife and I are both Defense Department workers, so we are, at least for now, exempt from the hiring freeze. (That was not clear at the outset, and there was some concern at work that one person couldn’t accept a promotion and that we wouldn’t be allowed to replace two departing/ed professors.) The most likely impacts on us are from the return to office edict and just the general climate of a purge of those perceived as disloyal to the President. Neither of us are covered by collective bargaining.
My wife’s team requires people to show up to the office two days a week. Aside from one “core” day a month where everyone is there, they spend hours on Teams meetings regardless of whether they’re telecommuting. A requirement for 100 percent in-office will be challenging from a logistical standpoint and add some expenses for commuting and parking. And, since they barely have enough desks to support the current arrangement, it’s unclear how they’re going to accommodate the whole team at once on a daily basis.
While I have enjoyed considerable flexibility, my position is not coded as telework-eligible. For now, then, I don’t expect any changes on that front.
My greatest concern is that, while I ostensibly enjoy academic freedom, my only protection in that regard is leadership adherence to the norm. My position is in the Excepted Service, so I enjoy none of the normal career protections if my position were to go away for any reason. Further, while the norm is “tenure without tenure,” I essentially have no recourse if my contract is not renewed upon its expiration in July 2027.
That puts me in a considerably better position than those in the new administration’s immediate crosshairs, including those whose jobs are based on something that could be construed as “DEI.” To say nothing of, for example, transgender servicemembers. But it certainly creates a chilling effect on my ability to write in core areas of my scholarship, including defense policy and civil-military relations.
More broadly, it puts the federal workforce in general in a quandary. Do they comply with legal but objectionable orders? Do they resign their posts entirely?
To take one example, I’ve seen multiple posts from ostensibly seasoned folks in my social feeds arguing that agency heads and other senior officials ought to simply refuse to carry out perfectly legal orders, such as sending out letters based on an OPM template ordering the shutdown of DEI programs and the reporting of those trying to hide said programs using clever name changes. While the policies themselves may well be questionable—and will almost certainly be challenged in court—promulgating guidance is not. It’s not a hill to die on.
Rather clearly, Trump, Musk, and others are actively trying to purge the federal government of people who aren’t fully on board with the MAGA agenda and, indeed, just thinning the herd, period, by making federal employment less rewarding. Unfortunately, this will be quite popular even beyond Trump’s base.
It is likely to be effective in the most perverse way. Those most apt to leave will be younger workers with the best prospects in the private sector. Their departure will leave the federal workforce poorer in the short run, while also depleting the ranks of future leadership. The very oldest workers, who are financially able to retire, may also depart. With a hiring freeze in place, it’s not even clear when and whether they can be replaced. (The freeze doesn’t just apply to those entering government; even a move within an agency constitutes a “new hire.”) The result will be a less talented, less efficient civil service—which will, naturally, fuel the narrative that the civil service is mediocre and inefficient.
