Federal Workers ‘Terrified’ By Trump

There are about 3 million federal employees, and POLITICO wants you to know that they are living in a state of terror. 

I’m pretty sure that doesn’t apply to all of them, and to the extent that it is true for any, they should, for both their sake and ours, leave as soon as humanly possible. 

‘I am terrified’: Workers describe the dark mood inside federal agencies https://t.co/vNOuaGmiRL

— POLITICO (@politico) January 25, 2025

I would never prejudge any particular person’s abilities or productivity merely on the basis of being a federal employee. No doubt, many are hardworking, loyal, and good people. But they are in a bad system that is unproductive, filled with poor performers, has no internal incentives to improve, and encourages laziness and even resistance to direction from above. 

These federal employees are so so terrified of the new Trump civil-service regime that they took their “distress” to the nation’s paper of record. pic.twitter.com/AGqCOT6n6y

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) January 27, 2025

It must be dispiriting for the best workers to look around and see so much sloth and indifference and to know that the American people are not exactly thrilled with your performance. 

Think of the good ones as being in the position of a high-performing student doing a group project. The one winds up doing most of the work while being dragged down by the rest. 

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.

“Trump version 1.0 was bad,” said the EPA employee. “I’m already done with version 2.0.”

Trump, within hours of returning to power, issued a slew of executive orders seeking to overhaul how the federal government operates, from removing job protections to ending remote work to implementing a hiring freeze. The reception inside the federal government has been uneasy. But especially worrisome to some employees was the White House’s decision on Tuesday to eliminate diversity programs, subsequently placing those staffers on administrative leave.

At the State Department, the shutdown of those programs was something many saw coming. But some were startled by the directive that they report individual cases of people’s job descriptions being changed to “disguise” the DEI element to a special Office of Personnel Management email address. Some saw it as an order to snitch on colleagues. Others, who prepared for Trump’s return to office, had begun working months ago with outside nonprofits to archive websites they feared would be taken down by the Trump administration — including information on ending gender-based violence around the world.

As I wrote earlier today in my VIP column, the #resistance is real and federal workers think of themselves as the permanent government, unaccountable to elected officials and the voters. 

To the extent that this is true, they should be gone. Whenever you hear the Pravda Media speak of “norms” and “democracy,” rule by permanent bureaucrats in the Deep State is what they really mean. 

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.

The line the Pravda Media is feeding us is that the voters shouldn’t get what they voted for because federal employees are big sad over it. I have no gripe with any particular federal employee, but what on earth did they expect when Trump ran on streamlining government, getting rid of DEI programs, and getting back to basics and doing so efficiently?

The election was about, among other things, completely reforming the federal government and workforce. Voters WANT that. And if these federal employees are so skilled and indispensable then they should have great prospects in the private sector. 

By the end of the week, some employees said wearily that they did not know how long they could hang on. Many described conditions as reminiscent of the McCarthy era, and were despondent to see how quickly their office’s leaders acquiesced.

At the Department of Labor, staff members watched a colleague who had been recently hired to a civil service position be escorted out because she was a former political appointee. One employee said her manager required her to scrub the website not only of the words “diversity, equity and inclusion,” as the executive order required, but also of references to “underserved” and “marginalized communities.” Afterward, she said, she went into a closet, called her mother and wept.

On Tuesday morning, Moriah Lee, an analyst at NASA, joined a virtual town hall to learn what all the orders would mean for her small team, which monitors and audits projects in the space program. The acting supervisors, people she had known personally for years, made it clear to everyone that they were not inclined to show flexibility, she said.

Gone was the weekly speaker series that had been organized under the diversity program, which had brought in deaf people, combat veterans and others to share their experiences. Gone was her ability to live in Nashville and go twice a month to an office two hours away in Huntsville, Ala.

After the meeting, she and her colleagues went back to their jobs. They were rattled, she said, but not afraid. “The people who are acting most in fear are the ones in authority,” she said.

I don’t take joy in the fact that many people will be tossed out of work, but it is long past time that this happens. The jobs, in many cases, should not have existed in the first place. And, unlike most people in the private sector, federal employees are so distressed by this because they never faced risks that the rest of us have all our working lives. 

I’ve lost jobs. Been laid off, fired, or had to leave for various reasons. It sucks. But it is also a fact of life. The people who have been paying the taxes that made federal jobs so comfortable and safe have never enjoyed the same comfort and safety. 

And, of course, the DEI staff terrorized people as part of their job, enforcing political correctness, so I have little sympathy for them. 

I doubt most federal employees are terror-stricken, and I doubt enough of them will wind up moving to the private sector. And I absolutely doubt that any worker who has ever been laid off is spending too much time worrying about the DEI trainer with a cushy gig with the federal government facing the same fate.