Trump goes to war with the federal workforce

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President Donald Trump is moving swiftly to purge the federal government of people his team views as disloyal – while seeking retribution against former senior staffers his team believes weren’t loyal enough last time.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s administration sent out an email that encouraged federal employees who aren’t “reliable, loyal, trustworthy” to resign their jobs – with the promise of pay through September if they do so immediately. Earlier, he moved to fire a dozen inspectors general, some career Justice Department staff members, and members of independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, moves that may have violated federal law. He’s taken steps to strip federal employees of job security protections they’ve long enjoyed. And he’s stripped security details and clearances from some high-profile former employees who have faced threats on their lives, in a move they view as retribution.

The moves are part of a systemwide push to remake the federal government with loyalists – even areas that have traditionally remained independent from the presidency or staffed with nonpartisan career civil servants that his team often derides as the “deep state.”

Why We Wrote This

In President Donald Trump’s early flurry of actions, his goal of shrinking the federal government may overlap with efforts at retribution against perceived enemies. The result is turmoil in the federal workforce.

The result has been a chaotic swirl of uncertainty and anxiety for federal workers. One Justice Department employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said the deluge of emailed memos and directives had a “bad guys taking over the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter feel to it.”

And the chaos may be the point – a tool to demoralize career civil servants and convince them to resign, clearing a path for Mr. Trump to fill the government’s vast bureaucracy with staff members who hold his views in a way unseen in recent American history. And this may be just the beginning, as a number of Mr. Trump’s nominees are on the verge of winning Senate confirmation to take their posts atop the government’s various federal agencies.

Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Reuters

Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, testifies at a Senate Budget Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, Jan. 22, 2025.

These include Russell Vought, Mr. Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, who could get Senate approval as soon as this week. Mr. Vought, who served as OMB director at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, laid out his disdain for federal workers in a 2024 speech that was obtained by ProPublica last October.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” said Mr. Vought. “We want to put them in trauma.”

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