The Purge

Wrecking the civil service

Credit: Getty Images

In my lifetime, pursuing a career in civil service was an honor. Serving your country and your fellow Americans was a dream for people who wanted to make our nation better, safer, cleaner. And making the government efficient, fair, and honest.

Working for the federal government, as an infectious disease specialist at the CDC or embassy staff in Cairo or an air traffic controller, was aspirational. FBI agents are the cream of the crop. United States attorneys know what they’re doing: Their conviction rates are twice that of state and local prosecutors. Now senior FBI agents and U.S. attorneys have been fired. Donald Trump wants to destroy the civil service and is well on his way to doing so.

And that’s not all. One of Trump’s top operatives wants to make government workers miserable.

A key Project 2025 author and Trump’s new head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought has been clear about his ambitions. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected … We want to put them in trauma.” The man who will likely oversee all federal agencies wants his fellow citizens working for those agencies denigrated and demonized, as well as unemployed.

Can you imagine your boss hoping you won’t want to come to work because you’re viewed as a “villain?” Vought used that word. Sounds like the premise for a dystopian novel. But this is all real, all happening right now.

The federal government employs more than 2 million people outside of the military. Most of these people are career civil servants who have traditionally kept their jobs regardless of who is in the White House. They are what allows the peaceful transfer of power to occur. Besides the near impossibility of replacing that workforce with each new administration, many of these workers have decades of experience and knowledge that keep the government running smoothly and reduce chances for corruption such as nepotism.

Until Trump 2.0.

Donald Trump believes or has been told to believe that federal employees have accomplished a “Marxist takeover.” Really?

Also, his claims of a bloated bureaucracy are bogus. Those inside the federal government say they are actually understaffed, and the numbers bear that out. The employment rolls of the civil service have increased marginally since 1980, but the population of the country has grown by 32% in the same time frame. So the same number of people are working for 100 million more Americans.

Nonetheless, Trump wants to get rid of as many as he can, so he can: a) avoid paying billions of dollars in salaries and benefits, and b) insert his own sycophants and loyalists. This should be a surprise to no one. Project 2025 outlined this exact scenario months ago.

Trump has given the job of hatchet man to Elon Musk, who is not known for his soft touch when it comes to downsizing. When he bought Twitter, Musk fired, bought out, or furloughed 80% of its staff.

Numerous top civil servants have already been fired, including the most notable federal prosecutors, senior leaders at the FBI, and 18 inspectors general — all without cause.

Last week, those still employed got an ultimatum email with the subject line, “Fork in the Road.” Musk sent a similar email with the same subject line to Twitter employees after he purchased the social media site.

The email offered all federal employees a choice: either stay and accept Trump’s demand that anyone who remains be “reliable, loyal, trustworthy,” thus running the risk of being furloughed; or resign, effective immediately, and get paid through September. This “deal” was offered to almost every civil servant, regardless of their expertise, experience, or tenure with the federal government. Trump wants 5 to 10% to take the buyout. So far about 2% have agreed.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. Haphazardly and significantly cutting the civil service will affect every American citizen. From tax refunds to warnings about foodborne illness to fighting forest fires to fixing highways, purging the civil service will kneecap the government from being able to function effectively.

A spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management called the offer “a rare, generous opportunity — one that was thoroughly vetted and intentionally designed to support employees through restructuring.” Others have called that hogwash.

The legality of the offer is suspect and being challenged by civil service labor unions. After all, Congress, not the executive branch, controls the budget. At this point, Congress has funded the government only through March, with a possible government shutdown looming. So to offer severance pay and benefits for eight months is likely illegal. These workers could agree to a deal that the president has no ability to fulfill. Oh, and they had only a week to decide, though a federal judge has extended the deadline by four days.

In the meantime, it is no accident that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is making life miserable for the remaining members of the civil service, in the hopes that more will leave. They have shut down access to personal records. They have shut off access to government emails. They have disallowed federal workers to communicate with state and local officials. They have frozen payments on approved work. They have forced people to simply stop working on projects the new administration doesn’t like or are in any way associated with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

For example, one of the main jobs of the Environmental Protection Agency is to study and mitigate pollution. Pollution is more often concentrated in low-income and non-white neighborhoods. Because so much of EPA’s work on pollution is done for the benefit of these groups, that work has been deemed DEI and thus terminated.

The short-term ramifications of this wrecking of the civil service are obvious and odious, but the long-term ones may be even worse. The loss of knowledge and know-how by hundreds of thousands of experts is irredeemable.

No one is arguing that our civil service is perfect, though it is among the best in the world and recognized as such. But destroying it as is now happening is uncalled for to say the least — and dangerous for the country.

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Stay Steady,
Dan