By Joe Davidson · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Less than a fortnight in office, President Donald Trump hasquickly targeted federal employees in his attempt to remake the government in his own image, using the politics of revenge.
Newly re-inaugurated, for a second term, his roiling actions have generated workplace fear, confusion and anger – never good traits for any organization. The breathtaking scope and sudden implementation of his moves, some with dubious legality, stunned workers and citizens alike, as Trump tries to significantly and controversially expand the powers of the presidency.
“I’m mad,” said Jeremy Wood, a Department of Agriculture (USDA) employee based in Raleigh, North Carolina,and one of many feds awaiting termination after being put on paid leave. He’s proud of his good performance reviews, so this feels like a “punch to the gut,” he said, and morale now is “in the dumpster.”
Trump has blamed the federal workforce for blunting his policy plans in his first term, and his administration argues the broad executive orders are needed to bring more accountability and efficiency to government.Two years ago, when Trump vaguely foreshadowed his intentions by declaring “for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution,” no one knew how deep into the workforce that would go.
Part of that reprisal is Trump’s order bashing civil service protections by turning a broadly defined group of federal workers into “at-will” employees, allowing them to be fired without the same appeal rights as other feds. He is seeking to accomplish this by reinstating his controversial first term “Schedule F” executive order, now renamed “Schedule Policy/Career.” Another directive declares federal Senior Executive Service members “must serve at the pleasure of the President,” meaning their due process protections would be eliminated.
Labor organizations, including the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) have filed lawsuits challenging what AFGE called Trump’s “efforts to politicize the civil service through illegal executive orders.”
Notably, due process for feds facing discipline or termination is meant to protect not just individual workers from unfair actions, but more broadly and more important to protect the public from a government staffed with partisans loyal to a political party or individual instead of to the nation and its Constitution.
The president has long scorned feds as “deep state” creatures who thwart his desires. Now his administration’s retaliation for supposed wrongs against Trump is going well beyond officials with whom he has a particular beef – fired Justice Department lawyers, for example – and includes civil servants who are baffled by their looming ousters.
TheDOJlawyers were sacked for doing their jobs – namely for prosecuting Trump on now-defunct charges related to his personal custody of classified documents and election interference. Because of that work, his administration “does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda,” according to a letter informing them of the dismissals.
Similarly, U.S. Agency for International Development staff members were sent home because officials said they “identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive orders.” Trump demonstrated his hostility toward the Biden administration’s promotion of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) by shutting all DEIA offices across the government and placing their employees on administrative leave in anticipation of being laid off.
Trump also ousted some inspectors general, including some he appointed in his first term. That action is possibly in violation of the law requiring 30 days congressional notice. To accelerate the dumping of federal workers, the Trump administration is pushing buyouts for “a dignified, fair departure from the federal government,” according to an Office of Personnel Management email blast to the workforce. If feds agree to resign by Feb. 6, they will continue receiving pay and benefits without working until Sept. 30.
Taken together, Trump is demonstrating a “blunt assertion of presidential authority, which the administration believes sits above everything else,” said Donald Kettl, professor emeritus and former public policy dean at the University of Maryland, by email. “The threat to fire any official who does not follow it – that’s new and, in a flash, redefines the very nature of the public service.”
There’s not much trust among feds and their representatives in Trump’s buyout plan, in part because of uncertainties about funding availability. The Treasury union questioned OPM’s “legal authority to use a deferred resignation” program and urged its members to reject the offer, saying it “is designed to entice or scare you into resigning from the federal government.” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) warned federal workers that if they take Trump’s offer, “he’ll stiff you.”
Two days after Trump’s inauguration, Wood, a 23-year federal employee, received an email from the Agriculture Department’s human resources office saying he was immediately being placed on administrative leave with full pay and benefits. The email provided no reason but did say “this administrative leave is not being done for any disciplinary purpose.”
Wood assumes he was targeted because he previously worked in the agency’s diversity office, though he was transferred out of that in December, before Trump took office. Nonetheless, his past association with diversity efforts apparently were enough to have him treated like a slacker.
“My goal has always been to help feed and clothe the American people,” he said “and also to provide equal access to those opportunities as well as work opportunities.” But the administration’s message to him, he said with sadness in his voice, is “the work that I’ve been doing is wasteful of the taxpayer dollars, that it is discriminatory and that it is shameful.”
The White House, its Office of Management and Budget, and USDA did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump’s zeal to cut the workforce overlooks facts outlined in a new Brookings Institution report by Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow. Her key findings say federal civilian employment levels have remained flat since the mid-1960s, while the nation’s population has grown by 68 percent. Also, most feds are in national security agencies, including the Defense Department where more than one-third of all feds work.
“Not only are the number of federal employees small compared to the population,” Kamarck wrote, “but they also don’t cost very much. Compensation for federal employees cost $291 billion in 2019, or 6.6% of that year’s total spending.”
The president’s actions against feds have “sent our union membership skyrocketing,” said Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. “Every federal employee we represent that was on the fence about joining, but had not done so yet, is signing up now. Our headquarters phone is ringing off hook with federal employees who do not have a union trying to organize one immediately … The members we have are engaged in a way I have never seen before.”
AFGE generally received one or two leads a day about union representation, said David Cann, AFGE’s chief organizer, “but since the election we’ve gotten over 800 inquiries” thanks to Trump.
Like others, Erwin likened Trump’s workforce moves, along with his efforts to kick transgender people out of the military, to the early 1950s McCarthy era, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) hunted suspected Communists in government. Trump’s executive order on transgender service members accuses them of “expressing a false ‘gender identity’” that “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
For Erwin, “in some ways it is worse than anything McCarthy ever did,” he said by email. “Trump is President of the United States, which means he has real power, and his worst impulses are going unchecked by Congress.”
Trump said he wants more accountability for government workers, but his actions “are not a government tune up for more efficiency,” said Teresa W. Gerton, a former Army officer, career civil servant, political appointee, and past president and CEO of the National Academy of Public Administration.
“They instead are generating so much chaos and confusion that the entire machinery of government threatens to grind to a halt,” she added. “I can only conclude that the creation of a fearful, dysfunctional work environment is in fact their goal.”
Questioned about the legality of Trump firing feds, press secretary Karoline Leavitt cited the White House Counsel’s Office and offered a novel, disruptive and possibly illegal construct.
“He is the executive of the executive branch,” she said of Trump, “and, therefore, he has the power to fire anyone within the executive branch that he wishes to.”