Inside the federal workforce that fears Trump’s war on bureaucracy

WASHINGTON – The tremors from Donald Trump’s decisive electoral victory have hit every corner of Washington. But their maximum intensity is felt by the capital’s federal workforce, which comprises tens of thousands of mostly anonymous employees not so fondly referred to by Trump as “the deep state”.

Few notions have consumed the once and future president more than the belief that his executive power has been constrained by a cabal of unelected bureaucrats.

In his first rally of the 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas, Trump framed the bureaucracy as a national adversary, declaring: “Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state.”

His intention to accomplish the latter is an explicit feature of Trump’s official to-do list, known as Agenda 47. From numerous interviews conducted with government officials spread across eight federal agencies, the overwhelming consensus is that Trump and his allies are not bluffing.

That said, exactly how his war on the bureaucracy will be waged, and how government workers will respond to it, remain looming questions.

“There’s definitely anxiety, no question,” said Mr Thomas Yazdgerdi, president of the American Foreign Service Association, which represents about 17,000 active-duty and retired service members across six federal agencies. He said diplomats were asking him: “Is my job going to be OK? Will they shut down my bureau? What will happen to me?”

Many long-time federal employees expressed exhaustion at the very prospect of a second go-round with Trump.

“I believe there will be a significant exodus among the one-third of our workforce that is eligible to retire,” said Ms Nicole Cantello, a former attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) speaking on behalf of the agency’s union, which she represents. “Many of them will be unwilling to relive all the hostility they experienced four years ago.”

But most federal workers do not have the option to retire or to transfer their expertise to the private sector. Their anxieties about the incoming administration extend well beyond the usual uncertainty about what a new president’s priorities and leadership team will be.

Much of their concern centres on Trump’s pledge to reinstitute Schedule F, an executive order he issued late in his presidency that would have empowered his administration to convert tens of thousands of civil servants to “at-will” workers, who could more easily be fired and replaced with political appointees.

The legality of Schedule F was never tested because President Joe Biden revoked the order when he took office.

“They are what makes this government work,” Ms Natalie Quillian, a deputy chief of staff in the Biden White House, said of the federal workforce.

Referring to a rule that Mr Biden finalised this spring making it difficult to reinstate Schedule F, she said: “I think we’ve taken all the actions we can to make sure they are protected, and I’m not aware of any other action we can take.”

Officials interviewed for this article warned that making civil servants feel more vulnerable about their livelihood would almost certainly create a chilling effect on how they go about their work. The perception of exhibiting insufficient loyalty to Trump’s agenda is more discomfiting at some agencies than at others.

Three mid-level EPA officials said they feared the subject of climate change would be off-limits in the new administration.

At the Pentagon, officials were trying to game out what policies might catch Trump’s attention and prompt edicts like the one he announced five years ago on social media,

forbidding transgender people from serving

“in any capacity in the US military”. There are also fears inside the Education Department that its legacy of civil rights reforms could soon be terminated, or that Trump will make good on his vow to dissolve the department altogether.

Even agencies with distinctly nonideological missions could come under scrutiny. At the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), for example, the mission of safely landing airplanes has found no sceptic among the authors of Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint for reshaping the federal government.

But federal employees at the FAA and elsewhere have taken notice of Trump’s close association with Mr Elon Musk, billionaire industrialist and owner of social media platform X, as well as SpaceX, whose rocket launches are regulated by the agency.

Mr Musk also has been openly contemptuous of collective bargaining rights. One FAA official said his co-workers fear that Mr Musk may exercise undue influence in that regard and are concerned that Trump will roll back any protections against discrimination that the new president deems to be “woke”.

In the end, what might end up blunting any damage Trump might try to inflict upon the bureaucracy is its own hidebound imperviousness.

One former official at the Transportation Department, who asked for anonymity to speak freely, recalled the more than year-long effort to obtain the funding for a specific, relatively small project that had already been authorised.

It was the nature of bureaucracy, the official said: Nothing could be done, or undone, with the stroke of a pen. NYTIMES