The Deliberate Decimation of the Federal Workforce

At 2:33 pm Mountain Time, on February 27, 2025, Natasha Miles’s world fell apart.

The 53-year-old had been driving west for five days. She was heading toward a new home and a new job after spending decades working at Penn State, where she’d earned her PhD in atmospheric science and had been a research professor in its Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science. In recent years, she had received grant money from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for her projects and had also served as a consultant for the agency. Her contacts there had been encouraging her join NOAA full-time, and after grappling with the prospect of leaving academia, she had said yes.

Miles was at a point in her life when she wanted to shake things up a little. Her two sons were grown. Her husband, a supercomputer expert, had moved to Illinois to take a job at the state university in Urbana-Champaign. And she had become weary of the endless hustle for grants to fund her research and supplement her salary; far better, she reasoned, to take a federal job with stable pay and benefits.

“The job was perfect for me, working with a group of people who are really great and dedicated to climate science,” she said. She would be part of the largest network in the world dedicated to measuring the concentration of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, working alongside people who flew planes to take measurements, who climbed up high towers to place instruments, who ran global projects to capture air samples and ship them to NOAA’s office in Boulder, Colorado, for analysis. Cumulatively, this work made it possible to produce extraordinarily accurate data about changes in the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases from one year to the next.

By the time all the paperwork was completed, in January 2025, election season had come and gone, and Donald Trump was back in the White House. Miles calculated what she would need in her studio apartment out West, and loaded those must-have items—clothes, ski gear, tennis racket, backpack, sleeping bag, and a few household items—into her dark blue Hyundai Tucson hybrid SUV, kitted out with a travel cage for her dog, Mia. On February 22, she looked around her house, which she had decided not to sell just yet, walked out to her vehicle, and set off on the 1,600-mile road trip.

An hour outside of Boulder, Miles’s phone began to ring. Her new boss was on the other end of the line. “Have you checked your e-mail?” she asked. Miles hadn’t; she’d been driving. “You need to.”

Miles took the next exit off the freeway, pulled her SUV to the side of the road, and opened her e-mail on her laptop. There it was, in black and white: The scientist’s job no longer met the needs of the new administration and was being eliminated. As of 5 pm that day, Miles would no longer be a federal employee. She sat in her car—Mia whining in the cage behind her—flabbergasted. “You’re supposed to be saving for retirement at this point,” she thought to herself.

And then she thought, “Who on earth is going to do this job now?”

By now, the gutting of the federal workforce is one of the most widely reported stories of Trump’s new term. But it’s also the least understood.

After the inauguration, the second Trump administration didn’t waste any time carrying out Project 2025’s fever dream of eviscerating the federal workforce while putting the remaining workers “in trauma”—as advocated by Russell Vought, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget. The principal author of Project 2025, Vought was aided by the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its leader during the first four months of Trump’s second term, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. All told, the non-military federal workforce will be reduced from about 2.4 million to about 2.1 million by December, according to Scott Kupor, the director of the US Office of Personnel Management. This elimination of one in eight workers represents the largest fall-off in federal employment since the end of World War II. Departments and agencies concerned with workplace and financial regulations, public health, the environment, income inequality and racial diversity, education, and overseas aid have borne the brunt of this attack, even as other agencies, particularly those carrying out Trump’s ferocious anti-­immigrant agenda, have had money showered on them.

The unions that represent federal workers have opposed these changes, but their ability to fight back has been limited by the executive order Trump signed that ended the right to engage in collective bargaining for workers in agencies related to national security. In May, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit allowed the union-busting measure to go into effect in some agencies, and over the summer, a panel of judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the de-unionization effort to continue across the board. As a result, according to estimates from the Center for American Progress, more than 1 million workers, in over a dozen federal agencies, have been stripped of collective bargaining rights. This marks the biggest union-busting operation in US history.

“The Trump administration has taken power away from workers to speak up about conditions in the workplace, to be an advocate for good government. It sends a chilling effect for whistleblowers. It’s really devastating,” said Steve Smith, deputy director of communications for the AFL-CIO. “Not that it’s a surprise—because Project 2025 pretty much laid it out.”

Making conditions even worse for federal employees, Trump’s team has pushed to recategorize tens of thousands of civil servants so they can be fired at will by his administration, leaving workers across the federal government particularly vulnerable to shifting political winds, and making it easier for DOGE to effectively dismantle entire agencies and bureaus, as happened to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Taken as a whole, says Andrew Huddleston, director of communications at the American Federation of Government Employees at the time I interviewed him, “it’s about punishing federal employees and trying to make federal employment less attractive.”

This crude reimagining of the role that government workers play in American life is devastating for those who rely on federal services, and it is catastrophic for those who built their careers providing these services and planned out their lives on the assumption that their public-­sector employment would provide them with security as they aged.

Despite the scale of this transformation of the federal workforce, media coverage has failed to fully convey what’s being lost. After focusing intensely on the drama of DOGE’s rampage through federal agencies in February and March, the media moved on, reporting instead on each new daily outrage or provocative Truth Social post. In doing so, it dropped the ball on covering what will likely be one of the most durable aspects of Trump’s legacy: his administration’s deliberate hamstringing of large parts of the federal government, and the abysmal failure of the government to keep up its end of the social compact with its own workers and with Americans who rely on a functioning government for essential services.

Systems built up over the past 120 years, from Progressive Era regulatory agencies through New Deal and Great Society social programs, and on to the expansions of healthcare and food stamp programs of the past 15 years, are being eliminated or eroded at warp speed, as is the notion of a professionalized civil service largely insulated from the diktats, the cronyism, and the vengeful impulses of a single leader. And while many lower courts have, when presented with lawsuits by government employees’ unions and other affected groups, attempted to slow this process, the Trumpified Supreme Court has largely rubber-stamped it, even if only temporarily.

As a result, the redistributive power of the federal government—one that made great projects such as the electrification of poor rural areas and the construction of national transportation systems possible—is being cast aside. And the ability of the federal government to use its muscle to expand civil and political rights to historically marginalized groups is being deliberately destroyed.

This is the type of labor that Trump has said “we never wanted, and we’re probably not going to allow them to come back,” as his administration has sought to carry out additional mass firings during the government shutdown that began on October 1—layoffs that were temporarily halted by the courts but that nevertheless served to further erode trust between citizens and their elected leaders. The damage Trump’s administration has inflicted at all levels of society is profound. One 24-year-old worker at the IRS offices in Seattle, who took DOGE’s “Fork in the Road” buyout offer after months of insecurity around his job, told me, “I feel like our whole government is compromised, which sucks.”

When I asked this worker in May, as the cuts were accelerating, what he wanted government leaders to know, he said he would like to ask Elon Musk a series of questions. “I’d ask him why he’s firing good people, why he’s lying about their performance, [and] how is this efficient? I’d ask why he doesn’t tell people that he’s paying people to do nothing,” he said, referring to the tens of thousands of federal employees who were put on administrative leave but still paid for months on end before finally being fired. “I’d ask how he thinks it’s fair to fire people with families, who can’t get jobs in this market. And I’d ask how it’s good for the country.”

In mid-February, Adrian M. received an e-mail informing her that she was being fired from her job as a communications specialist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because her performance wasn’t up to par. Hundreds of other probationary staff at the CDC received similar missives. The letter infuriated her. Adrian, who lives in rural Tennessee, had long faced being stereotyped because of her race and gender—the assumption that Black women were angry, emotional, quick to fly off the handle. And she knew that, too often, they were seen as people who had gotten their education and their jobs only because of affirmative action, or DEI, as MAGA people liked to put it.

Adrian had always hoped to find a permanent position at the CDC. She was fascinated by public health, and the agency was seen the world over as the gold standard in that field. But it took several years, and several detours, before she was finally able to realize her dream.

In September 2024, after working for a couple years on a CDC-funded public health fellowship focused on chronic diseases, health-literacy campaigns, and health issues related to air quality, she finally got the message she had been waiting for. At last, she had financial stability and could afford improvements to her home. But just a few short months after beginning her new job, she received the message. The subtext of the explanation for her firing stung. After repeatedly railing against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives during his campaign, Trump had grotesquely insinuated, days after his inauguration, that DEI hires in the military and the Federal Aviation Administration were responsible for a fatal air crash over the Potomac River. “I’m being called a poor performer, and my knowledge and skills don’t meet the needs of the agency,” Adrian said incredulously. “My knowledge and skills came from the agency. I wouldn’t have had my job if my skills weren’t good.”

Of all the policies being implemented by Trump 2.0, the gutting of federal employment and federal services ranks at or near the top for its disparate racial impacts. The Economic Policy Institute estimated earlier this year that Black people, who represent 14.4 percent of the US population, make up nearly 19 percent of the federal workforce. Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported in August that Black unemployment had jumped to 7.5 percent, up more than a percentage point from a year earlier. Black workers were the only demographic to experience such a surge in unemployment. In the five months leading up to July, the number of Black women in the workforce declined by a startling 319,000. While there is no detailed breakdown of the number of Black people who lost their federal jobs, it’s hard to see how the DOGE cuts, decimating the federal workforce and creating ripple effects throughout the broader economy, could not have contributed to the rise in Black unemployment.

For three generations, since the establishment of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, programs have existed to enable people who have historically been on the wrong end of the country’s racial calculus to climb into the middle class. But under Trump and Vought, these ladders are being taken down at speed. So, too, are the networks of government services, from state-funded healthcare and food stamps to Head Start, that were designed to counter the systemic racial discrimination that has kept non-white populations disproportionately unemployed and impoverished.

Trump’s efforts to undermine the esprit de corps of government employees, and to break the ties holding together the federal workforce, speak volumes about his priorities. Skilled scientists, data managers, doctors, public health officials, and financial regulators, among others, don’t enter federal employment to get rich—federal jobs pay less than do their equivalents in the private sector—but to make a difference, to better the lives of their neighbors and their fellow community members. At the onset of Trump 2.0, the president and the world’s richest man chose to take a chain saw to those communal bonds.

“The government didn’t just illegally fire a bunch of random people. They fired employees who decided to dedicate our lives to, in a myriad of different ways, making the lives of other humans better,” said Kelsey Hendrix, a blind woman who worked as a contract specialist for NOAA in Silver Spring, Maryland, and was fired during the early DOGE purges. “We are also people who have had it drilled into our heads since the day we took the oath of office that we are a team, not just individual people, and that everyone has an equally important part to play on that team.”

Dan Meleason was one of about 6,000 veterans who lost their federal jobs earlier this year. He had served over two decades in the military before taking a job with the US Forest Service. When I interviewed him in May, he was still fuming: “I question why I wanted to come back in federal service. I get kind of depressed because of that.” He had thought that, because his work helping to mitigate the risk of forest and grassland fires in the West was so clearly important, it would be treated with respect. Instead, he came to think, the government viewed him as entirely disposable. “It’s not what I expected when I re-signed up to work for the people of the United States. It truly isn’t,” he said.

Days after Russell Vought was appointed acting director of the consumer Financial Protection Bureau in early February, shadowy DOGE operatives started meeting at the agency’s office. Since the CFPB’s founding in 2011, Republican politicians have not hidden their disdain for it. During his first term, Trump mused about trying to close it down but opted instead to appoint Mick Mulvaney—a conservative congressman who had spent years railing against the bureau—as acting director, perhaps hoping to kill it off slowly, via a thousand cuts. Mulvaney was empowered to trim some of the bureau’s functions and reorient its work toward encouraging low-income Americans to save more money, rather than going after bad actors in the world of finance. Since then, Republicans have doubled down on their hostility toward the bureau, and GOP lawmakers now seem content to let Trump kill off, in all but name, an agency that was created in the wake of the 2008 recession.

In 2014, David (a pseudonym), who had launched a successful anti-­poverty nonprofit working in the conservative Deep South, was hired by the CFPB. Born in Brazil to a Colombian mother and an American father who had served in the Peace Corps in Latin America before the family moved to Maine in 1977, David had witnessed the challenges of poverty from a young age. After his parents split, his mother raised him, his twin brother, and another sibling in a house with no indoor toilet, working at a factory and struggling to make her paycheck cover the monthly bills. David’s job at the CFPB is to develop national strategies and community partnerships aimed at protecting people from predatory lenders. It would, he hoped, give him “an opportunity to reach millions of consumers with low income across the country.” He would have the chance to intervene in situations where the poor were forced to pay more to access basic financial services and faced endless fees for using credit cards and other financial tools. But in February 2025, everything changed.

Vought’s henchman, Mark Calabria, who was an adviser to Vice President Mike Pence during Trump 1.0 and is now the chief statistician for the Office of Management and Budget, ordered the CFPB’s 1,500 employees to stop their work. Hundreds of investigators, economists, lawyers, and consumer advocates were told to cease doing what the bureau was established to do—protect consumers. Vought closed the CFPB’s headquarters and attempted to deprive it of all funding by notifying the Federal Reserve that it didn’t need any additional funds.

Rumors circulated that the entire CFPB staff was going to be sacrificed in a planned Valentine’s Day massacre. In response, the National Treasury Employees Union went to court seeking a temporary restraining order against the cull. They got the order. Thus, instead of being fired in February, the vast majority of workers at the CFPB were put on administrative leave. Mothballed. Like tens of thousands of other federal employees in agencies the new administration had in its sights, they would be paid to do nothing. Or at least that was how they understood it, based on the e-mails they had received. But that wasn’t how the Trump team presented it to the public. When Trump’s nominee to head the CFPB, Jonathan McKernan, testified during his Senate confirmation hearings in late February, he stated that his application wouldn’t have been processed if no one was working. “He either lied or he didn’t know,” David concluded. “Everyone’s supposed to be working, but no one is.”

Meanwhile, investigations into predatory lending went undone, and consumers found they had one less institution in their corner in DC. That means that poor Americans will likely end up paying higher credit-card interest rates; will be stuck with ever more fees on ever more services, including on overdrafts; and will be targeted by predatory mortgage practices, exploitative private student loans, and so on.

Similar vandalism was inflicted on a score of other agencies. By spring, USAID had been largely dismantled, its lifesaving anti-famine and medical work overseas grinding to a halt, with thousands of staff stateside and tens of thousands of workers and contractors abroad fired or put on administrative leave, leaving millions of people more vulnerable to infectious diseases such as malaria and polio, as well as to malnutrition and waterborne illnesses. In April, Boston University health economist Brooke Nichols estimated that due to a lack of access to medicines and treatments, 119,000 children and 57,000 adults had already died as a result of USAID’s destruction. By the end of the summer, the tracker estimated, over half a million people globally had died, with a startling 88 deaths per hour.

Crucial parts of NOAA’s weather forecasting and climate-change prediction work were also put on ice, leaving communities at greater risk of weather-related disasters. The Education Department was eviscerated, making it ever harder to level the educational playing field for disabled and financially disadvantaged students. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with nearly all federal funding for public television and radio, was eliminated. The Voice of America was largely demolished. Throughout the first months of the second Trump administration, new cuts were imposed almost daily, as a result of which, in one corner of government after the next, vital, frequently lifesaving work was simply cast aside with no regard for the consequences.

During the government shutdown, the White House only escalated its threats against the federal workforce. Its mass layoffs at several agencies were temporarily blocked by a federal court, but Trump also threatened to not issue back pay to furloughed workers, began withholding billions of dollars of funds promised to Democratic-run states, and started to cut “Democrat”-favored government agencies and offices.

As Trump does everything he can to hollow out vital government functions that had been mandated and funded by Congress over the past several decades, tens of thousands of federal workers have been put on a never-ending roller-coaster ride, much like Natasha Miles. After a series of court rulings in the spring, Miles was grudgingly rehired by NOAA. But she was then immediately placed on administrative leave—forbidden to do the work that she had been hired to do. And a few weeks later, as the court cases wound their way through the system, she was fired again.

In April, Miles learned that she could get her old job back at Penn State. On the eve of Mother’s Day, the ex-government worker arrived back at her house in Pennsylvania. Her sons would take her out to a Mexican restaurant for lunch the next day. When she moved into her studio in the mountains above Boulder, she had wanted to make it seem like home. To tuck things away, to hang things up. Now she couldn’t even bring herself to unpack. “Anything that I didn’t need immediately is still piled up in boxes and bags,” she said some weeks later. Her new-old job—reliant as it was on federal grant money in an era of unremitting federal hostility to climate-change research—could disappear at any moment.