President Donald Trump and his team are crowing about the downsizing of the federal bureaucracy, which is set to shrink by tens of thousands more on Sept. 30 when workers who took a DOGE buyout hang it up.
But if Trump’s goal was to dismantle the workforce he calls the “deep state” — and blames for the failings of his first term — he’s got a long way to go. Although he’s disrupted swaths of the government, the vast majority of career federal employees who avoided the firings of the past seven months are sticking it out, according to Labor Department statistics and the White House’s own admission.
Many of those who’ve chosen to remain are keeping their heads down. Some aren’t — and their open defiance of Trump administration policies may make it harder for the administration to achieve Trump’s goals — much like Trump complained they did in his first term.
At the end of the day, career staffers still believe that politicians come and go and it’s them who will persevere, the survivors told POLITICO.
“They are staying in their jobs — the vast majority of people, even though they could get a job somewhere else or look for a job somewhere else,” said Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, whose bargaining agreements at at least six agencies Trump has sought to scuttle. “There will be a new administration, with new priorities.”
For many, that’s true, but for others, such as those in highly specialized fields like foreign aid, the job market for former government workers is limited. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Sept. 9 it likely over-estimated past job growth by hundreds of thousands, painting a grimmer picture of the employment market than previously thought. That too could be a factor in federal workers’ apparent resolve to stay.
While 200,000 federal workers have left the government this year, the most in a single year since World War II, Trump still employs about 2.2 million civil servants.
By year’s end, the administration expects to cut loose 100,000 more federal workers, according to the White House Office of Personnel Management. That’s a lot, but it amounts to a cut of about 12 percent.
Some agencies have taken bigger hits. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for one, says he expects the staff of the Department of Health and Human Services will shrink by a quarter. Others, such as the Department of Education and the EPA, have taken deep blows.
In terms of sheer numbers, the biggest hits have come at the Department of Defense, which has shed 56,000 workers out of about 900,000 civilians; the Department of Agriculture, down 22,000 from about 98,000, and HHS, which has 13,000 fewer people on the payroll compared to a year ago, when there were 93,000, according to a tally as of the end of August compiled by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that opposes Trump’s downsizing.
But for all of Trump’s broadsides — he’s called civil servants “crooked” and “dishonest” people who are “destroying this country” — the percentage of federal workers quitting each month hasn’t budged, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The quit rate is holding steady at 0.5 percent as of July, the same percentage as last year before Trump took office and down from 0.7 percent at the height of the pandemic.
A minority of federal workers back Trump and support what he’s doing. Thirty-eight percent of them voted for him last November, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted in early March, and 83 percent of those who voted for Trump approved of his job performance, despite the turmoil in their workplaces that was well underway at the time.
The quit rate among federal workers is still far below the 2.2 percent rate of the private sector.
That’s despite the White House’s estimate that 80 percent of the departures were voluntary.
It’s not clear how many of those workers were planning to quit, or retire, anyway — and enjoyed a few extra months’ pay thanks to the “deferred resignation” deal Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency offered. The White House doesn’t have the data yet on the retirement eligibility of workers who took Musk’s “fork in the road” — or even hard numbers on how many did — but expects at least a third and as many as half had enough service to start collecting their pensions.
Rather than go quietly, workers who resent Trump’s attacks, as well as the damage they say the president has done to the programs they work on, intend to fight it out.
In response to Kennedy and Trump’s firing of the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Aug. 27, more than 1,000 civil servants, some current, some former, published an open letter demanding Kennedy’s resignation. CDC workers at agency headquarters in Atlanta held a “clap out” to thank three departing colleagues who’d quit in protest.
At the National Institutes of Health, workers have publicly accused Director Jay Bhattacharya of prioritizing politics over human safety, prompting him to meet with them. Bhattacharya promised to permit open debate and said he wouldn’t retaliate against them for speaking out.
In an interview with POLITICO, Trump’s personnel chief, former venture capitalist Scott Kupor said: “I don’t fault anybody for having views that are different from what the administration is doing.” Kupor added: “This is a completely different motion than anybody’s ever seen. So it’s not surprising to me at all that people are reacting to it.”
Agency leaders have, in other cases, punished workers who’ve resisted Trump’s moves. The Environmental Protection Agency fired employees who wrote a letter criticizing agency leadership and the Federal Emergency Management Agency suspended workers who warned in a letter that the Trump administration’s actions were preventing the agency from fully responding to extreme weather events like hurricanes and floods.
Those in the crosshairs say they’re leaning on the extensive system of protections Congress created to shield the civil service from political interference. “I’m grounded in what the rules are,” said a career senior executive at the Department of Health and Human Services, who was placed on administrative leave and offered a transfer to the Indian Health Service.
“It’s not perfect, but it’s set up to give people due process. Employees are entitled to their due process, and by you just walking away and saying, ‘I’m just going to retire,’ you’re letting them not follow due process,” said the HHS staffer, who was granted anonymity to avoid retribution.
AFGE and its allies have filed at least a dozen lawsuits still working their way through the courts, Sanghvi said, and union members are making the case to the public and to Congress about why the jobs they do and the services their agencies provide matter. Some have filed whistleblower complaints or gone public with their concerns about political interference at their agencies.
As Debra Katz, legal counsel for two former NIH officials who filed whistleblower complaints on Sept. 3 over the administration’s moves to change vaccine recommendations put it: “We shouldn’t roll over and play dead. Even though the institutions that have been set up to protect workers are not functional now, the administration at some point could change, and we could see this agency functioning again.”
All the upheaval has prompted even Republican lawmakers to complain about the indiscriminate purge and administration officials to acknowledge their concerns and even rehire workers they’d let go, including employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health who provided direct services to firefighters with cancer and coal miners with black lung disease, as well as an award-winning NIH Parkinson’s researcher.
The battle with the bureaucracy is playing a role in the administration’s decision to eschew regulation, in favor of pressure tactics, to pursue its goals, according to the political appointees in charge of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Marty Makary and Mehmet Oz explained in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece this summer that career staff couldn’t be trusted to regulate. “The problem with prescriptive regulation is that it often puts more power in the hands of bureaucrats than society is willing to tolerate,” they wrote.
Makary and Oz boasted about the voluntary pledges companies have made to them — food manufacturers have promised to phase out artificial dyes and health insurers to speed up their processes for approving treatments — but regulations would make it more difficult for the companies to reverse course. Regulating, though, is a time-consuming process that leans heavily on career staff, who Makary and Oz implied they have little allegiance to.
“As agency leaders directly accountable to the president, our cabinet secretary and Congress, we answer to the public,” they wrote.
On Sept. 3, the architect of Trump’s campaign against the bureaucracy, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought spelled out the terms of engagement at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington.
He framed Trump’s assault on the workers as at the very core of his second term agenda. “We had many, many existential issues, and all of those existential issues came through what I’m going to talk about today, which is the fact that we were up against a bureaucracy that was 100 years in the making,” Vought said.
Vought boasted about Trump’s progress thus far — “we have a president who understands fully what is in front of him and has dealt aggressively and quickly with that” — but Vought acknowledged that “much work still remains.”
Kupor said he’s looking at the downsizing less from the perspective of an ideologue than as someone who once bought and sold companies. Kupor said he had “no desire to denigrate the federal workforce.”
Kupor listed civil service reforms championed, at times, by politicians on both the right and left, to treat government workers more like those in the private sector, to hire and fire more quickly, to reward top performers and empower managers.
“My hope is you can start to change the culture in terms of the way people think about what their roles and responsibilities are,” he said. “I think those can be enduring if we get it right.”
Should I stay or should I go?
Even people who endorse the kinds of changes Kupor envisions are skeptical Trump’s likely to get there with his move-fast-and-break-things approach.
David Walker, a Republican who led Congress’ Government Accountability Office during George W. Bush’s presidency and helped make the case for such reforms at the Defense and Homeland Security departments, is among the doubters.
“I’ve said this many times: Government’s grown too big, promised too much, subsidized too many, lost control of the budget, has no strategic plan, has not managed to achieve results,” he said, adding that “the president knows that we need to make major transformational reforms.”
But Walker sees the slapdash way Musk and DOGE went about it as counterproductive. Rather than targeting underperformers or program areas that were unsuccessful, based on clearly defined, transparent criteria, the administration cut people because it could. It first targeted workers still on probation because they were new to the government or new to their roles.
After that, cuts proceeded without apparent rhyme or reason. In numerous cases, the administration had to bring workers back. “What DOGE did was not what needed to be done,” said Walker. “You don’t want to have to fight a battle over how you’re going about doing it.”
The cutbacks have already prompted complaints from lawmakers and their constituents about a breakdown in government services, from trash pick up in national parks to testing for lead poisoning in children to aid responding to natural disasters.
“Elon Musk planted time bombs all over the federal government,” said Elaine Kamarck, founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution think tank. “We don’t know yet which ones are going to blow up and when.”
Kamarck spearheaded a previous reform campaign by then-Vice President Al Gore that led to a downsizing bigger than Trump’s. President Bill Clinton touted a reduction of 377,000 workers and the end of “the era of big government.”
Kupor said he’s keen to cut down what he called a “contractor state,” meaning government contractors he said ballooned after Clinton and Gore’s cuts and who operate more like full-time employees than temporary hires brought on for specialized tasks.
Career staff who spoke with POLITICO about how they’ve handled the tumult of Trump’s second term said that they understood that politics was part of the game when they took their jobs, but admitted surprise at the aggressive campaign against them Trump has waged.
They resented Musk’s shock-and-awe approach, which seemed to lack expertise or measured strategy. They worried about being surveilled and loyalty tests. Others said they could no longer do their jobs or felt their work was compromised by the administration’s ideological beliefs.
Kevin Shea, former principal senior adviser to the deputy secretary of agriculture, said he understood from Trump loyalists that the president blames federal workers, at least in part, for the travails of his first term and after, from his struggle to implement his agenda to his impeachments.
“His people attribute all of this to the establishment, the elites, and so this is all their revenge,” said Shea, who started working at USDA during the Carter administration and retired in January because he expected to be ousted.
The DOGE people “didn’t care about policy,” a longtime Department of the Interior worker who is on leave after taking the deferred resignation offer, said.
Most workers described feeling disheartened, insulted and disrespected by Trump’s attacks. As another USDA staffer who took the deferred resignation deal put it, “It kind of felt like trying to turn the country against federal workers.”
The looming threat of being fired forced some workers’ hands. One former employee at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which oversees automobile safety, said their manager pressured them to opt into the buyout. They ultimately took it to ensure they weren’t fired before becoming eligible for a student loan forgiveness program for public servants.
“Quit or be fired was the message,” the person, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said.
Those who have chosen to remain said they have done so with reservations.
“I don’t regret my decision to stay, but it hasn’t been easy,” a career staffer at the Department of Energy said, adding, “The last eight months have been the most chaotic, demotivating and inefficient of my time in federal service.”
Staying put involves a personal calculus. For some, a few people left in leadership they can trust or the belief that they can still make a mark from inside is enough.
Watching their colleagues leave is depressing, an FDA employee said. But those who have decided to stay say it’s because they think they still have something to offer the agency.
“I feel like I can make a positive difference through the insanity,” another FDA employee said, granted anonymity for fear of retribution.
To the victor
As with everything about Trump, the public is divided about his war on the bureaucracy. Forty-nine percent said they trust federal workers, including 43 percent of Republicans, according to a poll by the Partnership for Public Service this spring.
The partnership’s president, Max Stier, has been trying for nearly a quarter century to convince people to serve their government and remains worried about lasting damage, regardless of what happens after Trump leaves office.
“It’s so much easier to destroy things than to build things,” he said. “When you burn something down, it’s not as if the fact that you did it fast is going to make it easier to undo. The destruction is something that’s difficult to rebuild.”
Stier and Sanghvi of the American Federation of Government Employees think Trump wants to revive the 19th-century spoils system, in which political leaders handed out jobs to supporters and stocked the government with loyalists.
Two years ago, Trumptold a gathering of North Carolina Republicans he’d like to revive the civil service exam, which was halted more than 40 years ago in response to a racial discrimination lawsuit, and feature questions about the Constitution.
“We at least legally, have a green light now to be able to do that,” Kupor said, referring to a recent Justice Department decision to end a consent degree from 1981 that banned such exams.
Kupor said there wasn’t currently any plan to revive the test, but said he wasn’t opposed to it, as long as it evaluated applicants’ job skills.
Still, Kupor said he doesn’t think it akin to reviving the spoils system to say that federal workers should carry out the president’s directives.
“I don’t want to minimize any of the pain, which is totally real for people if they’re losing their jobs,” he explained. “But if people are literally not going to do the work that’s assigned to them, because they have a different ideological view on something. Quite frankly, I think the honorable thing to do is for them to resign.”
Rachel Shin, Danny Nguyen, Ruth Reader, Robin Bravender, Jordan Wolman, Hannah Northey and Chris Marquette contributed to this article.
