Hollow out the civil service in order to
Disable entire agencies
Replace workers unwilling to violate laws and their oath to the constitution with workers who will lie and ignore laws and oath to the constitution for Trump
This is being done via the following actions
Hiring Freezes
Rescinding job offers
Firing new or newly promoted employees without cause
"Make workers feel trauma" and force them to quit
Demotions
Eliminate telework
General assholery
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at the time. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”
“Put Them in Trauma”: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda
"J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing.
These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.
Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They appoint unqualified people—somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a party hack—to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron, not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/doge-civil-servant-purge/681671/
When authoritarian leaders attempt to consolidate power, they typically try to take control of the civil professionals, which usually results in a decline in government-provided services.
In Hungary, for example, one of Viktor Orbán’s first acts upon retaking the office of Prime Minister in 2010 was to dismantle civil servants’ labor protections, allowing political appointees to remove career employees without cause. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro fired over 3,500 career officials on his third day in office. And in Poland, the Law and Justice Party, under Jarosław Kaczyński, moved to weaken the country’s Civil Service Act just one month after taking power.
In all three cases, these moves reintroduced patronage politics at the expense of government services. In one index that compares economic and governance indicators across 137 countries, Hungary steadily moved from being one of the top performers, ranked #15 in “government performance” when Orbán took office in 2010, to almost the bottom third, with a rank of #87 in 2024. Among other problems, retiree pensions have steadily decreased, “corruption is pervasive,” and “the efficiency and quality of basic public services such as water, sanitation and electricity have declined.” In the same index, Brazil went from #26 in government performance before Bolsonaro took office in 2019 to #77 in 2022 when he left. Poland, under the tenure of the Law and Justice Party, saw a somewhat less steep decline on the performance index, but was beset by a massive corruption scandal, the cash-for-visas scheme, in which upwards of 250,000 visas were issued to non-EU citizens in exchange for bribes.
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-civil-service-explained/
"Just look at all of those firings. DOGE has targeted so-called probationary employees first, often without regard for their skill or the necessity of their roles. Do you know what a probationary employee is? It's people who have been in their position for less than a year, or in some cases less than two years. That means new hires, sure, but also experienced workers who recently transferred departments or got promoted.
Not only does DOGE not seem to understand this, it has given no indication that it wants to understand. These are the easiest employees to fire, legally speaking, so they're gone. It even changed the length of the probationary period -from one year of service to two-in order to super-size its purge of the National Science Foundation."
The Incompetence of DOGE Is a Feature, Not a Bug
The civil service is the civilian workforce of the U.S. federal government, currently numbering about 2.2 million employees. These employees perform virtually all the functions of the federal government, from operating our national parks to protecting our national security.
Over 70 percent of them work in defense and security-related departments, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, and nearly one-third of civil servants are veterans. The total number of federal civil servants today is roughly the same as it was in the late 1960s, although the U.S. population has since grown by more than 60 percent.
The future of agencies like the CDC and FDA are uncertain: ‘Shitshow is an understatement'
More than 7,000 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were cut. Staffers with decades of experience received emails at 5 a.m. on Tuesday that they were being placed on administrative leave and would no longer have access to their buildings, effective immediately. In the Washington D.C. area, thousands of federal workers lined up outside office buildings to see if their badges worked.
“It’s so chaotic. The amount of knowledge that is being purged today at CDC is just tragic.”
The CDC’s Division of Environmental Health and Science Practice (DEHSP) was eliminated.
That includes the Asthma and Air Quality Branch, the Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch, the Climate and Health Activity branch, and the Water Food and Environmental Health Services, among others.
“They are firing whole organizational units,” says Samantha. “These are people that have 30 years of service, people with children, veterans, there was no thought put into trying to retain people that have institutional knowledge.”
“This bloodbath was so fucking bad I had multiple officials asking me if I thought this was an April Fools joke. We were preparing for the worst and it sure looks like we got it.”
They say that there is a vast misunderstanding of how specialized and interconnected the teams are at NIH, and unlike corporate layoffs, a couple weeks of disruption could impact public health for years.
“When it comes to layoffs and RIFs, people are thinking it’s like Google where you fire a bunch of people and then you hire more new people to replace them,” they say. “These people are world experts, there’s very few of them that have incredibly specialized expertise. People build labs for years and years, the lab teams are very interconnected and sensitive. If you take one or two of these people out, it breaks everything.”
Thousands of CDC employees who worked on things like preventing HIV and lead poisoning have been told they were subject to a reduction in force. Experts say people will die.
“The cuts today at CDC targeted programs that address all aspects of American lives. This will lead to worse health outcomes, greater risks to the US public, and will contribute to the decline in US life expectancy."
“There has been no effort in allowing staff to transfer projects, programs, or responsibilities."
“We’re going to have patients die. Unnecessary, preventable death.”
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence” in the federal government “and seize them,” Russ Vought told The New York Times in 2023.
Back then, Vought was a leading figure in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s effort to provide a blueprint for a Republican presidency. Now Vought is the head of the Office of Management and Budget—which he’s described as “a president’s air-traffic control system”—and Donald Trump is following Project 2025’s plans to quash any part of the executive branch that doesn’t bend to his will.
All of these dismissals appear to plainly violate statutes, but the FTC firings are an even more direct provocation. That’s because the Supreme Court precedent that protects officials at independent agencies specifically refers to a president’s attempt to fire an FTC commissioner in 1933.
much of the executive branch would be transformed from watchdogs or independent actors into the president’s foot soldiers, raising the risk of tyranny—either of the majority or of the president himself.
From veterans hospitals to national parks, rapid cuts to federal workers are eating into services
At Veterans Affairs facilities in Detroit and Denver, staff reductions have led to canceled health programs and left homeless veterans without their dedicated coordinator to help them find an apartment and line up a deposit.
And in California, Yosemite National Park paused new reservations for more than 500 campsites during peak summer months because of staffing uncertainty.
In the private sector, major companies can spend months analyzing workers’ job performance, position and skills before making big cuts. They enlist senior leaders to recommend which workers to keep, pore over union rules and smooth the process of applying for unemployment benefits for fired workers. Such forethought is key to ensuring the employees who remain can still get the work done.
The Trump administration has adhered to few of those norms
Managers say essential staff have been cut, and that the administration hasn’t followed detailed rules on how to enact widespread layoffs.
cuts haven’t taken into account workers’ performance or the necessity of their roles.
“Visitors are going to find that their services are really limited”
Gorney’s termination letter, said her abilities didn’t meet the department’s needs. She received three performance awards in less than a year.
the Department of Veterans Affairs, plans to cut about 70,000 positions and has already laid off thousands.
Fewer VA staff are handling veterans’ claims that will get them treatment for military-service injuries and mental health conditions, two current employees said. This has already resulted in veterans waiting longer to get treatment in North Texas, one said.
One VA hospital in Detroit canceled programs meant to improve patients’ stability and range of motion after the firings of probationary workers, including Kara Oliver, a 33-year-old Navy veteran leading classes and monitoring participants’ health and progress.
Keith Camire, 48 years old, received one of those letters. He started in September at the IRS to streamline spending on IT. His co-workers, he said, are now scrambling to absorb the work.
Camire, in Milford, Penn., said he voted for Trump three times. He said he’s not opposed to downsizing the government but is against the indiscriminate manner in which the cuts are being made.
“Is it mission critical in the sense of police, fire, border security?” he said of the work he was doing. “No, but it’s essential to provide fiscal accountability and responsibility, which is what DOGE is about.”
Trump administration workforce cuts at federal agencies overseeing U.S. dams are threatening their ability to provide reliable electricity, supply farmers with water and protect communities from floods, employees and industry experts warn.
The Bureau of Reclamation provides water and hydropower to the public in 17 western states. Nearly 400 agency workers have been cut through the Trump reduction plan, an administration official said.
The heads of 14 California water and power agencies sent a letter to the Bureau of Reclamation and the Department of Interior last month warning that eliminating workers with “specialized knowledge” in operating and maintaining aging infrastructure “could negatively impact our water delivery system and threaten public health and safety.”
The Oklahoma City metro area alone has roughly 30,000 federal workers who help inspect meat, staff prisons, fix military planes and train air-traffic controllers. They are among 80% of the U.S. government’s 2.3 million nonpostal and nonuniformed employees who live beyond the Beltway, including many who are concentrated in certain regions by military bases and collections of federal offices.
A federal judge has ruled that tens of thousands of employees summarily fired by the Trump administration must be rehired
Judge William Alsup ruled that the federal government had illegally fired thousands of probationary employees across six federal agencies in a “sham” operation to circumvent employment laws.
“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that is a lie.”
At times and without warning, Ecology has lost access to funds for everything from protecting salmon streams from toxic chemicals to cleaning up arsenic and lead from former orchard lands and grants for new electric school buses.
Some of these efforts have been caught up in the courts. But the temporary restraints only go so far, Sixkiller said.
Every day there seems to be a new twist: a dataset that no longer is available to Ecology, scientists that have been leading projects no longer able to talk with Ecology or other agencies, Sixkiller said.
The firings at federal agencies, including scientists, people who have dedicated their careers to protecting human health and the environment have an impact on every single community across our state.
Sixkiller says cleanup at the Hanford nuclear site, greenhouse gas emissions accounting and protections for public health are at risk.
Employees at the Social Security Administration (SSA) were informed on Thursday morning that new rules forbid them from accessing “general news” websites, including those that have been at the forefront of the reporting on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort.
The “deep state” is a top-tier conservative bogeyman, right up there with DEI and George Soros. But it seems fair to ask: If a bunch of shadowy, unelected figures, many with shared business interests and connections, took over government functions at the highest levels and directly contravened the will of Congress, what might you call that? How about … DOGE?
DOGE, headed by unelected billionaire Elon Musk, is spearheading these federal layoffs
But federal workers’ salaries only make up a small fraction of total spending.
That’s 1% of gross domestic product (GDP). The government payroll for other developed countries is typically 5% of GDP
The federal civilian workforce as a share of total non-farm employment is on the decline, Shapiro said. In 1960, that share was about 3.5%. Now it’s about 1.5%.
“There’s a huge amount of federal services delivered by a very small and quite effective federal workforce,” Shapiro said.
Cutting federal workers indiscriminately will “substantially damage the economy,” Shapiro said.
The GSA, an independent government agency, manages government IT and a significant portion of the federal real estate portfolio. In recent weeks, the agency has been decimated by forced resignations and reductions in forces, including the elimination of 18F, a GSA unit focused on government efficiency. The GSA’s Public Buildings Service (PBS) is reportedly planning to cut 63 percent of its workforce, about 3,600 people in total. Elon Musk’s associates are staffed throughout the GSA, including Technology Transformation Services director Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer, and X staffer Nicole Hollander. A number of young DOGE technologists also have access to the agency.
Mr. Zelinsky said the notion that a court could not intervene to stop the Office of Personnel Management or the White House Presidential Personnel Office from carrying out firings threatened to undermine the power that courts have exercised since the foundational 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison.
“If that were true, judicial review would be over,” he said.
It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 million [note the original post has typo showing billion instead of million]
18F is precisely what Musk and team claim should exist within government. But when his team found it, they destroyed it, because it is evidence that government works well (can't have that!), and because like Zelensky, 18F didn't bend the knee.
Trump and Musk are eliminating any part of government that works well, because that undermines their thesis that government doesn't work.
GSA (which houses 18F) turns a profit as an agency. Naturally it has to be destroyed. 18F's healthy revenue stream also means it must go.
The move follows the firings of nearly 1,000 probationary employees Feb. 14, some of which were walked back later when they were determined to be essential employees.
Veterans make up more than 28% of the VA workforce and account for the same share of the federal workforce.
VFW National Commander Al Lipphardt said fired veterans weren't "brand-new, off-the-street employees," but were those who had served the country for decades in uniform and civil service.
"There are bigger ramifications in firing veterans than just faceless workers being let go. The American people are losing technical expertise, training and security clearances already bought and paid for by taxpayers. We're losing people who are genuinely committed to the mission and find a continued sense of purpose in what they do."
The VA has almost 450,000 employees, nearly 92% of whom work in health care and health administration and support services.
savings in salaries and benefits -- an estimated $83 million a year / VA's budget was nearly $304 billion in 2023
more than 2,300 veterans are expected to lose their jobs this week at the Defense Department
"This move should outrage anyone who respects our veterans and service members and believes our promises to them should be upheld."
This month, Andrew Bernier, a US Army Corps of Engineers researcher and a union leader, says that he has received a barrage of menacing messages from the same anonymous email account. Unfolding like short chapters in a dystopian novel, they have spoken of the genius of Elon Musk, referenced the power of the billionaire’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and foretold the downfall of “corrupt” union bosses.
But the most eerie thing about the emails, which Bernier says began arriving after he filed an official charge accusing the Trump administration of violating his union’s collective bargaining agreement, is that they included personal details about his life—some of which he believes might have come from surveillance of his work laptop. The author referenced Bernier’s union activities, nickname, job, travel details, and even the green notebook he regularly uses. The most recent email implied that his computer was loaded with spyware.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that it is moving to correct the accidental firing of several people working on the federal government’s response to an outbreak of avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu.
“There were a number of employees who commented that they had nothing but exemplary performance reviews and director awards for meritorious services, so this notion that they were being let go [for poor performance] was ludicrous,” they said. “The answer was that they were simply copying the verbiage from OPM and that their value to the nation is no longer required.”
About 325 NNSA workers initially received notices late last week that they had been laid off, according to Reuters.
"To order the firing of employees without knowing that NNSA is responsible for maintaining a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear weapons stockpile while also preventing, countering, and responding to a terrorist or other adversary with a nuclear or radiological device is utterly callous and dangerous,"
the NNSA struggled to notify some of the agency's originally fired employees that their terminations were rescinded because they lost access to their government email accounts.
“The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel,"
The firings are affecting a wide swath of federal workers and include employees responsible for education, small business grants, and the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile
Mass terminations of probationary workers also swept through the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency within the Energy Department that oversees the nation's nuclear weapons. The small organization is responsible for maintaining and upgrading America's arsenal of nuclear weapons, combating nuclear terrorism and preventing proliferation around the world.
"This administration has abused the probationary period to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office"
"Agencies have spent years recruiting and developing the next generation of public servants. By firing them en masse, this administration is throwing away the very talent that agencies need to function effectively in the years ahead"
The resulting notices were missing personal details, reading: "MEMORANDUM FOR [EmployeeFirstName] [EmployeeLastName], [Job Title], [Division]".
on]".
It’s been three weeks since Elon Musk’s agents took over the government’s IT and HR departments. Since then, the movements of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have had the cartography of a horror movie, DOGE picking off agencies one by one based on slasher logic, feeding an unslakeable thirst for cost-cutting and data.
Three weeks ago the United States believed in humanitarian aid. It helped people who had been ripped off by big corporations. It funded the infrastructure necessary to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. Now the United States Agency for International Development is gutted, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on ice, and National Institutes of Health grants are handcuffed. So much for all that.
This is how you get an executive order declaring that “each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart,” an arbitrary ratio with no regard for actual staffing needs. It’s how you get hundreds of federal government buildings on the auction block no matter how fully occupied they are. It’s both extreme and ill-considered, a race to empty the town’s only well.
Trump and Elon Musk plan to dismantle the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and strip military veterans and their families overseas of the generous federal hiring incentives they rely on.
This executive order seeks to impose severe hiring restrictions and would disproportionately harm veterans, who make up one-third of the federal workforce.
Many of these programs help veterans adjust to civilian life, with federal employment serving as a stable career path for thousands. Active-duty military members stationed overseas also rely on these programs for critical support, from child care to helping their spouses secure employment in foreign countries where they may lack language skills or legal work status.
The VA is already grappling with severe workforce shortages, particularly in medical and benefits processing roles. This new hiring bottleneck guarantees growing backlogs, delayed care, and increased suffering for veterans. But that may be the goal. ... they achieve two objectives at once — denying care to veterans while making the VA so dysfunctional that veterans either forgo medical treatment or are forced into the private sector.
For years, politicians have promised to fix the VA and take care of veterans. But this Trump executive order does the opposite — it throws veterans under the bus and a few other fast moving objects.
Employees at the General Services Administration (GSA) have been told to sell off 500-plus federal government buildings across the US, some of which house government agencies and the offices of US senators.
Many of the federal buildings on the list of non-core real estate are fully occupied, sources tell WIRED. This includes buildings like the Senator Paul Simon Federal Building in Carbondale, Illinois, which houses offices for the Federal Aviation Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Social Security Administration; as well as the Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building in Detroit, Michigan, which also houses numerous agencies. -
The Trump administration has also touted a return-to-office requirement as a key part of its plan—something made more difficult if government employees don’t have an office to return to.
Workers were informed that they had been fired with a frenetic email delivered around 9 pm ET on Tuesday. An evidently failed mail merge meant that some affected employees were addressed as [EmployeeFirstName][EmployeeLastName], [Job Title], [Division].
“This is to provide notification that I am removing you from your position of [Job Title] and federal service consistent with the above references,” the email from acting chief human capital officer Adam Martinez says. “Unfortunately, the Agency finds that that [sic] you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.”
Bypassing the content management system, they unpublished the homepage file, causing a portion of the CFPB homepage to display a “404: Page not found” notice typical of a website that has been deleted or is otherwise missing. Around 11 pm on Friday, the CFPB’s X account disappeared, and shortly after, according to a CFPB staffer, DOGE left the building.
Musk wrote “RIP CFPB” with a gravestone emoji in an X post Friday afternoon. In November, he posted “Delete CFPB.” There are around 1,700 employees in total at the agency.
Already, the change has stymied anti-human-trafficking work, including projects that help people escape from labor compounds where they are enslaved and forced to commit digital fraud, WIRED reported on Wednesday.
Although the administration subsequently clarified that “lifesaving” work would be allowed to continue under an emergency waiver program, the chaotic takeover of the agency has made this impossible in practice.
the “Fork in the Road” email: an offer of questionable legality — accompanied by thinly-veiled threats about what things will be like if you don’t leave — under a coercively-short timeline.
In addition to an oddly short timeline for making a decision — an age-old tactic of high-pressure sales environments, used car dealerships, and unsavory characters who operate outside the law — there were veiled threats of layoffs, loyalty tests, and more. But what’s worse is that many of those threats were based on bad facts or ignored legal realities. And some were just… untrue.
Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry
part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool
“This reminded me,” says Kelman, “of the Soviet Stalinism of turning in your friends to the government.”
These aren’t just numbers or statistics. These are real people who served their country — some for decades — now being told that their service, their sacrifice, means nothing to the Trump administration.
The hiring freeze doesn’t just hurt veterans looking for jobs; it also threatens the quality of care they receive. The VA is already understaffed, facing a $6.6 billion budget shortfall by the end of fiscal year 2025. Medical professionals, crisis hotline responders, and claims processors are desperately needed to keep the VA running. Now, with hiring frozen, those vacancies will remain unfilled.
That means doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals — already stretched thin — will be unable to keep up with demand.
The consequences will be catastrophic. Veterans will wait longer for care, disability claims will pile up, and crisis lines — lifelines for veterans on the brink — will be understaffed. For veterans battling PTSD, depression, or suicidal thoughts, delays in care aren’t just an inconvenience — they’re a death sentence.
For disabled veterans, the hiring freeze is an even deeper betrayal. Many depend on federal employment opportunities because their disabilities make it difficult to work in the private sector. Programs like the Schedule A hiring authority and the Veterans’ Preference system have historically provided a pathway to meaningful employment that accommodates their medical needs. By freezing hiring, Trump is cutting off a vital source of stability for those who need it most. These veterans — many already struggling with chronic pain, PTSD, and mobility impairments — now face even greater uncertainty. The very system designed to support them is instead shutting them out of employment and the economic security it provides.