Civil Service Purge

Hollow out the civil service in order to

This is being done via the following actions

“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/

"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, explained

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.

Civil Service Stories

Timeline

April 2

Inside Trump and RFK Jr.'s Health Agency 'Bloodbath'

April 1

The CDC Has Been Gutted

March 27

Independent Agencies Never Stood a Chance Under Trump

March 17

The Collateral Damage of Trump’s Firing Spree

March 14

Critics warn staff cuts at federal agencies overseeing US dams could put public safety at risk

DOGE Upheaval Arrives in Cities Far From Washington

March 13

Judge Orders Trump Administration to Give Federal Workers Their Jobs Back

March 10

WA Ecology director responds to federal rollbacks

March 6

Social Security Workers Aren’t Allowed to Read This Story

DOGE Is the Deep State

Federal workers’ salaries represent less than 5% of federal spending and 1% of GDP

March 5

The General Services Administration plans to sell hundreds of government buildings, including FBI headquarters

March 4

Judge Says Trump Can’t Fire Chair of Federal Workers Board Without Cause

March 1

18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was demolished by Musk’s team

February 25

VA Fires 1,400 More Employees

February 21

DOGE Sparks Surveillance Fear Across the US Government

February 19

USDA tries to reverse mistaken firing of bird flu response workers

February 18

National Science Foundation Fires 168 Workers as Federal Purge Continues

February 17

Trump admin scrambles to rehire hundreds of nuclear weapons workers

February 13

Sweeping cuts hit recent federal hires as Trump administration slashes workforce

DOGE’s Race to the Bottom

Trump and Musk Are Going to War Against Military Veterans

February 12

The General Services Administration plans to sell hundreds of government buildings

February 11

Dozens of CFPB Workers Fired in After-Hours Blitz

February 6

USAID Workforce Slashed From 10,000 to Under 300 as Elon Musk’s DOGE Decimates Agency

January 28

Separating truth from fiction on the “fork in the road”

Elon Musk Lackeys Have Taken Over the Office of Personnel Management

January 25

Trump's Hiring Freeze Is Screwing Over Veterans

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