Workers describe dark mood inside federal agencies

President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting the federal workforce have injected a new wave of anxiety among employees of the bureaucracy, stoking fear that the president is coming for their jobs.

Just days into Trump’s second term, some federal workers are contemplating quitting. Others are preparing to file complaints with their unions or communications with each other to secure platforms like Signal. Some, who fear they will be caught up in the purge of the White House’s diversity programs, are leaving their names on notes and documents that they worry could be labeled as dei adjacent.

As federal employees this week looked for clues within the orders to see how they will be affected, one Environmental Protection Agency employee said they were cleaning out their inbox and waiting for information on early buyout and retirement programs.

“Trump’s version 1.0 was bad,” the EPA employee said. “I’m done with version 2.0.”

Trump, within hours of returning to power, issued a slew of executive orders seeking to overhaul how the federal government operates, from eliminating labor protections to ending remote work to implementing a hiring freeze. Reception within the federal government has been uneasy. But especially worrying for some employees was the White House decision on Tuesday to eliminate Diversity programs, subsequently placing those employees on administrative leave.

At the State Department, the closure of those programs was something many saw coming. But some were surprised by the directive that they report individual cases of people’s job descriptions being changed to “disguise” the DEI element to a Special Office of Personnel Management email address. Some saw it as an order to surprise colleagues. Others, preparing for Trump’s return to office, had begun working months ago with outside nonprofits to archive websites they feared would be taken down by the Trump administration, including information about the end of the violence in genre around the world.

“I would love to leave, but I don’t know where I would go, and I’m terrified of not being able to pay rent and not have health care,” said one state employee.

Politico spoke to nearly two dozen federal workers for this story and granted many anonymity to protect them from retribution for speaking out.

It is too early to know whether a mass exodus of federal workers will occur. The vagueness of the president’s orders has many workers waiting to see how they will be implemented once the political staff is in place. But what is clear is that the new administration intends to follow through on its threats to purge and dismantle the federal bureaucracy.

“Most of us are watching cautiously and letting the dust settle,” said an employee at the U.S. Agency for International Development. “We know there are a variety of possible outcomes, and some people are panicking, but most are taking a wait-and-see approach.”

Adding to the anguish of federal workers, the acting head of the Office of Personnel Management, which is effectively the human resources department of the federal government, in Monday’s instructed agencies to compile lists at the end of the week of all recent hires and “quickly determine whether those employees should be retained at the agency.”

Career employees who have been on the job for less than a year are on probationary status, meaning they can be fired without triggering civil service protections that isolate much of the federal workforce.

“The only reason you would do that is it will fire them all,” said Alan Lescht, a Washington-based employment lawyer who represents federal workers. “If you have these mass shootings, you can’t accuse him of discrimination or anything. But then the question becomes who (Trump) hires again.”

Lescht said his company began receiving an increase in calls from concerned federal employees starting Monday night after Trump began signing executive orders.

New hires who haven’t started yet are also seeing their jobs disappear. Employees whose start date was February 8 or later had their job offers revoked with limited exceptions, under a different OPM memo linked to the Trump administration’s federal hiring freeze.

At NASA, in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, union membership exploded as part of an effort to protect themselves as public officials. The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 employees across the government, “will track how agencies implement the orders and will be prepared to file complaints if our contracts are violated,” a spokesperson said.

An Environmental Protection Agency employee said they plan to file a grievance with the union if their remote work agreement is terminated. In the meantime, they are preparing to find a job outside of the government.

Another EPA employee predicted that no major changes would occur until March, when the short-term spending bill runs out. “After that, it’s a toss-up,” they said.

Carmen Paun, Katherine Hapgood, Alfred Ng and Marcia Brown contributed to this report.