An Education Department employee was attending a funeral this week when she got the call: She was being placed on administrative leave because she works on projects that connect Black students, among others, to federal government programs.
A disabled veteran employed at the Department of Veterans Affairs grew emotional when he heard about the rescinding of telework options, unsure whether it would mean the end of his job taking care of fellow soldiers.
A Federal Trade Commission employee was so anxious that he told family members not to talk about politics on unencrypted lines. Across government agencies, workers eyed one another nervously, wondering whether a colleague would report them, accusing them of resisting the new administration’s move to end certain programs.
President Trump’s rapid push to overhaul the federal bureaucracy in his first days in office has been met with a mix of fear, fury and confusion throughout the work force.
More than two dozen employees across the government, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of worries of retribution, described agencies gripped with uncertainty about how to implement the new policies and workers frantically trying to assess the impact on their careers and families. As the nation’s largest employer, the upheaval in the federal government could reverberate in communities throughout the country.
Starting on Inauguration Day, the orders and memos came down one after the other, many crafted in the pugnacious tone of a campaign speech: the shuttering of “Radical and Wasteful” diversity programs in federal agencies; the stripping of civil service protections from a share of the federal work force; the end to remote work, which, one administration memo claimed, had left federal office buildings “mostly empty” and rendered downtown Washington “a national embarrassment.”
