‘Apprehensive and fearful’: Federal workers await a dismantling under Trump

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed once again to “drain the swamp”.

He’s tapped two billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to help him “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies” through a commission Trump is calling the “Department of Government Efficiency”.

In his failed run for president, Ramaswamy, who made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, spoke of cutting the federal workforce by 75%.

Musk, who shrunk Twitter’s workforce by 80% after his purchase, vowed in a statement that the effort “will send shockwaves through the system.”

It remains unclear how much power the two businessmen, who Trump says will operate from outside of government, will wield.

One thing is clear: Unlike eight years ago, Trump now has knowledge and experience to inform how he could carry out his agenda.

Those realities, along with memories of his first time in office, have many federal workers on edge.

“People are apprehensive and fearful,” says Nicole Cantello, an attorney with the Environmental Protection Agency who now serves as a union president representing EPA workers in the Upper Midwest.

A plan to go after “rogue bureaucrats”

Roughly 2 million civilians work for the federal government. All over the country, they protect national security and public health. They ensure food is safe and veterans are cared for.

Among these 2 million, Trump insists, are corrupt actors — “plenty of them” — whom he wants to root out.

At the tail end of his first term, Trump issued an executive order that created a new category of political appointees, called Schedule F. His plan was to move an unknown number of career civil servants into this category, making it easier to fire them and replace them with loyalists.

Two days after President Biden assumed office, he reversed course, rescinding Schedule F.

Donald Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, says he’s certain it will be back in the next Trump administration.

“This is something that they plan on doing — and plan on doing in relatively short order — because they see Schedule F… as a good idea that they waited too late to launch,” says Kettl, who cofounded a working group focused on protecting and reforming the civil service.

Earlier this year, the federal Office of Personnel Management issued a rule to make it harder to convert career federal employees into political appointees who can be fired at will.

But rules can be rescinded and replaced in just a matter of months.

“This is a speed bump at best,” Kettl says.

Scars from the first Trump term

Some federal workers recall how difficult it was to do their jobs during Trump’s first presidency, even without a commission hellbent on slashing regulations and jobs.

“Polluters knew that it was their administration,” says Cantello, the EPA attorney and union leader.

She describes changes that hampered their work. For example, lawyers could no longer directly ask companies about the pollutants they were discharging. Such information requests had to go through headquarters instead of being issued by the regional offices.

“When you put an additional bureaucratic roadblock in, and you have to submit something like that to headquarters, they can sit on it for a really long time,” she says. “And then you’re not enforcing the law.”

Trump also tried to move the EPA’s regional office overseeing the Great Lakes from Chicago to Kansas City, hundreds of miles from any of the lakes. The idea was dropped after an outcry, including from members of Congress.

This time around, Cantello fears a lot of people who lived through Trump’s first term will just retire.

“A lot of them feel they put their four years in,” she says. “And they’re just going to decline to do so this time around because it took so much out of them.”

A watchlist of “subversive, leftist bureaucrats”

There’s a chill descending over other parts of the federal government, too.

Last month, a conservative group called the American Accountability Foundation issued a watchlist of what it calls “subversive, leftist bureaucrats” who cannot be trusted to enforce immigration laws.

Dozens of federal employees in the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and elsewhere are identified by name.

“That’s unnerving,” says Marcus Hill, president of the Senior Executives Association, which represents some 8,000 senior executives in the federal government. They are the highest-ranking civil servants, who help political appointees carry out their agendas in a lawful manner.

Hill, who spent 38 years in government including as a senior executive, says it’s concerning and offensive that there is doubt about the motives of people who have chosen to serve their country.

“Whether it was a Democratic or Republican administration [that] came in, I understood clearly what my role and responsibilities were in terms of supporting that administration,” he says.

Hill notes that career civil servants swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and to faithfully execute their duties, not to swear allegiance to any party or president.

Doing even a little may have big results

Even with Trump’s unveiling of his “Department of Government Efficiency,” Kettl says it’s unlikely we’ll see federal employees fired en masse. Such a move would undermine Trump’s ability to get anything done, which would be disastrous for his administration.

“Who wants to read, if you’re on the inside of the new government, that unsafe drugs have been unleashed on the public, or that it’s not safe to buy Cheerios in the grocery store?” he says.

Instead, Kettl is expecting the new administration to swiftly oust a smaller number of individuals seen as particularly problematic for Trump.

It’s a strategy, he says, that brings to mind Henry VIII, known for beheading his enemies and putting their heads on spikes for everyone to see.

“If you succeed in getting your message across, then you don’t need to chop everybody’s head off,” says Kettl. “You just need to tell everybody that you’re serious about this.”