The employees who have so far survived the Trump administration’s federal defenestration project are morose. For some, the new workload is untenable. For others, chaos reigns. Scientists have been unable to purchase mice for research, while human-tissue samples have sat on dry ice, unsent, thanks to worker layoffs. Lawyers at the Education Department are racing through a backlog of complaints from parents of special-needs children. And many employees are learning that teammates have been fired only when they receive an email bounce-back: Address not found.
I spoke with 24 employees at 14 federal agencies for this story, most of whom are still employed and have requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. Uniting them is an overwhelming sense of despair. “We’re all in public service because we like helping people,” one Missouri-based Social Security employee told me. “What they’re trying to do is break our spirit.”
If you listen hard enough, you might hear “Big Balls” cackling over at DOGE headquarters. Because all of this chaos is by design. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, gave the game away this past fall when, in a speech, he said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. 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.”
Federal workers are accustomed to the quadrennial ebb and flow of agency leadership and the accompanying shifts in priorities. But this time, “it’s like a psyop—they’re after you; you’re the enemy,” a senior Foreign Service officer stationed abroad told me. The problem isn’t just the low morale. It’s the dysfunction.
In many cases, federal employees are simply unable to do the work for which they are paid by the American taxpayer. “At least 50 percent of my time is devoted to trying to deal with the repercussions, the shock” of having hundreds of colleagues suddenly disappear, including many researchers who oversaw studies, one senior National Institutes of Health scientist based in Bethesda, Maryland, told me. What outside observers haven’t yet grasped, he and other federal employees said, is just how far things have spiraled out of control.
Most federal workers know—and will freely volunteer—that some bloat in government exists. Certain contracts should be reviewed, many acknowledged to me, and particular programs axed. “Do we have to know every single language? Maybe not,” the senior Foreign Service officer told me. “Reasonable people can disagree about whether we need 27 communications shops at NIH,” a retired senior scientist at the agency, who requested anonymity to protect his former colleagues from retaliation, told me. The problem they have is with the administration’s approach—instead of being thoughtful and precise, it looks more like giving a haircut with a hedge trimmer.
For weeks, Trump staffers froze or restricted purchase cards for employees at most agencies, requiring senior approval for even such trivial acquisitions as a replacement cable or a last-minute car rental. Government scientists have felt it most. At NIH, the majority of staff members in the acquisitions office were fired, and researchers were unable to order reagents for experiments or basic tools for cancer-screening studies. One scientist working on a clinical trial to save the lives of children with a severe pediatric disease sent a series of email requests through the usual channels for new supplies, but received only bounce-backs, the Bethesda-based senior scientist told me.
Other researchers studying cancer, neurological disorders, and developmental dysfunction haven’t been able to access the lab animals they need for genetic testing. “We have the capacity for literally millions of mice on campus,” a federal contractor at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) told me, “and currently, there’s only one person left on campus who’s allowed to order animals. They fired the rest.” On Thursday, NIH employees received an email indicating that their purchasing authority would soon be restored. “Huge relief,” a senior scientist at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) texted me. But given the budget cuts, hiring freeze, and personnel shortage, the scientist added, that “doesn’t mean things are back to normal.”
During a team-wide conference call at NIH, a lead scientist explained to staff that samples from study participants were supposed to have been sent to them from a lab, but were instead stuck on a loading dock, because those operations workers had been fired. No one I interviewed could confirm whether the samples ever reached their destination.
NIH staffers have been told to slash their contract budgets—even though the great majority of their research is conducted through contracts. “It completely hobbles us,” the NCI scientist told me. Because of staff and resource cuts, that scientist is no longer able to regularly follow up with, or collect samples from, research subjects whom the team has been studying for decades. Patients are still showing up to the NIH campus for clinical trials, but soon, there may be significantly fewer of them. On average, it takes about two years to approve and initiate trials for new medicines and chemotherapies, and the latest federal firings and budget cuts have slowed parts of the process. “It’ll take time for it to be visible, but there will be a lot less of that,” the Bethesda-based scientist told me. “NIH is aligning with Administration priorities while ensuring NIH scientists can conduct research efficiently with the resources necessary,” a spokesperson for the agency told me in an email when I requested comment on the incidents that employees had described to me. “NIH remains dedicated to upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science.”
One of the crown jewels of American government—the world-renowned research-and-development capacity that, back in 1989, discovered the hepatitis C virus and earlier this month announced progress on a breakthrough cancer treatment—is losing its luster. The United States is on the cusp of an unprecedented brain drain: Thanks to other actions by the Trump administration, academic posts are scarce, and the private-sector job pool is already swollen with government refugees. Established NIH scientists told me that they’ve been counseling younger scientists, students, and recent graduates to seek work abroad, where government funding for research is more reliable. “People won’t come here to train; they’ll go to Europe,” the NIH retiree told me. “And China is going to kick our ass.”
For him, the stakes of this upheaval are obvious: “How I lost my job is trivial compared to the fact that people will die because of this.”
Employees at other agencies reported exasperations and inconveniences that, though far more prosaic, still interfered with their work. When Donald Trump’s team mandated that employees return to the office full-time—something the Biden administration had tried and failed to accomplish—it had not apparently thought through the logistics. Staff members who’d been hired years ago as fully remote workers are now obliged to come into the office—some commuting two or three hours each way, every day, according to my interviews. When they arrive, some discover that the infrastructure cannot support them: Desks are limited; meeting rooms are appointment-only. At agencies including the EPA and the Department of Agriculture, Wi-Fi is spotty and unreliable; the State Department, one employee told me, rarely has enough docking stations for workers to establish a wired connection. Workers at the IRS are reportedly rationing toilet paper, soap, and paper towels.
The parking lots were so full at NIMH last month that agency managers hired a valet service to double-park cars, one employee told me. (The same managers accidentally canceled the valet contract, and then had to rehire the firm.) The return-to-office mandate has “throttled efficiency,” one USDA scientist told me. “There’s no other way to put it.”
Many employees have had countless new time-sucking tasks imposed in the past 12 weeks. First came the demand for federal workers to produce a weekly bullet-point list of five accomplishments. (The fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio didn’t require his department to comply with this demand from DOGE was, some employees told me, a welcome sign of respect.) At the CDC, administration officials have also ordered federal workers to remove not only their pronouns from professional accounts, but also relevant degrees and qualifications and nonapproved pictures, according to one contractor there. A second Foreign Service officer told me that his team was asked to remove any use of the singular they, in favor of s/he, and their, in favor of his/her. That’s in addition to the work of scanning and scrubbing webpages, grants, and contracts for any mention of DEI-related words. (An incomplete list reviewed by The New York Times last month suggested that banned words should include such contentious terms as historically and women.)
Long-term employees feel as though they’re being punished for following past policies. Under the Biden administration, federal workers were asked to complete self-reviews based on several tenets, including how well they promoted DEI in the workplace. The Trump administration has eliminated the requirement, but many employees—even those who weren’t necessarily comfortable with the Biden administration’s rules to begin with—are now afraid they’ll be retroactively punished for having obeyed them. (A DOGE spokesperson at the White House did not respond to my request for comment.)
The second Foreign Service officer, whose job has involved combating discrimination abroad and who will soon be up for his first tenure review, spent a day editing his most recent self-evaluation to conform to the new anti-DEI standard. “It felt so gross,” he told me, “but I didn’t know what else to do.”
Again, some new directives are typical during any change in administration. But the scale of these adjustments is far from ordinary, according to the longtime federal workers I spoke with. Last week, Health and Human Services workers stood in line outside the Parklawn building in Bethesda, waiting to see if their employee-ID badges still worked. Entire departments of IT workers and tech-inventory managers at the agency have been vaporized. This not only puts sensitive health-information records at risk, but also means that government computers, cellphones, and other devices containing sensitive information are no longer tracked, according to one agency employee. Across the government, hundreds of human-resources staffers—including those whose entire job is to manage employee-retirement benefits—have been dismissed, portending trouble for the unprecedented wave of forced retirees. Where it may once have taken a few weeks for an employee to start receiving benefits, some expect it will now take six months or more.
Last month, the Trump administration closed seven of the 12 civil-rights-enforcement offices within the Education Department. Employees at these offices respond to complaints from families of students who need accommodations for learning, many of whom are children with physical and intellectual disabilities. Before January 20, if a complaint came in, staff could usually resolve it within 180 days. Because of the layoffs, one attorney who survived them told me, that will now be impossible. “A student might never hear back,” she said. From her perspective, the Trump administration’s approach boils down to vandalism. “They’re trying to make it so that the systems are so broken that they don’t work, and there’s an argument to get rid of them.”
The Trump administration is asking us to reimagine America as a country that not only does not value public service but actually torments its public servants. Elon Musk, Rolling Stone reported last week, responds to messages about the workers whose lives have been upended, or who fear for the continuity of their research under the DOGE crackdown, with laugh-crying emoji. As the USDA scientist told me: “They don’t see us as people with lives and cares and worries. We’re just those damn federal employees.”
Vought, at OMB, didn’t have to wait long to see his dream of workplace trauma fulfilled. Only two months in, and more than 130,000 employees have left the federal workforce, whether through layoffs, early retirement, or sheer demoralization—though some have been reinstated per court orders. The total number is expected to more than double in subsequent waves of reductions.
Many of the scientists at the NIH could find work in the private sector. They could make a higher salary working in agriscience or the pharmaceutical industry, but they’re devoted to the kind of high-risk, high-reward research that only federal resources can facilitate. “It’s one of the things that really made me patriotic—that America was the leader of this,” the Bethesda-based NIH scientist told me, before pausing for a moment. He and so many of the employees who remain are wrestling with a dilemma: Get out now, and spare themselves several more years of stress and contempt—or stay, to keep plugging away on the projects to which they have dedicated, in some cases, most of their life. “You’ve talked to a lot of people,” the scientist said to me at last. “What do you think is the right thing to do?”
Other federal employees are defiant. “I never thought showing up at my job would be a small act of resistance,” an employee from the Department of Transportation told me. “My ‘fuck you and fuck this’ instinct have kicked in,” a member of the Army Corps of Engineers said. “You’re going to have to push me out.”