Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge

As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition teams move into federal agencies, thousands of civil servants - and some of the Biden appointees they work for - are scrambling to insulate themselves from the new administration’s promised purge.

Federal employees are scrubbing their Facebook and X accounts for any negative posts about Trump. Some, including at least one prominent official who testified in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, are weighing putting in retirement papers, while others maneuver to transfer to seemingly safer agencies. D.C. recruiting firms are seeing booming business from those looking for private-sector work.

Meanwhile, some agencies have moved to reclassify jobs with titles that could clash with Trump’s agenda, especially those promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, boosting environmental justice and fighting the effects of climate change. For the first time, some civil servants are taking out liability insurance to cover lawyers if they’re demoted or fired. And in a rare alliance, outgoing Biden administration appointees are joining forces with labor unions to extend collective bargaining agreements, locking in benefits before the incoming administration can seek to undo them.

Before Trump takes office Jan. 20, career staffers are racing to outmaneuver his plans to gut and radically reshape the nonpartisan bureaucracy of 2.3 million. The president-elect has promised to fire thousands of professionals and replace them with political loyalists, slash trillions of dollars from the federal budget, eliminate departments and relocate others away from what he derides as the “deep state” of intransigent bureaucrats in the capital. Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, told supporters earlier this year that Trump’s second term would “put the bureaucrats in trauma.”

Beyond these sweeping structural changes, many federal employees also fear they’ll be singled out by Trump or Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech moguls tapped to run his new “Department of Government Efficiency,” who have begun calling out public servants on social media to ridicule what they see as wasteful or politically tinged jobs.

“There is shock and there is actual fear, and there is self censure in the sense that people are scared about retaliation,” said Jesus Soriano, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, which represents more than 1,000 scientists and administrators at the National Science Foundation.

In another shift with potential to upend the civil service, lawmakers with a new GOP majority on Capitol Hill are dusting off legislation to force teleworking employees back to the office, allow Veterans Affairs to fire underperforming workers with little recourse and to require mandatory training to ensure that federal employees follow the administration’s agenda.

Every White House brings new priorities and leadership to the government, particularly when political parties shift. But Trump promises a transformation unprecedented in the modern federal system, a restructuring far deeper than in his first term. As they wait to see whether Trump and his allies will be able to follow through, the resistance that many career civil servants showed to his first-term agenda is largely going underground this time - with staff keeping their heads down rather than speaking out and risk being singled out.

Many of the incoming White House’s blueprints to slash the workforce could be slowed by lawsuits and pushback in Congress - an inevitable inertia that some are highlighting to calm jittery nerves.

“The American government is an aircraft carrier, and you don’t turn it on a dime,” said Kevin Owen, a Washington-area attorney whose clients are predominantly federal workers. Still, Owen is warning the burst of clients asking for guidance that a wait-and-see approach could also backfire.

“It’s a threat they need to take seriously and plan for in advance,” he said of the climate he expects will prevail in Trump’s second term.

Trump’s transition team said that federal employees will be secure if they are committed to working under his administration.

“The Trump Administration will have a place for people serving in government who are committed to defending the rights of the American people, putting America first, and ensuring the best use of working men and women’s tax dollars,” Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Trump transition team, said in an email.

Trump came to Washington in his first term in 2017 pledging to shrink government and do battle with what he called a bloated bureaucracy. But his effort to gut the workforce and demand loyalty from career workers largely failed. The number of federal employees grew overall during his first term.

He issued his most sweeping assault on the workforce at the end of his term - an executive order known as Schedule F that called for removing civil service protections from tens of thousands of professionals, allowing them to be replaced by political loyalists in a return to the system of presidential patronage appointments that disappeared with the creation of a modern civil service in the late 19th century. But his term ended before the policy could take effect, and President Joe Biden quickly revoked it.

Now, Vought, the first-term White House budget chief who began implementing Schedule F at the Office of Management and Budget, is set to return to the same role as Trump is pledging to reinstate Schedule F.

Many civil servants, facing whiplash from a Biden presidency that embraced federal employees and their unions, say they need to get ahead of what might happen.

Career employees at all levels are considering plans to quit or retire, although numbers are anecdotal.

At least four senior career policy officials at the Office of Management and Budget are planning to leave before or as Trump takes office. Among them is Mark Sandy, who broke ranks to testify in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry in 2019 about the decision to pause congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine, according to two people familiar with his plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Sandy testified on Capitol Hill that he raised questions about the legality of Trump’s hold on aid to Ukraine; the president-elect has threatened to retaliate against career “bureaucrats” who he thinks have wronged him.

Sandy’s departure has not been publicly announced, and a White House spokeswoman declined to comment.

Numerous career officials at the budget office are wary of a range of Trump’s policies, from his push to reclassify federal workers to make it easier to fire them to Vought’s plans to expand the president’s power to unilaterally cancel spending, the people said.

“I think the risk is very high that the strongest, most experienced OMB career staff who have worked for multiple administrations under different parties will be leaving,” said Kathy Stack, who served at the agency for almost three decades. “Many employees are actively looking at their options.”

Top watchdogs at the Central Intelligence Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, both Biden appointees, announced their departures in recent weeks in what colleagues in the inspector general community said was a concern that Trump could continue a purge of inspectors general carried out in his first term.

One meteorologist at the National Weather Service recently deleted all references on his social media accounts to the threats climate change poses for extreme weather, along with any mention of union support, “to make everything about me much more apolitical,” he said. Trump has long rejected climate science and cast doubt on the dangers of climate change.

“I generally take people at their word, and these people have said some pretty awful things about federal workers,” said the meteorologist, who, like two dozen current and former civil servants interviewed for this article, requested anonymity because speaking out could make them targets of the new administration. The weather service is the best-known department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - an agency that could face downsizing or dismantling, according to Musk’s public comments and Project 2025, a road map for a second Trump term drawn up by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

An information technology employee at Social Security who supports gay rights locked down their Facebook account and deleted X after the election, removing all posts that were anti-Trump, pro-gay rights and pro-Ukraine.

Civil servants are joining encrypted messaging channels and anonymous chatrooms on Reddit to game out the possibilities. Some are optimistic that lawsuits will block much of Trump’s agenda for the federal workforce from taking effect. Others express crippling anxiety about their jobs and predict they’ll be fired.

“People see the things being said about government workers and quite understandably they’re wondering, ‘What does this mean for me?’” said Tom Yazdgerdi, a senior Foreign Service officer who is president of the American Foreign Service Association.

Trump’s designee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, has vowed to fire the agency’s top officials, shut down its Washington headquarters and make it easier to sue journalists. Within the Justice Department, initial panic faded when Rep. Matt Gaetz - who had been investigated by prosecutors for sex trafficking claims - withdrew his name as Trump’s choice for attorney general. But even with a new selection, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, many of the more than 100,000 staffers at the country’ largest law enforcement agency remain wary of a president who has vowed to fire career staffers and prosecute his enemies. Legal firm recruiters in Washington have been deluged with queries from career law enforcement officials about private-sector work.

“There’s been such a disdain for civil servants that is not typical that everyone sort of knows why they want to leave government,” said Sarah Van Steenburg, one recruiter taking a rush of calls from Justice Department lawyers. “A lot of these people have done phenomenal things in the government,” she said. “The concern is that there isn’t space right now in the private sector.”

Those planning to stay in government are scouring federal job sites for postings at other agencies that appear like they might avoid the chopping block. The Education Department, NOAA, Environmental Protection Agency, Internal Revenue Service, Justice Department and at least two dozen smaller agencies are targets for steep cuts or elimination, according to Trump’s campaign website.

“If I were a budget analyst I would be applying for jobs at Customs and Border Patrol, or if I was at the EPA, I’d try to get to VA or the FAA,” said Owen, referring to agencies he predicted are “not going away.”

Civil servants have looked for guidance to outgoing Biden appointees in leadership roles, with mixed results. VA Secretary Denis McDonough has told his headquarters staff that “their work for veterans matters” and praised their accomplishments during his tenure, a person familiar with his approach said. Days before he resigned as Social Security commissioner last week, Martin O’Malley’s top staff secured a deal with the agency’s powerful union to maintain its generous telework policy through October 2029, for the first time making work from home a feature of the collective bargaining contract instead of at management’s discretion.

The work-from-home policy at customer-facing Social Security has been a particular target of Republicans, and Trump’s first-term commissioner abolished a popular telework pilot program.

Many large departments are following suit, and extending labor contracts that include employee rights to arbitration in disputes with management and other working conditions, some for as long as five years, to thwart any union-busting planned by the incoming Trump administration.

Ramaswamy, hearing of these efforts, responded on X on Nov. 18, “I’m hearing via allies that federal government unions are scrambling to update their collective bargaining agreements to avoid getting fired.”

“The prospect of being asked to return to the office 5 days per week like most working Americans apparently ‘has them in tears’” he wrote.

Social Security’s chief information officer told her staff at a mandatory town hall meeting last week to “stay calm and keep your head down” when the new team comes in. And Biden appointees at the State Department quickly angered congressional Republicans for holding listening sessions to calm employees who are anxious about a second Trump administration. In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) demanded how much taxpayers paid to “cater to federal employees who are personally devastated by the normal functioning of American democracy.”

A State Department spokesman said the agency does not comment on congressional correspondence. The spokesman said that managers in each office have discretion to decide “how to support their team members.”

Some Biden appointees have tried to preemptively protect career staff with administrative moves. Leaders at one Commerce Department agency have changed the organizational chart to reflect workers based in the Washington area who have moved elsewhere for remote work, according to one person familiar with the changes. The goal was to show more employees spread out across the country, where Trump’s team has said it plans to move a variety of departments.

Civil servants elsewhere are changing the nature of their jobs. A longtime climate change researcher who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation and asked that her agency not be identified said she expected more of the kind of interference she experienced during the first Trump administration, when she said she was pressured to remove references to the human causes of climate change from her work. So she is now looking for ways to focus it on the effects of extreme weather, without connecting it to climate change. The researcher said her message to younger scientists has been to stay in government. “I really don’t want to see us have a massive exodus.”

Officials at several major agencies said they are methodically reviewing job descriptions to scrub references to DEI policies, which conservatives have heavily criticized, or to urge employees in those roles to apply for other jobs. Open DEI-related positions are not being filled, these officials said.

Some employees are seeking legal protection, including several colleagues of Soriano, the National Science Foundation union official, who have purchased liability insurance in case they are targeted by the new administration, he said. “It is unheard of that in order to do a job in the government, employees who we consider run-of-the-mill, following ethics rules and rules on scientific review, they become a source of professional liability.”

Leaders of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, a research arm of the Energy Department in Pittsburgh, are changing the names of some research projects so they don’t jump out as “environmental-type actions,” said Lilas Soukup, president of local 1916 of the American Federation of Government Employees, representing employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Energy Department in Pittsburgh.

In Trump’s first term, she said, climate change researchers who left the lab were not replaced - but no one was fired. There’s so much anxiety this time around that the lab is removing the names of career scientists who are tied to specific projects.

“Normally, you want to put their names out there for recognition,” Soukup said. “But we are all trying to think outside the box. You don’t what is going to be a trigger or not a trigger for the new administration.”

Ian Duncan contributed to this report.