Federal Agencies in Turmoil: An Inside Look at the Anxiety Among Workers

President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting the federal workforce have injected a fresh wave of anxiety among employees across the bureaucracy — stoking fears the president is coming for their jobs.

Just a few days into Trump’s second term, some federal workers are contemplating quitting. Others are preparing to file grievances with their unions or moving communications with each other to secure platforms like Signal. Some, fearing they’ll be caught up in the White House’s purge of diversity programs, are leaving their names off of memos and documents they worry could be labeled as DEI-adjacent.

Uncertainty and Fear

As federal employees searched this week for clues within the orders to see how they’ll be affected, a staffer with the Environmental Protection Agency said they were cleaning out their inbox and waiting for information about early retirement and buyout programs.

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

Overhaul and Unease

Trump, within hours of returning to power, issued a slew of executive orders seeking to overhaul how the federal government operates, from removing job protections to ending remote work to implementing a hiring freeze. The reception inside the federal government has been uneasy. But especially worrisome to some employees was the White House’s decision on Tuesday to eliminate diversity programs, subsequently placing those staffers on administrative leave.

At the State Department, the shutdown of those programs was something many saw coming. But some were startled 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 snitch on colleagues. Others, who prepared 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 on ending gender-based violence around the world.

Fear of the Unknown

“I would love to leave, but I don’t know where I’d go, and I am terrified of not being able to pay rent and not having healthcare,” one State staffer said.

POLITICO spoke to almost two dozen federal workers for this article and granted anonymity to many in order to protect them from retribution for speaking out.

It’s too early to tell if 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 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.

Cautious Watching

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

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

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

“The only reason you would do that is that he’s going to fire them all,” said Alan Lescht, a Washington-based employment lawyer who represents federal workers. “If you have these mass firings you can’t accuse him of discriminating or anything. But then the question becomes who does [Trump] re-hire.”

Lescht said his firm began getting a spike in calls from worried federal employees starting Monday evening after Trump began signing executive orders.

New hires who have yet to start are also seeing their jobs vanish. Employees whose start date was Feb. 8 or later had their job offers revoked with limited exceptions, under a different OPM memo tied to the Trump administration’s federal hiring freeze.

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

An Environmental Protection Agency staffer said they plan to file a grievance with the union if their remote work arrangement is rescinded. In the meantime, they’re preparing to find a job outside 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.