US president-elect Donald Trump.
Credit: Reuters File Photo
Washington: The tremors from Donald Trump's decisive electoral victory have hit every corner of Washington. But their maximum intensity is felt by the capital's federal workforce, an aggregation of 2.8 million mostly anonymous employees not-so-fondly referred to by Trump as "the deep state."
Few notions have consumed the once and future president more than the belief that his executive power has been constrained by a cabal of unelected bureaucrats. In his first rally of the 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas, Trump framed the bureaucracy as a national adversary, declaring, "Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state."
His intention to accomplish the latter is an explicit feature of Trump's official to-do list, known as Agenda 47. From numerous interviews conducted with government officials spread across eight federal agencies, the overwhelming consensus is that Trump and his allies are not bluffing. That said, exactly how his war on the bureaucracy will be waged, and how government workers will respond to it, remain looming questions.
"There's definitely anxiety, no question," said Thomas Yazdgerdi, president of the American Foreign Service Association, which represents about 28,000 current and former State Department workers. He said diplomats were asking him: "Is my job going to be OK? Will they shut down my bureau? What will happen to me?"
Many longtime federal employees expressed exhaustion at the very prospect of a second go-round with Trump. "I believe there will be a significant exodus among the one-third of our workforce that is eligible to retire," said Nicole Cantello, a former attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency speaking on behalf of the agency's union, which she represents. "Many of them will be unwilling to relive all the hostility they experienced four years ago."
But most federal workers do not have the option to retire or to transfer their expertise to the private sector. Their anxieties about the incoming administration extend well beyond the usual uncertainty about what a new president's priorities and leadership team will be.
Much of their concern centers on Trump's pledge to reinstitute Schedule F, an executive order that he issued late in his presidency that would have empowered his administration to convert tens of thousands of civil servants to "at-will" employees, who could more easily be fired and replaced with political appointees. The legality of Schedule F was never tested because President Joe Biden revoked the order when he took office.
"They are what makes this government work," Natalie Quillian, a deputy chief of staff in the Biden White House, said of the federal workforce. Referring to a rule that Biden finalized this spring making it difficult to reinstate Schedule F, she continued, "I think we've taken all the actions we can to make sure they are protected and I'm not aware of any other action we can take."
Trump is hardly the first prominent politician to decry the federal workforce. George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama and four-time presidential candidate, inveighed against "pointy-headed bureaucrats with thin briefcases full of guidelines." Richard Nixon derisively termed them "little people in big jobs."
And though career government employees often serve in successive administrations from both parties, they are ultimately guided by viewpoints that some might construe as agendas.
"It's clear that there are civil servants with different policy views that work in government," said David E. Lewis, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, who has written extensively on bureaucracies. "And in some ways, that's by design. We would expect experts to have opinions about what should be done. Sometimes those opinions fall along party lines, and you end up seeing some agencies with more Republicans and others with more Democrats. But historically speaking, that effect has been small."
Trump clearly does not believe this, Lewis acknowledged. "I would say his views of the bureaucracy are more strident than what we've seen from recent presidents," he said. The closest parallel, Lewis added, was the "spoils system" administration of Andrew Jackson's administration nearly two centuries ago, in which government jobs were doled out to cronies and family members.
Officials interviewed for this story warned that making civil servants feel more vulnerable about their livelihood would almost certainly create a chilling effect on how they go about their work. The mere perception of exhibiting insufficient loyalty to Trump's agenda is more discomfiting at some agencies than at others.
Three midlevel EPA officials said they feared that the subject of climate change would be off-limits in the new administration. At the Pentagon, officials were trying to game out what policies might catch Trump's attention and prompt edicts like the one he announced five years ago on social media, forbidding transgender people from serving "in any capacity in the U.S. Military." There also are fears inside the Education Department that the agency's legacy of civil rights reforms could soon be terminated, or that Trump will make good on his vow to dissolve the department altogether.
Aaron Ament, who served as chief of staff of the Education Department's general counsel's office during the Obama administration, said that even if the Trump administration kept the agency intact, it could immediately test the resolve of its staff by cutting back many of the department's main regulatory and enforcement functions.
"During his first term, Trump outsourced higher education policy to for-profit industry executives who systematically dismantled enforcement and regulatory protections for students," Ament said. "If this term is similar, we could not only see the same harms but find Trump weaponizing the Office for Civil Rights to cut off funds for state universities that teach from books he doesn't like or disagree with him politically."
Even agencies with distinctly nonideological missions could come under scrutiny. At the Federal Aviation Administration, for example, the mission of safely landing airplanes has found no skeptic among the authors of Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint for reshaping the federal government.
But federal employees at the FAA and elsewhere have taken notice of Trump's close association with Elon Musk, billionaire industrialist and owner of social media platform X, as well as SpaceX, whose rocket launches are regulated by the agency. Musk also has been openly contemptuous of collective bargaining rights. One FAA official said his co-workers fear that Musk may exercise undue influence in that regard and are additionally concerned that Trump will roll back any protections against discrimination that the new president deems to be "woke."
One intelligence official predicted that many at the CIA would make their career decisions based on whether the new CIA director is a conservative who is openly respectful of the intelligence community, like Sen.Tom Cotton, R-Ark., or a bomb-heaving outsider, like Kash Patel.
Several people who were interviewed for this story pointed to Trump's mercurial character as a factor that might ultimately come to their rescue. Though they did not doubt the sincerity of his hostility toward "the deep state," they strained to imagine a 78-year-old man with a notoriously fleeting attention span poring over employee manifests and organizational charts.
In the end, what might end up blunting any damage Trump might try to inflict upon the bureaucracy is its own hidebound imperviousness. One former official at the Transportation Department, who asked for anonymity to speak freely, recalled the more than yearlong effort to obtain the funding for a specific, relatively small project that had already been authorized.
It was the nature of bureaucracy, the official said: Nothing could be done, or undone, with the stroke of a pen.