Before Trump installed him as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought said he planned to traumatize federal workers. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “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. We want their funding to be shut down… We want to put them in trauma.”
In 2018, I joined the federal service as an IRS employee. I took a pretty big pay cut, but I was excited to have the opportunity to serve my country and work in a union position again. The agency is the most accommodating organization I’ve ever worked for. Management was always understanding when I needed time to take my children to an appointment or take time off to care for them when they were sick.
I was hired under the first Trump administration and served as a non-partisan employee under both his and Biden’s administrations. Administrations changed, priorities shifted, but our mission remained the same — to serve the American people. My partner was hired into federal work two years ago, as well.
There seems to be a myth out there that federal employees are elites. We are not rich. We’re normal workers just trying to make it like everybody else. In fact, we make 25% less on average than similar work in the private sector. Despite this, federal work is typically unionized, which helps raise working standards for all Americans by competing with non-union private sector employment. That’s one reason why we’ve come under fire.
Since Trump has been elected to his second term, things have radically changed. Trump promised to dismantle the administrative state, and he set to work using the blueprint initially created by Curtis Yarvin under the acronym RAGE, Retire All Government Employees, and rebranded by Elon Musk as DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency. Musk has never had an original idea in his life.
The first shot across the bow was an email sent to every federal employee from hr@opm.gov asking us to reply, “Yes.” There was no sender, no signature block, and it was marked as an external email. It looked like a phishing attempt, and many of us marked it as such. But leadership in our agency told us to comply. Later we learned that Musk had sent a team of people into the Office of Personnel Management and plugged in an external server that they were using to send and receive these emails, collecting information on all federal employees.
Next came the illegal buyout offer. We started receiving emails denigrating our work and demanding that we submit our resignation within a week, saying we would be paid through September (fine print: if they choose to honor the agreement). The email also implied that if we didn’t quit, they would be looking to fire us, anyway. It’s hard to describe just how unprofessional these emails were. They were blatantly partisan and insulting, and unlike the typical, formalized procedures the federal government uses for its systems, the email instructed us to reply with one word: Resign. Once again, there was no sender, no signature block, and the email came from an external server. It all looked like a scam. It probably was.
The administration anticipated a 10% reduction in force through this offer. Federal workers started sharing information online and encouraged each other to uphold our oath of office. The mantra became, “Hold the line. Don’t resign.” Very few people accepted this sketchy buyout, and of those that did, the vast majority were within a year of retiring anyway.
We are now in the midst of the Trump Administration’s next phase: mass illegal terminations. As of February 24, DOGE has fired more than 200,000 federal workers. Most of these terminations cited poor performance, despite these workers having stellar appraisals. This has been devastating to those workers and their families and decimated the morale of the workforce.
These actions and many others of our new administration have violated our union contracts and the law. When our unions pushed back, we received an email from DOGE telling us that it is their position that our union contracts are invalid, because they were agreed to under a previous administration. On February 27, a judge ruled that all the mass firings are likely illegal. There is another hearing on the 13th. I don’t know what this will mean for us, but either way I doubt the Trump administration will follow the law.
In 2020, my partner and I decided to move to Salem, because we couldn’t afford the cost of living in Portland on our wages. Remote work allowed me to continue working for the Portland office after the move. Next week, that will come to an end.
They are forcing those of us who have been working remotely to report to an office every day (ignoring union contracts) despite there being no capacity for the number of employees that will need to work in those offices. As soon as the deadline to return to office was announced, the administration announced they’d be closing many offices throughout the country. So, we are all going to go into the office and fight over space, and as soon as we all get settled in, they’re going to move us around the country, making us play a hellish version of musical chairs while we wait for them to fire us for “poor performance.”
Because my office is located so far from my home, I will have to stay with family in Portland throughout the work week. This will deprive me and my family of time together. But honestly, I’m one of the lucky ones. There are many who will be fired, because they can’t bridge the distance, or because they can’t resolve childcare issues with such short notice.
For a while, I tried to deny that all of this was getting to me. I didn’t want people to know, because our distress is one of the administration’s stated win conditions. I have done everything I can to retain my position in order to safeguard the institutional knowledge of our government, and prevent my position from being given to a Trump loyalist. But every day I wonder whether my partner and I will still have a job. Every week there’s some change to our working conditions to try to make us more uncomfortable and increase our stress levels. According to the Associated Press, Trump has stated that he intends to fire 50% of IRS employees and reassign the rest to Immigration Enforcement. While I do think it would be fun to go to the border to stand around like an idiot and get in the way, I can’t realistically put my family through that. I don’t think I can do it anymore. I’m going to have to find work elsewhere.
When federal workers talk about our experience, our friends and families often tell us that this situation is normal and it happens all the time in the private sector. However, this situation is not analogous to private sector layoffs and restructuring because there is no private sector organization that is analogous to the federal government. A much better comparison is the de-Ba’athification and Dissolution of Entities in Iraq. I would like to encourage those who think this is normal to read up on that and consider whether that turned out well for the Iraqi people.
To my fellow federal workers, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that this is happening to you and your family. I’m sorry you’re under attack and that you’ve been betrayed. You have been incredibly brave and strong in trying to hold the line against this assault on our country. Remember, though, that holding the line does not mean doing whatever you can to save your job. Holding the line means upholding our oath of office and disobeying illegal orders. Do your best to prepare, because your job is already forfeit. Good luck to you. We can do this!
Though I will lose my public sector job, I refuse to surrender. Living conditions have been getting worse, generation after generation as wealth inequality has ballooned, and the pandemic has only poured gasoline on the fire. Unsatisfied with being richer than anyone has been in history, now the billionaires are reaching into our pockets directly through the Treasury. I’ll be damned if I look my children in the eyes and tell them that at a time of economic, governmental, and ecological collapse, I stood by and did nothing. I may not have all the answers, but I know this: we are stronger together. If every single person who sees the rot at the core of this system commits to just doing one thing a week to build grassroots and local democratic organizations like DSA, we would be unstoppable. The time for complacency is over. The time for action is now.
