In January and February, as the federal government embarked on its destruction of the federal government, or what Musk described as “humble tech support” and a “trillion dollar deficit reduction,” I fielded Signal chats, e-mails, and calls from federal workers all day and night. Often, there were tears. I heard many accounts of outlandish mistreatment and generalized workplace havoc.
Lambert: Hmm. Conservatives use Signal too.
I ended up speaking with more than a hundred and sixty current and former federal employees from two dozen agencies. I felt hypnotized by the prismatic breadth of the regulatory state.
Before Trump’s second term, the federal civil service had tended to be stable—with an average job tenure of around twelve years—and, from a journalistic standpoint, rather dull. Government employees are often self-effacing and nonpartisan; they prefer to operate behind the scenes. The U.S. government had endeavored to be a model employer, with clear rules and pay scales, strong labor protections, and targeted hiring of veterans and people with disabilities. No longer. “The members we represent are in a state of unrest,” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told me. “They’re going to do their job every single day, regardless of the threats, but they can only do so much. There’s going to be a breaking point.”
It’s August now, and the Signal chats have slowed. DOGE has tempered its behavior somewhat in response to court rulings and public protest. Indiscriminate terminations have morphed into superficially businesslike “reductions in force,” and some departments, such as Veterans Affairs, have pulled back on avowed dismissals. But lawsuits continue to play out, as Trump asserts more and more power for the executive branch and Congress relents—despite polls showing that a majority of Americans disapprove of DOGE’s cuts.
The organizers of “No Kings” cited a theory of social movements developed by the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth: “It only takes 3.5% of the population engaging in sustained, strategic protest against authoritarianism to achieve significant political change.” In the U.S., that number would be about twelve million. They weren’t quite there.
There continues to be widespread disarray, burnout, and pressure to quit. Many of the civil servants who remain are pushing against their limits. Steven, a Social Security customer-service representative I wrote about in March, now sees going to work every day as an act of civil disobedience. “The fear has changed,” he told me. “Before, it was mainly about losing our jobs. ‘Don’t say this, don’t do that.’ My fear now is, some people flat-out don’t care if they get fired.”
Lambert here: “I felt hypnotized by the prismatic breadth of the regulatory state” is the most New Yorker sentence ever.
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