Soon after inauguration, the Trump administration announced plans to slash the size of the federal government, seemingly by any means necessary. The administration enlisted Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to carry out unprecedented waves of widespread firings, buyouts, and reductions in force, many of which faced legal challenges. As of June 6, the labor department has reported the federal government has gotten rid of 59,000 jobs since January. These firings are deeply political. They intend to purge nonpartisan employees and replace them with loyalists.
This series puts names and faces to some of the thousands of civil servants whose lives and futures have been upended. They all share a commitment to public service and a belief that the government is supposed to help people.
"We signed up to serve the American people. We signed up to be helpers. And it just really sucks that this has been happening."
"Just thinking about the people that have traveled that river, and the towns and communities that have sprung up around that river, and all of the animals and birds and plants and bugs that you don't even think about that call that river home—it just means so much to me."
"It's like taking everything that has been set up so deliberately over decades, and just like throwing it against the wall to smash on the ground."
"When government works, you shouldn't notice it. But I've had a lot of people saying things like, well, the USDA doesn't do anything for us anyway. And I just want to be like, Do you eat food?"
"There won't be people to essentially speak for this species, or to stand up for them, or to mitigate some of the consequences for endangered species. It's hard to even imagine what might happen."
"If that goes away, then people are not going to know what the agencies are doing and are not going to be able to comment on new changes and have their voice heard."
"When we lose influence, we lose not just power—we do—we lose ground. We lose the ability to protect ourselves."
"The USDA really does seem to be in service of goals that are much bigger than partisan politics."
"Aid is leverage, and so essentially we lose leverage. And all of the money we've invested—because I don't see it as just foreign assistance, I see this as strategic investment—those investments are lost."
"I'm struggling to understand how and why we have been villainized when all we want to do is serve the public. There is nobody that went into public health because they wanted to make a lot of money. Because you don't, right? You go into public health because you want to serve people."
"This is 100 percent my dream job, and it doesn't really exist in the private sector or even the public sector outside of the federal government. There's very little need for agricultural engineers in the private sector, and most farms are unable to pay for the work on their own."
"The work we do isn't for fun. The work NOAA does is for science, service, and stewardship. We want to make science that protects people."
"Our employer, the President, and a lot of his administration are actively vilifying these employees, myself included. Saying that we're lazy, that we're bureaucrats, that we're wasting money, when in reality we are working for almost no pay in the middle of nowhere."
"They've also hired all of these organizations and people abroad in these other countries, and in some of these countries, it's illegal to default on your debt, so they had to literally call them in the middle of the night and say, 'You need to get out of the country. I'm sending you your tickets right now.' They've had to leave their cars, their animals, to get out of the country."
"People had such a sense of pride for their participation in public service. They did not take that responsibility lightly, and that kind of passion aggregated in one place was so powerful and so cool to be participating in. I just hope that we can somehow get back to that. It's gonna take a long time, sure. But I hope that our faith isn't too damaged in these systems to get back to that place."
"Government can be good for people. It can help people, and it should help people wherever it can. And the CFPB is maybe one of the purest examples of that that I can think of. This exists pretty much solely to—and that's why it's such a target for banks and billionaires—it exists solely to help people on the other side of that equation, the victims of those institutions."
"This was all for nothing because somebody being petty. Because, "this is what I want, and this is my toy. The government's my toy, and it does what I want." That's all it really is."
"The majority of my family voted for Trump. So it's so hard for me to separate that. It's been really hard for me to talk to my family and anybody who voted for him at the moment, because it falls down to a difference in morals and values."
"My greatest fear is that our nation will lose its foothold as a country who has prioritized and been the go-to nation for science and technology. It has, for so many decades, been the preeminent place to come and study. I think that is what we are in most danger of losing."
"I think about that a lot with just all the other pre-docs who've been affected by this. We make commitments to community, and when they pull funds out from under us, that is not only harmful, but damaging to our profession and dangerous."
"What happens when people who need services come in? We're supposed to be a credible, trusted source. The government, your government, that you pay, is supposed to be a credible, trusted source. And I'm scared we're going to lose that."
"What led us all here is that we have stopped humanizing science. We're thinking about how we abstract categories and rewrite grants, and all I see is people in the shadows. If that's science, then I don't want it."
The protections that were built into the civil service, they weren't designed to protect me or other people working in the government. They were designed to protect the public. They were designed so that there could be continuity and services, so that every time an administration changed, you could count on the government to deliver your mail on time, to process your income tax returns on time, to provide updates on vaccines in time. And by so aggressively attacking the civil service, they're really attacking the people."
