Trump's Smear Campaign Against the Federal Workforce

The Trump Administration's Project 2025 plan to dismantle our institutions is taking shape.

For the past week, hundreds and hundreds of federal workers have reached out to me to share their stories about what’s happening within their federal agencies, and as patterns emerge, the bigger picture of Trump’s Project 2025 is starting to become clear. I want to share with you what I’ve seen so far, and where I believe this is going.

Federal workers usually enjoy a great deal of job security through civil service protection law, union contracts, and merit board due process protections. During Trump’s first administration, he ran into trouble trying to rid our federal agencies of those he deems “disloyal”. He is prepared this time, but still seems to be running afoul of laws and policy. This time, however, he doesn’t care. He’s learned through years of avoiding accountability that his “what are you gonna do about it” attitude has proven successful - especially with the corrupt Supreme Court in his pocket.

His acolytes are also more prepared - and it’s not like we didn’t know this was coming. It was all laid out in Project 2025 - and despite Trump trying to distance himself because of the projects wild unpopularity, the federal workforce is deep in the thick of the promises made by The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 authors.

On day one, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) began sending out a series of memoranda attacking the low hanging fruit in the federal workforce. Beginning with OPM itself, the administration installed a low-level yes man by the name of Chuck Ezell. According to a post on social media from an self-described OPM employee:

“Let me say this in no uncertain terms - OPM has been compromised and taken over. The very backbone of American Government, the HR of all HR in the U.S. Government has been taken over by outside politicals. In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President's henchmen.”

Once the administration had their yes-man in place, OPM went after three distinct groups of federal workers:

First, agencies were required to provide lists of probationary employees. This classification of employee doesn’t enjoy the protections of the merit board and can be fired at will for basically any reason. The usual probationary period is one year, but in some cases can be two years. The administration has instructed department heads to review these employees and remove those that are not necessary. They have not instructed the agencies to blanket fire these workers. Yet.

Second, OPM sent out a memo ordering all DEIA programs and their employees to be put on paid administrative leave. The multitude of workers that reached out to me described scenarios in which they were given only hours to access their important documents such as SF-50s, federal resumes, performance evaluations, and employee actions before they were summarily locked out of their systems.

Some agencies changed the language of the DEIA memo, taking out the political rhetoric about DEIA programs dividing Americans. That is what likely prompted the OPM to start testing a government-wide email address they could use to reach front line employees instead of relying on agency heads to disseminate their orders. They effectively cut out the mid level folks that might be trying to protect their employees.

The DEI memo also threatened front line workers that they could face punishment if they didn’t rat out their colleagues who might be working for units that once used DEIA language, but amended it after the election. Trump sees these folks as deep state disloyal people who are trying to hide from him.

Third, OPM recalled all telework and remote work employees, and ordered agencies to recall all work-from-home employees that live within 50 miles of an office to report to that duty station. This is nothing more than an effort to get people to quit so they don’t have to fire them. There are some exemptions to this directive, including those with a reasonable accommodation or medical telework. That is; those who work from home because they are disabled in some way.

Fourth, the administration initiated a hiring freeze and rescinded all job offers to those who hadn’t yet started work or didn’t yet have a start date. There must have been a lot of pushback on this, especially at the Department of Veterans Affairs - which made up 25% of the new hires and were mostly essential clinical jobs such as nurses and other health providers. Shortly after the job offers were rescinded, OPM exempted those jobs and have been re-issuing the offer letters.

That was just round one. Round two came this morning with the issuance of a memo regarding the new Schedule F executive order. It reads, in part:

It creates a new Schedule Policy/Career in the excepted service for positions that are of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy- advocating character (policy-influencing positions) and filled by individuals not normally subject to replacement or change as a result of a Presidential transition. Such career positions will be rescheduled into Schedule Policy/Career and thereby exempted from the adverse action procedures set forth in chapter 75 of title 5 of the United States Code. (Emphasis added)

Okay. So one might think “Oh good. My job isn’t confidential, policy-influencing, policy-making, or policy-advocating so I should be okay.” But then comes this instruction:

The terms “confidential,” “policy-determining,” “policy-making,” and “policy-advocating” in the Executive Order are drawn from 5 U.S.C. § 7511(b)(2) and 5 U.S.C. § 2302(a)(2)(B)(i). Neither the U.S. Code nor judicial precedents precisely define these terms in the context of their statutory usage.

In other words, these are squishy terms subject to the whims of the president and OPM. And even if you think you have a good argument that your job still doesn’t fit these descriptions, OPM throws in this nugget:

• “duties that the Director [of the Office of Personnel Management] otherwise indicates may be appropriate for inclusion in Schedule Policy/Career.”

Basically, Trump and OPM will decide what’s appropriate to include in Schedule F. OPM gave agency heads 90 days to submit all the positions they think fall into Schedule F, and an additional 120 days to add any positions they may have forgotten. After that, agency heads are directed to submit positions on a rolling basis.

You can read the entire Schedule F memo here.

Once these workers are moved to Schedule F, they can be fired at will, for any reason, without due process. There are several statutes and Biden executive orders that go against this policy, and I imagine there will be lawsuits to try to stop Schedule F from taking effect. This is actually addressed in the OPM Schedule F memo.

During Biden’s term, OPM issued policy under presidential authority that the phrases “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” and “confidential or policy-determining” to refer only to non-career political appointees and to have no application to career positions. But Trump says HE is now using HIS presidential authority to nullify those regulations. I imagine the lawyers that penned the Biden EO will fight this in court. I will keep you posted, but I imagine the Supreme Court will back Trump up on this one.

The administration has also taken several steps to prevent agencies from fighting back. He’s co-opted whistleblower offices with yes-men, he’s fired independent Inspectors General (illegally), and as I touched on before, he’s testing OPM direct email to employees government-wide to circumvent agency heads and mid-level management. He’s also shuttered EEO offices and revoked access to HR in many cases, leaving workers in the dark about their due process rights. Those due process rights, however, could be rendered meaningless by Schedule F.

In addition to all this, the Trump Administration has begun a nasty smear campaign against federal workers so that people will support gutting our agencies. The right wing noise machine has begun attacking federal workers as lazy, overpaid hangers-on. Let me be very clear about something…

Nothing could be further from the truth. We need to push back on this rhetoric forcefully. Federal employees are there because they want to be of service to others. They’re the helpers Mr. Rogers taught us about. Taking a job in the federal government means you work for pittance compared to what you could earn in the private sector, and usually you work longer hours for that lower pay. Further, the data shows unequivocally that remote and telework employees are as productive - and in some cases more productive - than their in-office counterparts. That’s not to mention the millions of dollars taxpayers save by not having to lease office space for these employees.

Nearly every single person who has reached out to me is frightened, angry, and frankly disgusted at these mischaracterizations. By and large, federal workers are the hardest working service jobs out there. In all my time working for the federal government, I only ran across two people who weren’t working their asses off in a thankless job for low pay because they wanted to help others. Two. Out of hundreds and thousands that either worked directly for me, or for folks that I worked with closely. And that was such an anomaly that I could name them for you. I remember them as outliers because the overwhelming majority of federal workers are dedicated and talented experts who take the pay cut to do a job that feeds their souls. Truly the salt of the Earth - and this administration is trying to get people to believe these folks are somehow the bad guys.

Call that lie out every time you hear it. Those who work for the government, or know someone who does, can attest to the incredible dedication and reverence to the oath that they have. It’s no wonder that someone like Trump - who is transactional and desecrates his oath - would denigrate those who embody the antithesis of his lack of empathy and understanding of what it means to be of service to others.

I have some thoughts about where all this is headed. I envision after testing the OPM government-wide email and moving as many people as he can to Schedule F, trump will start asking the front line employees to report disloyal (non-MAGA) workers to OPM as he did with the DEIA snitch email. I fear there will be loyalty interviews like the ones DOGE conducted at the National Security Council. He will fire anyone that could be seen as disloyal. They will empty out our institutions until the only people left are the bigoted MAGA yes men willing to help destroy the very institutions they swore an oath to protect.

Why?

To me, the answer is obvious. He intends to sow chaos and break the agencies so he can privatize them - lining the pockets of his rich pals with the tax revenue savings through tax cuts for the wealthy, and driving the business of government into the arms of the CEOs and oligarchs. Private schools, private police, private prisons, private Veteran health care, private post office, private social security… the list goes on and on.

An effective resistance is a focused resistance. Choose an institution and defend it with all your might.

“Institutions don’t defend themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.” ~ Timothy Snyder, "On Tyranny"

~AG