Politics

‘I am terrified’: Workers describe the dark mood inside federal agencies

Published

1 year ago

January 25, 2025

President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting the federal workforce have injected a fresh wave of anxiety among employees across the bureaucracy — stoking fears the president is coming for their jobs.

Just a few days into Trump’s second term, some federal workers are contemplating quitting. Others are preparing to file grievances with their unions or moving communications with each other to secure platforms like Signal. Some, fearing they’ll be caught up in the White House’s purge of diversity programs, are leaving their names off of memos and documents they worry could be labeled as DEI-adjacent.

As federal employees searched this week for clues within the orders to see how they’ll be affected, a staffer with the Environmental Protection Agency said they were cleaning out their inbox and waiting for information about early retirement and buyout programs.

“Trump version 1.0 was bad,” said the EPA employee. “I’m already done with version 2.0.”

Trump, within hours of returning to power, issued a slew of executive orders seeking to overhaul how the federal government operates, from removing job protections to ending remote work to implementing a hiring freeze. The reception inside the federal government has been uneasy. But especially worrisome to some employees was the White House’s decision on Tuesday to eliminate diversity programs, subsequently placing those staffers on administrative leave.

At the State Department, the shutdown of those programs was something many saw coming. But some were startled by the directive that they report individual cases of people’s job descriptions being changed to “disguise” the DEI element to a special Office of Personnel Management email address. Some saw it as an order to snitch on colleagues. Others, who prepared for Trump’s return to office, had begun working months ago with outside nonprofits to archive websites they feared would be taken down by the Trump administration — including information on ending gender-based violence around the world.

“I would love to leave, but I don’t know where I’d go, and I am terrified of not being able to pay rent and not having healthcare,” one State staffer said.

Blue Light News spoke to almost two dozen federal workers for this article and granted anonymity to many in order to protect them from retribution for speaking out.

It’s too early to tell if a mass exodus of federal workers will occur. The vagueness of the president’s orders has many workers waiting to see how they will be implemented once political staff is in place. But what is clear is that the new administration intends to follow through on its threats to purge and dismantle the federal bureaucracy.

“Most of us are watching cautiously and letting the dust settle,” said an employee at the U.S. Agency for International Development. “We know that there is a range of possible outcomes, and some people are panicking, but most are taking a wait-and-see approach.”

Adding to federal workers’ distress, the acting head of the Office of Personnel Management, which is effectively the federal government’s HR department, on Monday instructed agencies to compile lists by the end of the week of all recent hires and “promptly determine whether those employees should be retained at the agency.”

Employees whose start date was Feb. 8 or later had their job offers revoked with limited exceptions, under a different OPM memo tied to the Trump administration’s federal hiring freeze.

Career staffers who have been in the job for less than a year are on probationary status, meaning they can be fired without triggering civil service protections that insulate much of the federal workforce.

“The only reason you would do that is that he’s going to fire them all,” said Alan Lescht, a Washington-based employment lawyer who represents federal workers. “If you have these mass firings you can’t accuse him of discriminating or anything. But then the question becomes who does [Trump] re-hire.”

Lescht said his firm began getting a spike in calls from worried federal employees starting Monday evening after Trump began signing executive orders.

New hires who have yet to start are also seeing their jobs vanish. Employees whose start date was Feb. 8 or later had their job offers revoked with limited exceptions, under a different OPM memo tied to the Trump administration’s federal hiring freeze.

At NASA, in the weeks leading up to Trump’s inauguration, union membership exploded as part of an effort to protect themselves as civil servants. The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 employees throughout the government, “will be tracking how agencies implement the orders and will be prepared to file grievances if our contracts are violated,” a spokesperson said.

An Environmental Protection Agency staffer said they plan to file a grievance with the union if their remote work arrangement is rescinded. In the meantime, they’re preparing to find a job outside the government.

Another EPA employee predicted that no major changes would occur until March, when the short-term spending bill runs out. “After that, it’s a toss-up,” they said.

Carmen Paun, Katherine Hapgood, Alfred Ng and Marcia Brown contributed to this report.

Politics

Investigate them or shame them? Inside the debate over how to deal with creeps in Congress

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2 hours ago

May 4, 2026

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Politics

Republicans’ youth voter problem

Published

4 hours ago

May 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Two years after young voters swung to the right in 2024, helping return Republicans to unified control of Washington, economic concerns are pushing 18- to 34-year-olds back to the left for the midterms, according to a new national survey of more than 1,000 young Americans.

The poll from nonpartisan outfit Generation Lab, shared exclusively with POLITICO, amounts to a flashing warning sign for Republicans. It shows young Americans planning to vote Democratic in November by a margin of 52 percent to 19 percent. Broken down by party, the data indicates that the GOP has a significant base problem: Just 58 percent of young Republicans say they’ll vote GOP — with nearly a third selecting “neither” or “won’t vote.” By contrast, 85 percent of young Democrats intend to show up for their party at the ballot box.

Just as in 2024, deep discontent with the state of the economy is driving anger at the party in power. Now, 81 percent of young Americans rate U.S. economic conditions as bad or terrible — including 68 percent of Republicans. The younger the age bracket, the more optimism diminishes.

President Donald Trump shoulders most of the blame among respondents, with 41 percent who rate the economy negatively naming him as the top culprit, plus 9 percent who select congressional Republicans. But it’s not just the GOP: Another 31 percent finger corporate greed/large companies. Just 6 percent blame Joe Biden or congressional Democrats.

In many ways, the polling looks like an inverse of Democrats’ struggles in the 2024 cycle, when surveys showed that voters didn’t personally experience the positive economic image projected by the Biden administration.

“We tie this really closely to what people can see and feel and touch in terms of their own personal economic situation,” Cyrus Beschloss, Generation Lab’s founder and CEO, told Blue Light News. “Saying that affordability is a ‘line of bullshit’ is definitely not helping — to the extent that young people are clued into that.”

But a caveat remains. “Young people are voting at just obscenely low rates,” Beschloss said. Insofar as this demographic might swing to or from Republicans, “their power’s a lot more concentrated in social force” — as cultural barometers and pace-setters — “than it is electoral force.”

Young people’s social force on GOP politics looks highly negative right now, and not just over concerns about inflation, housing, jobs and gas prices. The survey also finds mass blowback to the U.S.-Israel war with Iran: Seventy-seven percent of young Americans say the U.S. made the wrong decision in striking Iran, and 75 percent say they disapprove or strongly disapprove of Trump’s handling of the military action.

Republicans are keenly aware of voters’ cost-of-living and economic concerns — but they argue that they’re positioned to sway Americans here with a message focused on lower government spending, new tax breaks and blaming Democrats.

The GOP is also addressing bad economic feelings head on by telling voters that they’re cleaning up messes created by Democrats. And following on Trump’s 2024 strategy, Republicans have doubled down on TikTok and other social-media content/branding that reaches young people where they are. Candidates speaking to voters directly works well, the party has found, as does pro-America content that can go viral organically — think Artemis II or the semiquincentennial.

“After years of skyrocketing costs and economic uncertainty under Joe Biden and Democrats, combined with the left’s alienating, out-of-touch rhetoric, young Americans are fed up with empty promises,” said RNC national press secretary Kiersten Pels. “They want real results, and Republicans are speaking directly to them in a way that resonates.”

The strong GOP push could yet pay dividends. “I really … would not discount how much the Republican world has been focused on running a really tight operation in terms of not only getting more young men into their camp but keeping them there,” Beschloss said.

But Democrats have built out their own infrastructure to compete, including creator networks for candidates to work with and new resources devoted to communicating via YouTube, podcasts, social media, influencers and Substacks.

And the economic concerns are a lay-up for Democrats’ midterms messaging writ large, they say, which puts affordability front and center — the kind of laser-focused approach that scored the party big wins in 2025. “Young voters’ top concern is affordability, and we’ve been beating the drum on that issue all cycle,” said DCCC spokesperson Aidan Johnson. “Many don’t think they will ever be able to buy a home, or are graduating out of high school and college with not nearly the same kind of opportunities that their parents had.”

Looking beyond the midterms: The Generation Lab also asked young Americans about the 2028 presidential race — and at this early stage, name recognition seems to be paramount.

Democrats like Kamala Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) best, at 31 and 23 percent respectively. Republicans pick Vice President JD Vance (25 percent) and then HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (13 percent). And tied for seventh overall, at 4 percent each among all young Americans: Jon Stewart, Mark Cuban and Tucker Carlson.

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