The year Trump broke the federal government

The Washington Post [no paywall]: “How DOGE and the White House carried out a once-unthinkable transformation of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy…“It isn’t easy to fire federal employees,” her co-worker told her. “We have all these protections. We’ll be okay.” He was wrong. The United States’ 2.4 million federal employees were about to get caught up in a once-unthinkable overhaul of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy, carried out in less than a year by one of the most polarizing presidents in American history. Missions have shifted or shattered. Entire agencies were deleted. Nearly 300,000 employees were forced out of the federal workforce. The Trump administration froze or shut off billions of dollars in scientific research, gutted or eliminated offices and programs devoted to civil rights and diversity, rewrote the federal hiring system to reward loyalty to the president, and shrank Social Security while installing Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents in hundreds of new offices across the country. More changes are coming: Trump officials are planning to cut tens of thousands of open positions from the Department of Veterans Affairs, downgrade performance ratings across the government, and replace the State Department’s traditional condemnation of torture and the persecution of minorities worldwide with scrutiny of abortion and youth gender transitioning in other countries….This account of what happened inside the U.S. government in 2025 is based on a year’s worth of messages and interviews with more than 1,200 current and former federal workers. More than 200 also agreed to fill out a Washington Post survey asking about their experiences. Thirty participated in nearly 60 hours of video and phone interviews, with many speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs or their families…”