Don’t Quit, You Wavering Bureaucrat
The government literally wants to traumatize you out of a job. Now is the time to stand your ground.
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This essay is dedicated to a particular type of person: a civil service employee, maybe a bit on the senior side, someone who believes in the mission of their agency, has endured innumerable nuisances on its behalf, could confidently look forward to retiring at that agency—and who is now in the crosshairs of Trump, and DOGE’s, governmental purges. Maybe the “fork in the road” email has already gone out to you, as it did to two million federal employees in February. And if that could be brushed off at the time—maybe it went into your spam folder—it’s now becoming clear that the Trump administration hasn’t forgotten about you, that it’s coming back with a fresh set of offers (now somewhat tidied up as the “U.S. federal deferred resignation program”).
So if you fit this description, or someone you know does, or someone you know knows someone who is kind of putting out feelers into their community about what they should do, here is my advice. Whatever you do, do not take that offer.
There has of course been considerable consternation about the “fork in the road” emails, the mass layoffs, and the closure of entire agencies (as in the case of USAID and the Agency for Global Media, which funds Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). But I have the sense that we’ve somehow underestimated what’s really going on. These aren’t just spending cuts, or the normal “spoils system” that follows the advent of a new presidency taken in this case to an extreme degree—something that can be weathered and brushed off in the way that senior bureaucrats are always so good at withstanding attempts at reform. This really is a war on the bureaucracy, a shift in the fundamental conception of government which may have permanent consequences, and it’s time to change from a mindset of self-interest and follow-the-leader—which has stood so many bureaucrats so well over the course of their solid careers—to a mindset of public duty and self-sacrifice.
As much as we might kid about the state of the civil service in America today, let’s try to have a slightly more grandiloquent understanding of where it comes from and what its value is. It emerged from a period of almost fathomless corruption peaking towards the 1870s, when appointees worked directly for party machines and the whole point of winning an election, really, was to get your graft running all the way down the ticket. It was an untenable system that threatened to sink the republic, and it was the work of several generations to impose a permanent, non-partisan civil service. Here is the historian Edmund Morris writing on that effort:
It is difficult for Americans living in the last quarter of the twentieth century to understand the emotions which Civil Service Reform aroused in the last quarter of the nineteenth. . . Men and women of the highest quality devoted whole careers to it, and died triumphant in the knowledge that, due to their personal efforts, the classified departmental service had been extended by so many dozen places in Buffalo, or that algebraic equations had been deleted from the examination papers of cattle inspectors in Arizona.
For all its dated aspects, Civil Service Reform was an honorable cause and of real social consequence. It sought to restore to government three fundamental principles of American democracy: first, that opportunity be made equal to all citizens; second, that the meritorious only be appointed; third, that no public servants should suffer for their political beliefs.
This stuff is no joke. An independent civil service is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy—and once it’s gone, it may take generations to restore. We actually know what the alternative is, and it’s not pretty—the entire civil service held by the party machines and changing hands from one election to another.
Yet the Trump administration despises everything the independent bureaucracy stands for. They believe, for reasons of their own, that it’s un-American, a deep state plot 150 years in the making. Their goal isn’t really savings, or streamlining, or anything like that. It’s to eliminate as much of the bureaucracy as they can get their hands on. And they’re actually very explicit about that. “We think a very substantial number of people will not show up to work,” Trump said on the abolition of telework in February, “and therefore our government will get smaller and more efficient, and that’s what we’ve been looking to do for many, many decades.” Trump was still speaking in somewhat coded political language, but Russell Vought, the current head of the Office of Management and Budget, speaking at a private address in 2023 with the recording obtained by ProPublica, made the same point without filters. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning we want them to not want to go to work,” he said.
What that means is that they are not going to stop. They are the wolf huffing and puffing at the door and any offer they make is for the sole purpose of getting enough little piggies to come out so that they can eat everybody just prior to blowing the whole house down.
The main tactic by the Trump administration, evidently, is divide-and-conquer. They want federal employees to be making these difficult decisions on their own, as opposed to with collective bargaining. They want to move in tranches through the bureaucracy so that those who take “fork in the road” offers now feel like they’re getting a good deal—getting substantial remuneration and then having a jump in the open job market ahead of their current colleagues who inevitably are going to get fired a bit further down the road. Trump called it a good offer—“eight months pay for nothing.” In an attempt to offer the Netflix carrot, a DOGE social media post in January tempted government employees with the offer that “[you] can take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.”
And, unfortunately, those tactics seem to be working. Only about 2% of the federal workforce took the February “fork in the road” offers, but there is the strong sense that more voluntary resignations have quietly trickled in. More than 700 staffers in the National Parks Service voluntarily quit, according to a leaked internal memo. In May, a group of senior officials from the National Endowment for the Arts announced their resignations in tandem as a protest against cuts and reappropriations Trump had made in grants.
That was the very worst thing they could have done. As Oskar Eustis, one of the leaders of the Professional Non-Profit Theater Coalition, gently put it in an interview with The New York Times, “the departures could make it easier to eliminate the agency.”
It’s time for a different mindset—not to think about the jump on the market, or whether staying on at an agency means making compromised choices, and certainly not about what’s on the Netflix queue—but to bunker down, to be as obstinate as possible, to refuse to carry out clearly unconstitutional orders, and, above all, to never leave your post.
In an article for Foreign Policy at the time of Trump’s first inauguration, veteran State Department official Susan Rosenberg offered civil servants the following advice:
In many ways you are the last line of defense against illegal, unethical, or reckless actions. History has shown us that implementation of such policies depends on a compliant bureaucracy of obedient individuals who look the other way and do as they are told. Do what bureaucracy does well: slow-roll, obstruct, and constrain. Resist. Refuse to implement anything illegal, unethical, or unconstitutional.
Ah, those were the halcyon days, the days of “anonymous” quietly steering the controls of government while Trump political appointees weren’t looking and then bragging about it in The New York Times, when the Trump administration didn’t seem to know what it was doing and the deep state could hold the government together even amidst the daily outrages on Twitter. Now the task is more grim. As Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker put it recently, “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.”
It’s the “disruption” that’s the key part. Mass protests can only do so much—Trump just won’t pay attention. Courts can only do so much—once agencies are shuttered, even if the shuttering is plainly illegal (like USAID’s almost certainly was), they are unlikely to be reopened again. Courts are not very good at changing facts on the ground.
But you—assuming you still have your job—can do a lot. You can disrupt. You are the obstacle to Trump’s planned gutting of the federal government, and so long as you still come to your desk and still have your keycard and computer access and still get paid by the government, you are in the way. Which is where you should be. You may still get fired in some future “fork in the road,” but it’s harder for the administration to fire everybody. The fact that they are playing this divide-and-conquer strategy means that they are heavily relying on people leaving voluntarily and their hand may be weaker than it currently seems. If they run into a solid wall of collective obstinacy, that really can buy time to stop the MAGA agenda and keep the federal bureaucracy functioning a little bit longer. Stall long enough—and then who knows what happens? The Trump administration loses its popular mandate or Democrats come back into power in Congress or Trump’s sheer distractibility, and in-fighting within the administration, causes him to focus elsewhere.
All my adult life, I have been stunned at bureaucracy’s talent for obfuscation. I am mesmerized by it any time I go to the post office and I am directed by a very surly employee to use the automatic scale only to find that the scale is not working, which of course is not the problem of the employee. I was really blown away by it the last time I was in a federal building and a roomful of people, waiting on a document, had to crane in collectively to hear their assigned numbers from an old woman, reading them out in a very tired voice, and wearing a face mask. Genius! It was a large room. It wasn’t the first time a crowd had lined up for documents just like these. There was no microphone, there was no number board, the woman didn’t even seem to think about taking off her face mask or speaking up to be heard by the dozens of people waiting on her.
It’s exactly that spirit that can be called upon now. That maze of unhelpfulness that is brought to bear on the public anytime anyone wants to get a building permit, or start a business, or mail a package, can now be turned around and used against the first existential threat to the bureaucracy in its history. The fox is in the henhouse, and bureaucrats, fighting now for their jobs and their agencies and not just the sacred right to clock out at five, can look for every hidden resource in their obfuscatory minds to not be pushed out of work.
I know that at the moment, leaving is tempting. I can only imagine how miserable it is to be a bureaucrat right now—funding slashed everywhere, colleagues fired or quitting, bozos in charge, the trauma that Russell Vought promised being one campaign promise that has been fully delivered upon. Private sector pastures have probably never looked greener, and the next offer that comes down the pike might be the one you take—under the logic that it’s bad now and it’s only going to get worse.
My point is that that’s exactly why you should stay. Because fundamentally this is bigger than you. This is about preserving the integrity of government. You are a public servant, after all. In the daily grind of bureaucratic work, that may not seem like such a privilege, but it is. The “good government” reformers of a century and a century-and-a-half ago dedicated their lives not just to eliminating algebraic equations from cattle inspector examinations but to getting you pensions and job security that almost nobody in the private sector has and, above all, to making you hard to fire. So this is not the time to be lured outside of your brick house by the tactical machinations of the Big Bad Wolf.
If you stay, it will suck. But, honestly, you owe it to the rest of us. MAGA has openly declared war against the principles of a professionalized government and the “deep state.” At least die on your feet.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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If the civil service/permanent bureaucracy/whatever you wish to call it were politically neutral, you'd have an excellent point. But because (not surprisingly) there is a significant bias to "big government" among the civil service, and the Democrats are the party of big government, there's a powerful lean, especially towards the top, towards the Democrats. So Democratic presidents are strongly supported as they implement their policies, but Republican presidents are significantly thwarted, as the senior civil servants resist the initiatives of the political appointees to whom they now report.
This is why Republican attempts to shrink the (let's face it, enormous) federal government routinely fail.
If the civil service didn't want Trump, it should have realized what it was doing - growing ever larger as it embraced expanded roles and resisted cutbacks. Now, Trump is here. If the civil service succeeds in thwarting Trump's efforts to shrink our (let's face it, unaffordable) government, something much worse than Trump will come along soon enough.
What a hoot!. Claiming that the federal bureaucracy is independent when 90+ support the Democrat party. Their public sector unions dump millions of dollars and free labor into Democrat campaigns. The graft of government and politics is so alive and well in the DC swamp. In fact, it is more so today than the romanticized end to Tammany Hall type corruption.
The design of this still greatest nation on God's green earth was for limited government. It is time for all these unaccountable government workers to feel the burn of layoffs that many of them routinely cause the private sector though byzantine and multi-layered rules, enforcements and fines.