There’s no mystery about why Trump is axing federal employees. They don’t support him | Opinion
What “federal workers “really care about, no matter who is in charge, is trying to figure out how, consistent with that administration’s priorities and the directions from their leaders, they can help the government work better for American people,” said Rob Shriver, former acting director of the Office of Personnel Management under President Joe Biden, to PBS.
That’s the theory, anyway, and perhaps it is why in an unsigned recent blog post on the website of the National Federation of Federal Employees, the union said federal workers are “dumbfounded” by the way Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is treating them as they are fired by the thousands.
But the reality of government workers for Republican administrations hasn’t lived up to the theory Shriver promotes.
If that were true, Republican public officials I’ve talked to, going back to at least the Reagan administration, wouldn’t lament the resistance they felt from within the bureaucracies they were appointed to oversee. Whether it was at the Justice Department, the Department of Education or the State Department, work that the overwhelmingly liberal government workers disagreed with was subject to work slowdowns, quality problems, strategic leaks and embarrassing malicious compliance among other problems.
The famously dishonest Trump echoes these complaints about his first administration. Nevertheless, the complaint rings true. It is the reason that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are slashing through the federal work force without much rhyme or reason behind individual cuts.
Trump is treating federal workers like conquered enemies while his most ardent supporters cheer Musk’s mass firings for a very simple reason. If you can judge a bureaucracy by its members’ political donations and the actions of its members’ unions, federal workers are the ones who declared themselves Trump enemies. Those donations and actions appear to show that much of the federal bureaucracy has about the same intellectual diversity as a university faculty lounge.
OpenSecrets donation data
Take the Internal Revenue Service, where I looked at the first 500 political donations that came up from OpenSecrets.org’s database for the 2024 election cycle. Wouldn’t you know it, more than 90% of them went to Democrats and their union allies. Among those 500 donations were seven to Trump compared to dozens for Kamala Harris.
IRS workers are primarily represented by the National Treasury Employees Union, which, much like its members, gives 96% of its donations to Democrats. Number one on their list? Trump’s November opponent Harris, whom the NTEU also endorsed.
Or look at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Of its employees’ first 500 donations, 495 went to Democrats and their allies. None went to Trump. The majority of HUD workers are represented by a different union called the American Federation of Government Employees, which endorsed Harris. More than 95% of its donations go to Democrats.
It is much the same story at the Environmental Protection Agency. Of the 500 donations I looked at, 495 went to Democrats and allies. Its employees are also represented by Harris-endorsing AFGE.
Even government workers you’d expect to be on Trump’s side are overwhelmingly liberal. Look at the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, where Trump and Musk haven’t taken out their literal chainsaw.
Why not? While the biggest union representing Department of Homeland Security workers like the Border Patrol and INS endorsed Harris, the National Border Patrol Council endorsed Trump. And among DHS employee’s donations I looked at there were 46 donations to Trump and 47 to other Republicans, more than 3 times as many as at the IRS, HUD and EPA combined.
Even though the majority of DHS donations went to Democrats and their allies and there were far more donations to Harris than there were to Trump, at least DHS looks a little more like the divided America we all love. But for much of the bureaucracy there is a startling uniformity to political beliefs. That’s a problem if government workers are going to be trusted by a divided public and political actors. America has two parties but federal workers have picked one.
There are a few institutions in which trust from all political sides is crucial for their operation. Educators and universities are trusted to teach our kids how to think. The judiciary is trusted to judge our disputes. Lawyers are trusted to represent us, no matter who we are. Government workers are trusted to carry out the will of elected legislators and executives regardless of their party. We expect members of all these groups to put mission above personal politics.
But these institutions are letting us down. Trust in institutions across the country is in decline along with interest in continuing to fund them in the same way we have in the past along with it. Deference to their expertise is largely dead.
Destructive, pointless DOGE cuts
So into this low-trust partisan environment has stepped the Trump administration with little concern for the actual people who have dedicated their lives to public service in ways that have nothing to do with politics, whether it is Veterans Affairs nurses or National Park rangers. The Department of Government Efficiency is making destructive and pointless cuts without regard to the rights and records of the people who are being dismissed from government.
And the howls have begun. Already the majority of Americans opposed to DOGE (60%) far outnumbers those in favor of slash and burn (36%). When the real-world consequences start to hit South Dakota and not just South Sudan, you can expect those numbers to get worse. It is clear that Trump, Musk and DOGE are not on the right path.
But what if they were? What if carefully and thoughtfully, Republican political appointees selected by Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney cut programs that were politicized or opposed Republican values or plain old American values? What if they combed through the records of government employees to respectfully usher out those who had become too partisan, dedicated to pursuing their individual political interests over non-partisan public service?
My bet? The howls would be just as loud as Democrats and government unions complained of a witch hunt to purge good people from government. The bureaucracy would still rebel and stories of mistakes the imaginary sensible Republicans would inevitably make would end up everywhere from podcasts to front pages.
While Trump is clearly cutting back federal employment the wrong way, it is important to remember that the loudest critics of his actions would be just as loud in objecting to someone doing it the right way. The problem for them isn’t how we’re cutting — it is the fact that we’re cutting at all.
This story was originally published March 26, 2025 at 5:08 AM.
