Federal Workers Are Being Used as Pawns in the Shutdown
Federal workers have I have become accustomed to a specific type of fear over the past year. The year 2025 was not stopped: first there was the email “fork” of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Effectiveness, followed quickly by numerous layoffs from the Trump administration.
As of July, more than 150,000 federal workers had resigned from their positions since President Donald Trump took office for the second time, according to The Washington Post. Tens of thousands of people have also been laid off.
Over the past few months, it seemed like this bloodshed was over, but that all changed on Friday.
Thousands of employees at eight government agencies have been subject to RIFs, or reductions in force – the formal process of laying off federal workers by the government. According to a document filed Friday by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), this latest round of layoffs affected more than 4,000 federal employees. The court filing also claimed the administration targeted Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services hardest, hacking a total of 2,500 jobs across the two agencies and across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Washington, D.C., office. The Department of Education has eliminated almost its entire special education team, CNN reported Tuesday. At the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the cuts ranged from a few dozen to several hundred jobs, according to the same filing.
Every day is an adventure
“People are afraid. Who said their goal is to traumatize people?” says an IRS employee, referring to private speeches given by Russell Vought, OMB chief and key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, who has been the public face of the job cuts. “If a normal human being said, ‘My goal is to traumatize families,’ there should be police at their door.”
“It’s pretty demoralizing,” a Food and Drug Administration employee told WIRED. “It is clear that this administrator will act illegally to try to cause further pain to agencies or offices that they do not like.” (The Trump administration used government resources, like websites, to blame Democrats for the shutdown, which critics say is a violation of the Hatch Act, a law prohibiting the use of public property for political messaging.)
“Every day is an adventure: new EOs, new memos,” says a Department of Homeland Security employee. “You have to constantly monitor where to pivot and what to stop, start and maintain.” (All of these employees were granted anonymity so they could speak candidly about their experiences.)
