Federal Workers Deserve Respect, Not Cruelty

Traumatized. That’s how Donald Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, has said he wants federal employees to feel. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains . . . . We want to put them in trauma.” 

Villains. These are the public servants who were hired to handle the tasks Congress authorized and provided funding for them to do. They process social security claims for seniors and loans for homebuyers and small businesses. They provide health services for veterans, inspect food, and test water safety. They develop vaccines to prevent the next pandemic, control air traffic, safeguard our nuclear arsenal, and much more. 

Elon Musk and his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) team have been doing Vought’s dirty work for weeks now, beginning with the “fork in the road” email invitation to all federal workers to resign immediately. This was followed with thousands of firings—many of which had to be reversed because the excised workers performed critically important national security or veterans’ health care jobs. Through it all, federal civil servants across the country have been mortified, waiting to see if they’re next.

A few days ago, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Musk, dressed in black, brandished a very large chainsaw above his head, and screamed, “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.” And on Saturday, February 22, after Trump pushed him to be “more aggressive,” Musk posted: “All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” An email sent by the Office of Personnel Management followed, giving workers until 11:59 p.m. on Monday, February 24, to list five things they accomplished in the past week. 

This patently absurd command, issued to millions of civil servants, was met with disbelief and immediate pushback, including from the Trump-appointed heads of multiple departments.

Common sense, the quality so glibly invoked by our current President, tells us that a worker’s worth should never be predicated on what they happened to do in a given week. If any more evidence was needed to prove conclusively that the Trump/Vought/Musk assault on civil servants is mean-spirited, counterproductive, and, frankly, clueless, this may well be it. 

I’m an attorney who served the last eight years of a thirty-nine-year career with the Department of Labor as a member of the federal Senior Executive Service. My duties included serving on the department’s Performance Review Board, which is charged with overseeing the evaluations of the agency’s senior executives. I can attest that the evaluation process at all staff levels in the department, from top to bottom, focused on employee efficiency and effectiveness in conducting those activities identified as most likely to advance the agency’s mission. This painstaking evaluation process, though doubtless imperfect, is designed to assure accountability and deliver results.

To me—and, I would expect, pretty much any other supervisor responsible for evaluating a subordinate employee in any federal agency—this latest OPM missive is a cruel joke. It evidences the reckless retreat from rationality in government we’re seeing every day, part of a break-it-and-make-chaos approach that would seem clownish if it weren’t so destructive.  

The Labor Department administers and enforces more than 180 federal laws that benefit and protect 165 million workers at 11 million workplaces. Congress passed these laws with the goal of keeping workers safe and healthy and able to provide for their families, enjoy the retirement benefits they earned, and assert the rights the laws give them. Taking care to ensure those laws deliver what they promise—with the resources Congress provides—is a sacred mission for Department of Labor workers. After almost four decades working with them, I know they honor it as such.

These public servants, and their counterparts in every federal agency, deserve our appreciation and respect—not the trauma induced by a man wielding a chainsaw.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.