‘Terrified’ Federal Workers Are Clamming Up

Federal workers are scared. They don’t know who to trust. As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have hacked away at federal agencies over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen workers who have outlined how the administration is pushing a new ideology and stoking paranoia within the government’s remaining ranks. My sources work, or until recently worked, across six different agencies, including the State, Commerce, and Defense Departments and USAID; most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or they feared being targeted. “People are terrified,” one worker told me, “not for losing their jobs but for losing democracy.”

The workers described a fundamental transformation in the character of the government: Many workers say they live in a constant state of fear, unable to trust their colleagues, unable to speak freely, reflexively engaging in self-censorship even on matters they view as crucial to national security. One team that works on issues related to climate change has gone so far as to seal itself off in a completely technology-sanitized room for in-person meetings—no phones, watches, computers, or other connected devices. (Representatives for the Commerce and Defense Departments, USAID, DOGE, and the White House did not respond to my requests for comment.)

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

The widespread paralysis has been driven not just by the terminations and the crippling of entire agencies—which workers say has followed no apparent logic or process—but by executive orders and internal communications. Take the first diplomatic cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on January 21, the day after the inauguration. The message, which was sent to all members of the State Department, and which outlined various priorities, takes an “Orwellian” tone, as one State Department employee described it to me. Next to a priority labeled “Stopping Censorship and Prioritizing Truth,” Rubio wrote that although the State Department has been “combatting malign propaganda from hostile states” since the Cold War, the agency has also recently worked to promote “censorship, suppression, and misinformation” targeting Americans—perhaps motivated by “an excess of zeal or misguided attempts to control discourse.” The email, a copy of which I obtained, goes on:

This Department will forever stand in support and defense of Americans’ natural and First Amendment rights to free speech. We will combat genuine enemy propaganda, but always and only with the truth: that America is a great and good and just country, whose people are generous, and whose leaders now prioritize our core interests while respecting the rights and interests of other nations. Above all, programs that lead or in any way open the door to the censorship of the American people will be terminated.

My sources were disturbed by the idea that the administration would dictate “the truth” and accuse workers of censoring Americans. (What censorship Rubio is referring to is unclear, and a State Department spokesperson, who replied to my email inquiry without giving their name, said only, “As a general matter, we do not comment on internal personnel matters.”) Those working on behalf of Trump have already hidden information and engaged in censorship themselves, deleting scientific data and prompting researchers to scrub terms related to gender and sexuality from their work, in addition to purging information related to climate change and more. Because of this, one worker said, colleagues at his agency have considered replacing the generic word including with such as in reports, given the word’s proximity to inclusion, or excising terms like vulnerable groups, which are often used to refer to children, out of concern that they could be flagged under the administration’s sweeps to eradicate anything pertaining to diversity.

Transitions of power always lead to changes in priorities, but that is not what the workers say they are witnessing. Instead, the new Trump administration is engineering what some feel could be described only as ideological obedience.

Secretary Rubio’s message is just one example of the many ways the Trump administration has made these red lines apparent. Many Republicans have spoken out against any group or agency that could be perceived as censoring conservative voices. Shortly after the election, for instance, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an operation for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda established by President Barack Obama, shut down after a Republican-controlled House didn’t re-up its funding. Federal workers I spoke with now say that neither they nor their colleagues want to be associated in any way with working on or promoting disinformation research—even as they are aware that the U.S. government’s lack of visibility into such networks could create a serious national vulnerability, especially as AI gives state-backed operations powerful upgrades. Some are even discussing whether they should revise existing technical documents to scrub references to “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As one source told me, “If this administration is dictating the truth and dismantling disinformation efforts, you can’t bring it up anymore. You just don’t want to put a target on your back. Whether it’s intended or not, self-censorship emerges.”

Federal workers told me that this self-censorship started with issues related to DEI. On the third day of the Trump administration, the Office of Personnel Management instructed agency heads to email their employees a notice asking them to report one another for violations of President Trump’s executive order. Both the fear of being reported by colleagues and the fear of being punished for not reporting colleagues quickly led to a pervasive loss of trust and communication, my sources told me. Many employees stopped speaking openly in meetings in front of unfamiliar co-workers. Pronouns were dropped from emails; pride flags were taken off desks; references to Black History Month and promoting women in STEM were excised from office discussions, they said. Several workers told me they believed this was the intention: “Make people question what is safe—Where can I speak? Who can I speak to? How can I speak? You create a culture of chaos, fear, and confusion,” Stephie-Anne Duliepre, a former Science for Development fellow at USAID, told me. “I think that was the strategy because it was effective: wearing people out, stripping people’s will or faith that if they ever speak up they would be safe.”

This feeling may be by design. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of Project 2025, said in private speeches obtained by ProPublica that “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, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Some federal workers who collect health and medical data from Americans to support a wide array of downstream research, including cancer-drug discovery, are discussing whether to continue recording if patients are transgender, or information about pregnancies and abortions, an employee told me. The absence of that information will limit the kind of research that scientists can do, like studying how a drug affects pregnant women, or gender-based health disparities. But the workers are wrestling with whether having these data will put Americans in danger of being targeted by their own government, the employee said. Although workers have often asked patients about illegal behavior in the past, including illicit drug use, this time feels different: “It’s not just because it’s illegal in some places,” the employee said, referring to abortions. “It’s because it’s political.”

[Read: DOGE has God-mode access to government data]

Climate change has become another perceived taboo, sources told me. At the Department of Defense, the direction has been explicit. On January 27, several staffers received an email from superiors, according to a copy I reviewed, stating that the director of Army staff was working to suspend any activities “associated with, but not limited to the following areas: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory, Climate and climate change, Transgender, and Abortion policies." In other cases, workers are drawing their own conclusions. Some are discussing how to reframe climate-related policy documents, or even research on issues that could have downstream climate implications, into other kinds of energy and environmental issues that are more in line with the Trump administration’s priorities. (Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to pay “particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources,” for example.)

For any communications related to climate and other sensitive topics, the team that has stopped bringing internet-connecting devices to in-person meetings has also shifted from email to Signal messages, a worker in the group told me. “All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,” the worker told me. “Now I am being treated like a criminal.”

During my conversations, many workers referred to George Orwell’s 1984, and its portrayal of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a minor government bureaucrat, to explain the scope and scale of their experience. They referenced the Ministry of Truth, doublethink, and Newspeak as they described what was happening. Six terminated workers at USAID conveyed to me how the agency’s rapid dismantlement represented an example of the worst of what could happen in this environment: DOGE swept in, Trump froze virtually all aid spending, and Musk began blasting USAID publicly as a “criminal organization.” Agency staff were slow to grasp the full scope of what was happening and to react—they told me that they wish they’d organized protests or sounded the alarm to the outside world more quickly. Under the new regime, the staff became more afraid to talk to one another in large groups and stopped connecting their personal devices to the government Wi-Fi for fear of being surveilled. “USAID is a canary in a coal mine,” a terminated USAID worker told me. “It felt like being hunted by your own government.”