The Washington Post

How DOGE and the White House carried out a once-unthinkable transformation of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy.

By Hannah Natanson and Meryl Kornfield

A State Department worker watched on television as President Donald Trump, hours into his second term, signed executive orders that halted relocation flights for Afghan refugees — which her office existed to coordinate. She wondered: What would happen now?

A Veterans Affairs staffer in that agency’s equity office watched Trump sign another document, this one outlawing diversity programs, and thought, “It’s over.” And in a Social Security building, a woman wandered over to her co-worker’s desk worried about Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for budget director. Vought said he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma,” she pointed out, and would soon decide which agencies to cut and by how much.

“It isn’t easy to fire federal employees,” her co-worker told her. “We have all these protections. We’ll be okay.”

He was wrong. The United States’ 2.4 million federal employees were about to get caught up in a once-unthinkable overhaul of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy, carried out in less than a year by one of the most polarizing presidents in American history.

Missions have shifted or shattered. Entire agencies were deleted. Nearly 300,000 employees were forced out of the federal workforce. The Trump administration froze or shut off billions of dollars in scientific research, gutted or eliminated offices and programs devoted to civil rights and diversity, rewrote the federal hiring system to reward loyalty to the president, and shrank Social Security while installing Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents in hundreds of new offices across the country.

More changes are coming: Trump officials are planning to cut tens of thousands of open positions from the Department of Veterans Affairs, downgrade performance ratings across the government, and replace the State Department’s traditional condemnation of torture and the persecution of minorities worldwide with scrutiny of abortion and youth gender transitioning in other countries.

Reached for comment, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston wrote in an emailed statement: “President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from federal government. In less than a year in office, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer.”

A White House official who declined to give their name also shared 19 bullet points listing Trump’s accomplishments transforming the government in 2025. These included processing a record 2.5 million ratings claims at Veterans Affairs; ending the Biden-era Digital Equity Act, which, the official wrote, “provided billions in handouts based on race”; allowing fossil fuels to be used in federal buildings again; halting operations at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; terminating “all federal Fake News media contracts”; requiring that agencies cut 10 existing rules or regulations for every new rule introduced; downsizing the federal bureaucracy; ordering staff back to the office five days a week; and shuttering “radical and wasteful government sponsored” diversity programs.

Several federal agencies did not respond to requests for comment, including Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This account of what happened inside the U.S. government in 2025 is based on a year’s worth of messages and interviews with more than 1,200 current and former federal workers. More than 200 also agreed to fill out a Washington Post survey asking about their experiences. Thirty participated in nearly 60 hours of video and phone interviews, with many speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs or their families.

This is their story.

CHAPTER I: Winter

Jan. 20, 2025

Executive Order: “Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis.”

Google searches for “federal workers return to office” spiked by 600 percent as soon as Trump ended remote work. Then instructions began to go out.

A Department of Health and Human Services staffer in the Southwest was given five days to move to D.C. A Defense Department worker had two months to report to an office in another state. In Pahrump, Nevada, a Bureau of Land Management employee received an email with the address of the nearest federal building: more than 70 miles away. Edward Brandon Beckham looked at his wife, dying of cancer in home hospice, and knew he couldn’t leave her to commute for three hours a day.

Workers turned a conference room in a Veterans Affairs office in California into desk space for six nurses. Veterans who called to confess thoughts of suicide could hear people speaking in the background. In the Southwest, a woman who conducted background investigations into federal applicants showed up to her new office to find she could hear every word of her co-workers’ conversations — and they could hear hers. She moved into a musty closet, closing the door.

A Customs and Border Protection employee, unable to locate a federal office building, started driving to an international airport that ran flights only on weekends. He walked and shuttled through miles of empty terminals each morning to a desk where he sat, all day, without seeing a single human face. After six months, he quit.

Jan. 20, 2025

Executive Order: “The Director of the Office of Management and Budget … shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government.”

The FBI instructed janitorial staff in Quantico, Virginia, to paint over a colorful mural bearing the words “FAIRNESS,” “COMPASSION” and “DIVERSITY.” Pete Hegseth, the newly confirmed defense secretary, ordered an end to Black History Month celebrations. IT workers at the Transportation Department scraped every mention of “DEI” from their website.

The Social Security Administration shuttered its Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, where 150 people handled civil rights complaints and harassment cases, and made accommodations for those with disabilities, both SSA workers and members of the public. One disabled staffer learned of the closure by reading media reports and, fighting tears, called her supervisor on his personal number. He knew no more than she did, he said.

At NASA, a worker emailed her office’s equal employment contact with a request. But the automated reply said the recipient “wasn’t found at nasa.gov.”

Nicholas Cheng, former data management and reporting branch chief for the Department of Defense Education Activity: “It was just mad chaos from the start. And so every new thing that happened became this mode where you were just waking up every morning and being like, so what crazy thing is going to come down today? And it just became clear that nobody actually cared about us being able to do the meaningful work that we were doing before. And the best we could was just sort of try to survive.”

Dozens of Education Department staffers checked their email to find they were on leave “pursuant to the President’s executive order on DEIA.” One of them, Donna Bussell, couldn’t understand why: Her job was helping administer grants to support Native American students. Then she remembered. She’d once served as president of an affinity group for Native Americans and Alaskans at the department.

A Veterans Affairs psychologist heard from a man who ran treatment groups for LGBTQ+ veterans. He was quitting, he said, because VA had become “hostile.” The psychologist’s LGBTQ+ patients stopped showing up to their appointments.

Jan. 28, 2025

Email titled “Fork in the Road”: “If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce … Type the word ‘Resign’ into the body of this reply email. Hit ‘Send’.”

A National Guard employee and former lawyer responded with questions — How could this possibly work? Will the government be bound by it? He was careful not to type the word “resign.” A Veterans Affairs worker texted his wife: “It’s 100% a ‘here’s your chance to get out paid, you might not get that later.’” In Colorado, a Forest Service staffer opened his diary and wrote: “I advised as many people as I could not to take it. … I am coming to the realization that I have to fight back.”

In D.C., an Education Department staffer waited three weeks, then replied “resign,” because he was sure he’d get fired anyway. In Minnesota, Agriculture Department loan assistant James Barnebee resigned, too. It was an easy decision, even with four children: He had voted for Trump, who campaigned on reducing the size of the government. The president, Barnebee thought, was just doing what he promised.

Feb. 3, 2025

Elon Musk Post on X: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Erica Hagen, 48, hoped it didn’t mean anything when bosses told her not to wear USAID gear to an event with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was touring Latin America.

Hagen, a program officer in the Dominican Republic, listened as Rubio promised the audience that foreign aid wasn’t gone, just under review. She thought about all the frozen programs she had helped oversee: One treating and preventing HIV. Another educating children in rural areas. A third reducing plastic in the oceans.

Not long after Rubio’s visit, Hagen and her colleagues were sent home, dismissed from their jobs. Someone staged a goodbye ceremony. “Participants will paint rocks with positive images and messages to commemorate the presence and contributions” of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the invitation read. Hagen wrote “RIP USAID” in red and black on an oval rock. She left it on a picnic table with nearly 100 other rocks, which someone eventually nestled under a tree.

She flew to D.C. with her three children and husband to find a final set of off-boarding instructions: She had to cancel her diplomatic passport by punching a hole in it. Everything Hagen owned was wrapped in plastic on a cargo ship, so she drove to her local library to borrow a hole punch.

She closed her eyes as she pressed down, wondering if this was how it felt to dig your grave.

CHAPTER II: Spring

Feb. 13, 2025

Letter to Fired Workers: “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.”

Thousands of probationary workers found out they were fired from prerecorded videos. Some were instructed to leave the building in 30 minutes. The Office of Personnel Management’s acting director told probationary staff, “I understand that this may be unexpected and that this is difficult.” One worker asked, “Who is this guy?”

The Small Business Administration emailed terminated employees a number they could call to appeal. But when one woman phoned, an apartment building answered: “Thank you for calling Westbrooke Place.” A Veterans Affairs supervisor texted a fired subordinate: “It states it’s due to your performance which is not true. … You need to appeal it.”

Shelly Nuessle, former information system security manager for the Maritime Administration: “I have awards that I received that … in the past I have taken pride in. And they’re all now just kind of in a pile in my basement on one of the bookshelves, because they kind of make me mad now.”

More mistakes emerged. The Energy Department laid off hundreds of engineers, technicians and managers who maintain America’s nuclear weapons before scrambling to rehire them. Veterans Affairs had to bring back workers who staff the Veterans Crisis Line. The Department of Health and Human Services reinstated employees who oversee aid to survivors of 9/11 and regulate the nation’s food supply, including a neonatologist who helped oversee the quality of infant formula.

About 2 a.m., Elon Musk, the billionaire whom Trump had named to lead a cost-cutting team called the U.S. DOGE Service, shared a picture of himself in gladiator armor and wrote that he was destroying “the woke mind virus.” Later that morning, Forest Service worker Amanda Mae Downey drove to her office in Michigan to sign a letter accepting her firing, unsure how she’d support her three children, sick mother and newly unemployed husband. Above her signature, she wrote in blue: “Received and accepted under duress.”

Feb. 22, 2025

Elon Musk Post on X: “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, 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.”

Puzzled workers spending their Saturdays at dog parks or breweries, or taking their children to Scouting America events, opened a message titled “What did you do last week?” It asked for five bullet points of accomplishments.

A worker at the Food and Drug Administration reported it as spam. An employee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development fed the instructions into ChatGPT, then responded with 20 pages of gibberish. At an airport in the Pacific Northwest, Transportation Security Administration employees who check for weapons were pulled away from their X-ray machines to compose bullet points. Lines swelled.

A Forest Service staffer copied the email verbatim into his diary. “Every week things come more and more into focus,” he wrote beneath it. “We are at war.”

In Virginia, the family of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services worker Caitlin Cross-Barnet checked her into a mental health facility. She was struggling with despair after a difficult hysterectomy, and because she felt Trump was unraveling the government. In daily calls to her husband, she asked about changes to the federal workforce. Six days after the “What did you do” email, she killed herself.

Within two months, as Musk fell out with Trump and prepared to leave the government, most agencies reversed course and told employees to ignore the emails.

March 4, 2025

Post on X by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin: “UPDATE: Working with the talented team @DOGE, I just cancelled an additional 21 grants, saving over $116 million for the American people.”

Across the government, staff searched for words they hoped would save the work they believed in. NASA employees built a spreadsheet explaining why DOGE shouldn’t cancel the agency’s 13,000 contracts and grants: “Mission essential.” “Worthwhile scientific research.” “Taxpayer dollars … were already spent.”

At the Energy Department, one worker prepared memos arguing that his projects would cut costs for American homes and businesses. Someone decided to cancel many anyway. So he, like other employees, began deleting: Any mention of “carbon.” “Sustainability.” The word “green.”

Jenna Norton, program director at the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases: “We were basically able to do very little real work for months. I remember in those early days, people kept saying this is temporary and things will settle down and things will get back to normal. At this point, we are 10 months in, 11 months in, and the pattern has not changed. The assault has not slowed. If anything, it has continued and gotten worse.”

State Department staffers scrubbed out the terms “diverse” and “inclusive.” One Environmental Protection Agency employee, tasked with eliminating information about race, gender and religion, confided to her diary: “It’s really difficult to have to erase someone’s existence from the federal government.”

At the National Institutes of Health, Elizabeth Ginexi was sent a list of grants to review for DOGE, along with words to watch for: “inclusion,” “race,” “ethnicity.” It felt unscientific. Had she really earned a Ph.D. to do this? Breaking the rules, she called one grantee from her personal phone and told them to revise their study abstract — removing the words “gender” and “minorities.”

Then DOGE arrived at her building. They were easy to spot: Silent young men in their 20s and 30s, always wearing backpacks. Some of her colleagues’ cars were searched in the parking lot. Other employees were stopped in the bathroom and asked for their ID cards. Ginexi began having nightmares about getting fired because she voted for Kamala Harris.

Not long before she decided to resign, she texted a friend: “NIH is being killed.”

April 1, 2025

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Post on X: “This overhaul is about realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again. It’s a win-win for taxpayers, and for every American we serve.”

Ten thousand health staff, including biomedical scientists and researchers who studied patient safety, lost their jobs. Senior leaders at the NIH received letters offering new posts in remote areas such as Alaska or Billings, Montana. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those who oversaw chronic disease, HIV and tuberculosis programs were reassigned to the Indian Health Service.

When Tony Schlaff arrived at the Health Resources and Services Administration, he was astonished to see hundreds of people queued up outside. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Everybody is going through a full screening,” the person standing next to him said. Schlaff filed into line and, alongside hundreds of colleagues, waited for nearly two hours, shivering in the frigid wind.

Once indoors, Schlaff watched employees walk through a TSA-style screening machine and undergo badge checks. Some walked back outside, tearful. After half an hour, he got close enough to hear what was happening: “You do not have access to the building,” one security guard told a woman whose badge failed to swipe, which is how she found out she’d been fired. “Leave. Go home.”

Tony Schlaff, former project officer at the Health Resources and Services Administration: “We were in a new world. We were being told by the administration to do things that were illegal and unethical. And yet the bureaucracy had no way of responding to that.”

In Texas, Shelley Bain awoke to her phone buzzing. Bain, a 66-year-old program specialist for the Administration for Children and Families, checked her email and saw she’d been fired at 4:30 a.m. She made a cup of coffee and calculated. She was losing half the retirement income she’d counted on. She is legally blind, so it would be hard to find another job.

At 6:24 a.m., she texted her children. Her daughter swore. When Bain’s grandchildren woke, she made breakfast and walked them to the bus stop. Before they boarded, she pulled the girls, 12 and 14, aside: “I just got fired, but it will be okay.” She watched the bus pull away, thinking about how she’d probably have to sell her home, a farm outside Dallas where she and her husband had hoped to die.

CHAPTER III: Summer:

May 7, 2025

US DOGE Service Post on X: “Credit Card Update! The program to audit unused/unneeded credit cards has been expanded to 32 agencies. After 10 weeks, more than 500K cards have been de-activated.”

The spending limits on federal credit cards shrank to $1. Government scientists studying food safety ran short of lab-cleaning fluid. Contractors who help identify U.S. soldiers killed in combat were told to pause their work.

A climate researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey found herself unable to travel for research conferences, restock hydrogen gas or buy Scotch tape. A Food and Drug Administration staffer couldn’t purchase dry ice or environmental swabs, nor pay the highway tolls that safety inspectors incurred driving for work. When colleagues asked what they were supposed to do, she told them to try HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Trump.

In a Colorado branch of the Forest Service, one man was designated purchaser for the entire office. Anyone who wanted to buy horse fodder or irrigation pipes had to wait until the man returned from weeks-long firefighting trips. The new system meant staff were a week late buying chainsaw fuel, delaying the thinning of flammable forest brush. “In 15 years, I have never seen us so unprepared for fire season,” the local fire management officer told staff at a meeting, according to one worker in attendance.

General Services Administration political appointees imposed a rule mandating they approve project requests, and more than 1,500 built up in an internal tracker, including executed leases and notices saying construction could begin. At NASA, a group of employees wrote several detailed paragraphs, across multiple emails, to justify buying fastening bolts.

Social Security started requiring that one of fewer than a dozen people sign off on expenses for all 1,300 field offices. Staff ran out of paper, printer cartridges and phone headsets, even as calls poured in from Americans asking what Trump might be doing to their benefits.

In one Northeastern office, the fridge broke. In late April, a staffer emailed the office seeking donations: “We are going to purchase a new fridge since the funds that would normally be available for Facilities to provide us with one are still frozen. Before we do, I would like to see if anyone else is interested in contributing.”

June 11, 2025

Department of Homeland Security Memo: “Requests for approval of obligations above the $100,000 threshold must be submitted via memo through the Executive Secretary process.”

It wasn’t Abby McIlraith’s primary job to take calls from survivors — until Texas flooded.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency had long contracted with phone centers to help handle the influx of calls after disasters. But the contracts cost more than $100,000, meaning Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem had to approve them, and she was slow to do so, letting some lapse for close to a week.

So McIlraith was assigned to the phones, taking back-to-back calls. She wrote down what people had lost: homes, cars, furniture, appliances. She asked if they had anywhere to stay, if FEMA could help. She listened to people scream about how long they’d been waiting, demand to know why the government was moving so slowly.

Abby McIlraith, emergency management specialist in FEMA’s individual assistance division: “Secretary Noem’s requirements also delayed urban search-and-rescue teams by 72 hours in the Kerrville floods, which is completely unacceptable. The bureaucracy that they’re talking about is coming directly from the top, and it risks lives and communities every day.”

Per her orders, she kept each call to a few minutes. Whenever a conversation ended, she had 40 seconds to finish her notes. She watched the timer on her screen count down to the next call.

A few months later, she heard that other employees were signing a letter of dissent, disagreeing with the direction of FEMA under Trump. She wondered if signing would cost her her job, then recalled her week answering phones. McIlraith signed her name — and was placed on leave.

Asked about McIlraith’s account, FEMA shared a written statement from acting press secretary Daniel Llargues asserting Noem’s tighter control over spending “strengthens oversight, safeguards against fraud, waste and abuse, and ensures funding decisions are well-documented and mission-focused.” Noem’s $100,000 rule has already “saved U.S. taxpayers … $10.7 billion,” Llargues added, stating without offering evidence that Noem reviews every contract within 24 hours.

July 31, 2025

Office of Personnel Management Spokeswoman McLaurine Pinover: “Ultimately, the deferred resignation program … delivered incredible relief to the American taxpayer. No previous administration has gotten even close to saving American taxpayers this amount of money in such a short time.”

New resignation offers rolled out, agency by agency. As the summer waned, people left.

The NIH lost six directors of institutes focused on infectious disease, child health and the human genome. The Federal Aviation Administration lost its chief air traffic officer, among nearly a dozen other top officials. The Internal Revenue Service lost its chief of staff, chief procurement officer and chief human capital officer — while the Treasury Department lost more than 200 technical experts and experienced managers who helped run the nation’s financial systems.

At a town hall, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy told staff: “We’re going to lose some knowledge, right? We’re going to lose some expertise as we go through this process.” He asked those staying “to get the best points from those who are leaving.”

In the Midwest, union leader Colin Smalley watched his Army Corps of Engineers unit dwindle. Among the departed: An employee so knowledgeable about rock blasting that the government brought him back the first time he tried to retire. A staffer who was spearheading a novel project to stun invasive carp with electric shocks. How, Smalley asked his wife, could they ever replace someone who knew how to electrify rivers?

A National Park Service staffer in Colorado tallied her park’s losses: Two people employed for 20 years each. One woman who’d been there even longer. A biologist who’d founded a key program the park ran. Soon, everyone was picking up new responsibilities. Bosses filled out time sheets, biologists signed travel authorizations and the staffer, a land surveyor, began leading park tours. Other days, she cleaned bathrooms.

Hearing about a protest against federal cuts, she drew up a poster to carry. “Where have all the rangers gone?” it asked.

In Lander, Wyoming, three Forest Service retirees noticed fences tilting over, docks slipping into lakes, mountain roads caving inward from water pressure. Barb Gustin, 69, began volunteering to keep open Lander’s Forest Service office. Bill Lee, 73, drove hundreds of miles through the forest weekly, fixing broken fences and fallen signs. And Del Nelson, 81, started wiping down five bathrooms a day. He knew money was short, so he used one paper towel per set of toilets.

CHAPTER IV: Fall

Oct. 1, 2025

U.S. Forest Service Website Update: “The Radical Left Democrats shutdown the government. This government website will be updated periodically during the funding lapse for mission critical functions.”

More than 750,000 were sent home without pay as whole departments shuttered. Some National Park Service staffers left without being told if they could put up signs telling visitors their parks had closed. At the State Department, staffers who’d already been fired were surprised to see furlough notices hit their personal inboxes — a painful accident.

An Agriculture Department employee lined up a second job classifying soils, figuring the shutdown might last for a while. A State Department custodian required to keep working readied herself for another shift cleaning toilets and mopping floors. Education Department employees saw their out-of-office messages altered to blame “Democrat Senators” for the shutdown. On their sixth day working without pay, a skeleton crew of NIH researchers learned a well-liked animal health technician had been taken by ICE to a Louisiana detention center.

“We are going to have to lay some people off if the shutdown continues,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters, even as senior federal officials privately warned such firings would be illegal. An IRS worker wondered whether his disability, which necessitates working from home, meant he would be dismissed first.

Oct. 10, 2025

Russell Vought Post on X: “The RIFs have begun.”

In a year when roughly 300,000 had already gone, 4,000 more lost their jobs — dismissals swiftly entangled in lawsuits. In the Oval Office, Trump said he’d fired “people that the Democrats want.” The reductions in force targeted staff who regulated hazardous waste, checked the quality of federal housing and assisted students with disabilities.

Nationwide, flights fell behind schedule. Taxpayer help lines shut down. The president ordered the Pentagon to use research funding to pay service members, while his top deputies claimed they or Trump had found unspecified ways to compensate immigration and law enforcement agents. Workers who’d missed two paychecks in a row, while showing up to the office, watched money flow into gun-carrying colleagues’ accounts.

In Philadelphia, staff at one of the largest food banks noticed shelves growing bare. In Colorado, service members and veterans flooded the Homefront Military Network, asking for help with mortgages, utilities, car payments. Federal workers paid their bills with credit cards and stocked their kitchens from food pantries. Cynthia Brown, of the Government Publishing Office, lost her car to repossession, sold two iPhones and began subsisting on coffee and protein shakes.

Just before the government reopened, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown would trim as much as $14 billion from the United States’ annual economic output.

Nov. 12, 2025

President Donald Trump in the Oval Office: “With my signature, the federal government will now resume normal operations. … I think we really have a really great situation. We have a country that we love, and we have a country that’s in great shape.”

Federal workers, grateful to pick up paychecks again, found other worries waiting. Some agencies privately warned staff to expect deep spending cuts in 2026, reflecting Trump’s desired bare-bones budget. Following guidance from a top administration official to stop giving “everyone … an A,” the National Park Service decided to give 80 percent of staff middling performance reviews, which help determine promotions and bonuses. The National Weather Service lagged in hiring hundreds of promised replacement forecasters. And Veterans Affairs made plans to slice away as many as 35,000 open jobs.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, an attorney whose job used to be fighting housing discrimination told himself to stop thinking about things he couldn’t control — and dived into yet another internal personnel case. The Trump administration had stalled all his lawsuits and barred officials at his agency from speaking any language that wasn’t English. They’d even ripped down posters written in Spanish. Overnight, the attorney found himself unable to talk to many of his complainants, or even explain why.

He tried to focus on that day’s assignment — an ethics advisory opinion for a colleague who wanted to sell his house — but kept thinking about what he’d seen in the garage. Months ago, ICE had begun using his New York City federal building as a detention holding center. The evening before, walking to collect his bike, he’d witnessed a family in chains being led into an unmarked van. The attorney could still hear the sound their manacles made, dragging on concrete.

Thousands of miles away in Alaska, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist stopped by a bush outside her building. She wasn’t eager to start another day of “Section 7 consults”: 500-page reports assessing the environmental impact of docks, airports and cable lines. It wasn’t unimportant, but it wasn’t the science she was hired to do — monitoring beluga whales, analyzing samples of stranded ocean mammals for disease, testing the impacts of pollution on pregnant whales. And it meant hours formatting Word documents.

The biologist stared at the bush, delaying a few more seconds. There used to be rocks beneath it, and in the spring, she’d painted some with slogans: “Save the Whales.” “NOAA Saves Whales.” Children began adding their own hand-painted contributions. It felt like hope. Then one day she arrived at work to find all the rocks had been removed. “This is what we’re fighting against, and losing,” she told herself now, looking at the bare earth, and walked into the building.

David Harbourt, former lead safety and occupational health manager for the Food and Drug Administration Center for Veterinary Medicine: “I just always thought, well, I am the only person that works in occupational health and safety at my location and because of the depth and breadth of challenges and different hazards our personnel can be exposed to, why would they ever cut the safety people?”

In D.C., a Defense Department worker looked up from a pile of congressional inquiries to check the clock. Two minutes to 11:30 — his lunch break. Another morning gone with no chance to turn to his studies of rising rates of mental illness among service members. Or his proposals, languishing for almost a year now, on how the government could drive those down.

This job was all he’d wanted to do since a close family member, a veteran, died by suicide. Then his office shrank by half under Trump. The staffers who were supposed to answer questions from Congress lost or left their jobs, and their work became his. Now, whenever the worker snatched time to resurface one of his ideas, he was told there was no money. He kept having the same thought driving to work, doing the dishes, just before he fell asleep: “You’re failing the American people.”

Rather than eat, the worker rose from his desk and walked until he found somewhere secluded. He knelt in prayer.

“If I am supposed to be here, then I am going to keep doing this,” he told God. “But if it’s time for me to go, please open the doors, so I can go.”

He repeats the prayer almost every day, waiting for a sign.

About this story

Reporting by Hannah Natanson and Meryl Kornfield. Additional reporting by Laura Meckler, William Wan, Jacob Bogage, Olivia George, Emily Davies, Rachel Roubein, Lena H. Sun, Brianna Sacks and Aaron Wiener. Portraits by Marvin Joseph. Photo illustrations by Kathleen Rudell-Brooks.

Design and development by Tucker Harris. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Photo editing by Haley Hamblin. Edited by Mike Madden. Additional editing by Wendy Galietta and Kim Chapman.

A top Treasury career staffer, David A. Lebryk, announced his retirement. Surrogates of Musk’s DOGE effort had sought access to sensitive payment systems.

By Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf and Jacqueline Alemany

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues that was obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration. Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who has now been detailed to Treasury, is among those involved, the people said. Krause did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokeswoman for DOGE declined to comment. Lebryk could not be reached for comment.

When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head. Trump administration officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave before he announced he would step down, two of the people said.

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. (Musk was seen on Thursday visiting the GSA, according to two other people familiar with his whereabouts, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. That visit was first reported by the New York Times.) His Department of Government Efficiency, originally conceived as a nongovernmental panel, has since replaced the U.S. Digital Service.

The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.

It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.

On Monday, the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered a freeze on all federal grant spending — an order it rescinded two days later amid intense political backlash and lawsuits over the consequences of that decision.

Musk has characterized the rising national debt as an existential threat to the country and has proved willing to break norms in service of sweeping change.

Still, the possibility that government officials might try to use the federal payments system — which essentially functions as the nation’s checkbook — to enact a political agenda is unprecedented, said Mark Mazur, who served in senior Treasury Department roles during the Obama and Biden administrations.

“This is a mechanical job — they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”

In the 2023 fiscal year, the payment systems processed nearly 1.3 billion payments, accounting for about $5.4 trillion, nearly 97 percent made electronically, according to the Treasury Department. Every payment was made on time.

Lebryk’s departure is expected to be a shock to Treasury personnel, among whom he enjoys a sterling reputation. The lifelong bureaucrat joined the department as an intern in 1989 and spent three decades at the agency under 11 treasury secretaries, serving as acting director of the U.S. Mint and commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, among other roles.

In his email announcing his retirement, Lebryk praised the department’s staff.

“Please know that your work makes a difference and is so very important to the country. It has been an honor to work alongside you,” he wrote. “Our work may be unknown to most of the public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exceptionally important.”

Michael Faulkender, whom Trump nominated as deputy treasury secretary in December, praised Lebryk’s work in 2023.

“I could not, to this day, tell you his politics,” Faulkender, who served as an assistant secretary at Treasury during Trump’s first term, told The Washington Post at the time. “He always seemed to be relaxed and under control.”

The billionaire’s DOGE team has launched an all-out assault on federal agencies, triggering numerous legal objections.

By Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, Faiz Siddiqui, Cat Zakrzewski, Hannah Natanson and Jacqueline Alemany

The chaotic blitz by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has triggered legal objections across Washington, with officials in at least a half-dozen federal agencies and departments raising alarms about whether the billionaire’s assault on government is breaking the law.

Over the past two weeks, Musk’s team has moved to dismantle some U.S. agencies, push out hundreds of thousands of civil servants and gain access to some of the federal government’s most sensitive payment systems. Musk has said these changes are necessary to overhaul what he’s characterized as a sclerotic federal bureaucracy and to stop payments that he says are bankrupting the country and driving inflation.

Specific concerns include the terms of the “deferred resignation” Musk’s team is offering to purge the civil service — which experts say runs afoul of federal spending law — and whether Musk’s staffers will use Treasury’s payment system to reverse spending that has already been approved. (Two federal employee unions sued Monday to block DOGE from accessing that system. Late Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote to Congress that DOGE associates have only “read-only” access to it.) Several federal officials said they were worried about DOGE’s taking control of government systems that hold Americans’ personal information, including student loan data, and others have raised privacy concerns about the agency’s vow to use artificial intelligence on government databases. In other instances, officials have raised concerns that DOGE associates appeared to violate security protocols by using private email addresses or not disclosing their identities on government calls.

At a more fundamental level, several legal experts and government officials expressed alarm over how Musk’s team appears to operate as a strike team, outside typical agency rules and constitutional checks on executive power.

“The big-picture constitutional worry is that there is a kind of shadow executive branch that is existing and operating and exercising power outside of the channels the Constitution and the statutes that Congress authorized,” said Blake Emerson, a professor of constitutional law at the UCLA School of Law.

On Monday, the White House confirmed that Musk has been designated a “special government employee,” a status typically conferred on outside advisers from the private sector. Under a Trump executive order, the U.S. Digital Service, a White House office established during the Obama administration to consult on federal technology, has transformed itself into the U.S. DOGE Service. Democrats in Congress have raised objections to some of DOGE’s actions, but Republicans, who control both chambers, have not moved to rein in its activities.

In a sign of potential unease over how DOGE’s early moves are being perceived, President Donald Trump and Musk have defended the billionaire’s influence and the legality of their actions. Musk has alleged that much of the government is already violating federal law and that his efforts are a needed corrective, for instance asserting over the weekend, without offering evidence, that USAID is a “criminal organization” that should be shut down and that Treasury’s career staffers routinely commit federal crimes. Trump has also denied that Musk will be able to use his government influence to expand his personal fortune, though he did not point to specific guardrails against that.

“Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities,” a White House spokesperson said.

“If there’s a conflict, then we won’t let him get near it,” Trump told reporters Monday. “We’re trying to shrink government, and he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better. Where we think there’s a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it.”

Part of the concern has centered on the Treasury Department’s powerful payment systems, which are responsible for disbursing more than $6 trillion across the country every year. In private communications last week, a DOGE representative asked the most senior Treasury career official to halt foreign aid payments that Musk allies believed violated Trump’s executive orders, two people familiar with the matter said.

David A. Lebryk, who was at the time the acting treasury secretary, told Musk’s team that the department does not have the authority to cancel payments authorized by federal agencies, the people said. Lebryk was later ousted by Trump officials, and Bessent has since agreed to hand access to the system to DOGE officials.

On X this weekend, Musk defended using Treasury’s systems to shut down federal payments because, he said, some of those payments are being made incorrectly. “Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress,” he wrote.

Musk also pointed to U.S. law governing how payments are made. Inside Treasury, several officials mocked Musk’s tweet, which states that the U.S. government is required to complete payments properly certified by federal agencies — exactly the point Lebryk made.

Bessent wrote Congress on Tuesday that the payment system had not rejected any payments submitted by other agencies, and that no payments for Social Security or Medicare had been affected. The administration has notified recipients via several agencies that it will comply with a court injunction reversing a White House attempt to freeze all federal grants.

But Musk’s repeated statements that Treasury officials need to unilaterally shut down payments already approved by Congress and requested by agencies have alarmed numerous officials within the government, who note that the Constitution explicitly gives spending power to Congress.

Unilaterally terminating federal disbursements via Treasury’s payment networks would also almost certainly violate a 1974 budget law and due-process protections for grantees, current and former officials say.

Resignation bid prompts legal concerns

Musk’s rapid actions have prompted other concerns within the administration as well. Last week, his allies at the Office of Personnel Management sent an email to much of the federal workforce offering to pay employees’ salaries through September if they quit now. The proposal is intended to accomplish Musk’s goal of “mass head-count reductions” in the civil service.

The memo, which bypassed typical channels, provoked greater internal legal concerns that have not previously been reported. Administration officials point out that the OPM does not have the legal authority to guarantee payments to employees — a responsibility that rests with the agencies where people work. Additionally, the executive branch cannot specifically guarantee spending not yet approved by Congress, legal experts say. Government funding is currently set to expire in March, well before the end of September.

Last Thursday, a group of officials with the White House budget office — including career employees as well as political employees appointed by Trump — met with OPM officials, two people with knowledge of the meeting said. While the meeting was described as cordial, several career budget officials told The Post that they have concerns about the legality of the offer. (Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to lead the budget office, was not at the meeting. His nomination has not yet been confirmed by the Senate.)

The budget office has also received numerous questions from agency officials asking it to confirm the legality of the OPM’s offer, and some budget personnel have not been sure how to respond. On Tuesday, the OPM circulated an FAQ document specifically addressing legal concerns, in a sign that those worries may be widespread.

“They’re promising to pay people through Sept. 30, when they only have authority to spend through March 15 — it’s clearly a violation of the law,” said Charles Kieffer, who spent several decades across administrations in the OMB and worked for Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Federal employees have expressed alarm over whether some of the provisions of the contract are actually enforceable, including a portion stating that an employee “forever waives, and will not pursue through any judicial, administrative, or other process, any action” based on their employment, according to an agreement reviewed by The Post.

“The legality is the fundamental question, and nobody has any good answers,” said one staffer at a federal agency. “We’re being required to resign with more outstanding questions than answers, and our leadership knows it. They just say that OPM has ‘communicated that it is legal.’”

A spokeswoman for the OPM, which is being run by Musk’s allies, defended the proposal.

“Union leaders and politicians telling federal workers to reject this offer are doing them a serious disservice,” said spokeswoman McLaurine Pinover. “This is a rare, generous opportunity — one that was thoroughly vetted and intentionally designed to support employees through restructuring.”

‘We don’t know who these people are’

As Musk’s representatives have sought an increasing amount of data from a greater number of federal agencies, their actions have also spawned concerns about the security of classified or sensitive government systems.

Inside the Education Department, some staffers are deeply alarmed by the fact that DOGE staffers have gained access to federal student loan data, which includes personal information for millions of borrowers. Some employees have raised the alarm up their chain of management, several staffers told The Post.

DOGE team members may not be properly authorized under the Privacy Act of 1974 to see the data, experts said. That law says federal agencies cannot disclose an individual’s private information from a set of government records without the written consent of the person.

Under the law, all federal agencies are required to safeguard even unclassified information and ensure that it does not reach third parties or “unauthorized persons,” said Robert S. Metzger, chair of the cybersecurity and privacy practice group at Rogers, Joseph and O’Donnell, a Washington law firm.

Wired has reported that a handful of 19-to-24-year-old engineers linked to Musk’s companies, with unclear titles, could be bypassing regular security protocols. Trump on his first day in office signed an executive order granting interim “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” security clearances to an unknown number of individuals on a list compiled by the White House counsel’s office. But people within the government have said they don’t know how much access the DOGE employees should have.

“When persons who are not federal employees and do not possess requisite credentials are allowed into key federal systems, they are gaining access to information to which they are not legally entitled,” Metzger said. “The idea that unvetted persons can go to any federal agency and demand access to information — if they can do that simply because of presidential directive or the mandate of the U.S. Digital Service, it’s frankly preposterous.”

DOGE staffers using their personal email accounts and not identifying themselves by their last names have been involved in recent weeks in interviewing government technology staffers, including at the GSA, according to two federal workers. That has also triggered legal concerns within the federal bureaucracy, in part because of fears that sensitive information could be divulged to private actors.

“We have very strict security protocols about how to deal with non-gov emails, non-gov participation, refusal to identify yourself in a meeting,” said one person, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “They’re asking you to share code you’ve written for partner agencies. We don’t know who these people are.”

In an all-hands meeting with his GSA staffers Monday, the director of the agency’s technology arm — Thomas Shedd, an eight-year alumnus of Tesla, Musk’s electric-car company — said the concealment of those names is deliberate.

“As I mentioned in the Slack channel, we’re afraid of those folks’ names getting out and their personal lives being disrupted, which is exactly what happened last week, which is really unfortunate for them,” Shedd said in the meeting, according to a recording obtained by The Post.

Another employee in that meeting raised concerns that Shedd’s plans to overhaul the login system for federal systems could run afoul of the 1974 privacy law. Shedd responded that the idea was for users to consent to sharing their data, but the employee’s concerns underscored how his vision needed greater clarification.

“If we had a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock. But we should push forward and see what we can do,” he said.

Shedd told employees they should be prepared for work demands to become “intense” after cuts across the government, prompting one to ask if it is illegal to work more than 40 hours a week. He told them to follow HR guidance.

The use of AI to analyze government data also raises privacy protection concerns, according to one official worried that DOGE will deploy the technology on a database overseen by their agency. The new administration has already accessed sensitive data from the database, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity given fear of reprisal.

“It’s like a wild, wild West in contrast to the measured approaches that federal agencies have been taking to mitigate the misuse or harm of AI,” the official said.

Throughout his career, Musk has frequently made aggressive business decisions with little regard for immediate legal fallout. His firings and mass layoffs of Twitter staff in 2022 invited lawsuits, including one that alleged the company had not abided by early-warning requirements for large-scale layoffs. Musk’s sudden firing of the company’s executive suite, including its CEO, upon his takeover led to a different lawsuit alleging that he had failed to issue tens of millions in severance they were owed.

Twitter was also sued for failing to pay millions in rent after Musk’s takeover, as the billionaire enacted steep cost-cutting.

Changes at U.S. agencies prompt legal concerns

Many of the officials being forced out of the administration have also registered legal objections to DOGE’s actions.

At USAID, officials have objected to what they characterize as an illegal attempt to reconstitute federal agencies established by statute. By summarily merging USAID with the State Department, Trump officials are bypassing Congress, which creates federal agencies and is the only entity empowered by law to close them.

“DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices to a group of employees without due process,” wrote Nicholas Gottlieb, the director of employee and labor relations at USAID, in an internal email. Gottlieb also wrote that he had urged the USAID administrator to “desist from further illegal activity.”

At the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces civil rights laws against workplace discrimination, one official warned in a widely circulated internal email Monday about the legality of recent government actions. Like other agencies, the EEOC has been under major pressures; Trump fired two of its three Democratic commissioners last week, and the acting chairwoman sought to roll back some of the Biden administration’s protections for transgender people, moves that several lawyers told The Post are illegal.

“I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and the Commission serves the people of the United States,” an administrative judge at the agency wrote to EEOC acting chair Andrea R. Lucas, in a previously unreported message. “If you want to continue following the illegal and unethical orders of our president and the unelected leader of ‘doge’ that’s on you.”

An EEOC staffer said that the email and a follow-up note from a colleague expressing support were deleted from their inboxes. An agency spokesperson declined to comment on internal emails but said that staff were reminded Monday not to send “unauthorized all-employee emails.”

Jocelyn Samuels, who was fired as an EEOC commissioner last week, said she was worried about reports of DOGE getting access to sensitive personnel records at agencies such as the OPM and Treasury, noting the legal safeguards that should be in place.

“Medical records and disability information are supposed to be maintained absolutely confidentially and only shared on a need-to-know basis,” said Samuels, who is weighing whether to challenge her firing.

Tony Romm, Emily Davies, John Hudson and Lisa Rein contributed to this report.

Shrink government, control data and — according to one official closely watching the billionaire’s DOGE — replace “the human workforce with machines.”

By Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Hannah Natanson and Jonathan O'Connell

Billionaire Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg on Washington has brought into focus his vision for a dramatically smaller and weaker government, as he and a coterie of aides move to control, automate — and substantially diminish — hundreds if not thousands of public functions.

In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified. Gain control of the flow of funds. And push hard — by means legal or otherwise — to eliminate jobs and programs not ideologically aligned with Trump administration goals.

The DOGE campaign has generated chaos on a near-hourly basis across the nation’s capital. But it appears carefully choreographed in service of a broader agenda to gut the civilian workforce, assert power over the vast federal bureaucracy and shrink it to levels unseen in at least 20 years. The aim is a diminished government that exerts less oversight over private business, delivers fewer services and comprises a smaller share of the U.S. economy — but is far more responsive to the directives of the president.

Though led by Musk’s team, this campaign is broadly supported by President Donald Trump and his senior leadership, who will be crucial to implementing its next stages. And while resistance to Musk has emerged in the federal courts, among federal employee unions and in pockets of Congress, allies say his critics underestimate the billionaire’s talent for ripping apart and transforming institutions — as has been proved in the scant time since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

“Chaos is often the birthplace of new orders, new systems and new paradigms. Washington doesn’t know how to deal with people who refuse to play the game by their rules,” said investor Shervin Pishevar, a longtime friend of Musk’s. “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are two different storms backed by a majority of Americans — one political, one technological. But both are tearing through the same rotting structure.”

So far, the “storm” has elicited deep anxiety. Late Friday, a federal judge in Washington declined to block DOGE access to Labor Department data but expressed concern about young DOGE staffers who “never had any training with respect to the handling of confidential information” accessing “the medical and financial records of millions of Americans.” And on Saturday, a federal judge in New York temporarily blocked DOGE staff from accessing sensitive payment systems at the Treasury Department, citing the risk of “irreparable harm.”

After the New York ruling, Musk defended DOGE methods, tweeting that his team had sought to add routine information to outgoing Treasury payments to help spot fraud — “super obvious and necessary changes” that “are being implemented by existing longtime career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE.”

DOGE’s early directives, its technology-driven approach and its interactions with the federal bureaucracy have provided an increasingly clear picture of its end goal for government — and clarified the stakes of Trump’s second term.

If Musk is successful, the federal workforce will be cut by at least 10 percent. A mass bid for voluntary resignations — blocked by a federal judge in Massachusetts who has scheduled a Monday hearing — is expected to be the first step before mass involuntary dismissals. Those are likely to include new hires or people with poor performance reviews, according to a plan laid out in memos issued over the last week by the Office of Personnel Management, which is now under Musk’s control. Unions this week advised workers to download their performance reviews and personnel files in preparation for having the information used against them.

As much as half the government’s nonmilitary real estate holdings are set to be liquidated, a move aimed at closing offices and increasing commute times amid sharp new limits on remote and telework. That is intended to depress workforce morale and increase attrition, according to four officials with knowledge of internal conversations at the General Services Administration, another agency taken over by Musk.

“We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,” said one senior official at GSA, which manages most federal property. “I think that’s the larger goal here, which is bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck.”

To replace the existing civil service, Musk’s allies are looking to technology. DOGE associates have been feeding vast troves of government records and databases into artificial intelligence tools, looking for unwanted federal programs and trying to determine which human work can be replaced by AI, machine-learning tools or even robots.

That push has been especially fierce at GSA, where DOGE staffers are telling managers that they plan to automate a majority of jobs, according to a person familiar with the situation.

“The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines,” said a U.S. official closely watching DOGE activity. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”

The defenestration of the federal workforce could clear the way for Trump and Musk to cancel federal spending or eliminate entire agencies without approval of Congress, an unprecedented expansion of executive power. This week, Tom Krause, a Musk ally, was installed to oversee an agency in the U.S. Treasury Department responsible for executing trillions of dollars in annual payments to the full array of recipients, from contractors and grantees to military families and retirees. The Bureau of Fiscal Service has long simply cut the checks as ordered by various federal agencies, but Krause’s appointment may change that.

Meanwhile, White House officials have begun preparing budget documents that seek to cut some agencies and departments by as much as 60 percent, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal deliberations. It’s unclear whether Trump will feel compelled to ask Congress to approve those cuts. Though the Constitution specifically invests spending power in Congress, Musk and Trump budget chief Russell Vought have argued they should have authority to slash spending unilaterally.

Taken together, experts say, these shifts amount to one of the most aggressive attempted overhauls of the federal government in American history.

David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown University, said the proposed cuts would return the modern civil service to the late 19th century, before the enactment of anti-corruption reforms. Super said the two biggest previous power grabs were President Richard M. Nixon’s 1973 attempt to cancel federal programs he didn’t like and President Harry S. Truman’s 1952 effort to nationalize the steel industry — both of which were struck down by the courts.

“The administration is doing the equivalent of these moves several times a day, every day,” Super said. “The division we’ve had since 1787 is checks and balances — that no one branch is preeminent, but that all three are required to work together. The vision here is an extremely strong executive and a subordinate judiciary and Congress.”

Musk’s defenders say he and Trump are applying the long-standing idea of “zero based budgeting” — taking all spending to zero and then rebuilding from scratch — to the federal government for the first time. The moves are also characteristic of Musk’s boundary-pushing management style. When he took over Twitter, he fired more than 75 percent of the staff. He also has had a preference for a lean workforce at Tesla, an opposition to unions at all his companies and a habitual willingness everywhere to push past norms and rules.

Avik Roy, founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that promotes free markets, said the aggressive measures are justified in part by the severity of the nation’s deteriorating fiscal picture and the staggering rise in regulations during the Biden administration.

“There’s been this massive freak-out over what Trump and Elon are doing. But frankly it’s not been an evenhanded narrative. Because, when Biden was in charge, when Obama was in charge, they did a lot of things that were shot down 9-0 by the courts and there was not the degree of concern over breaking laws and precedent,” Roy said, pointing to President Joe Biden’s unilateral effort to cancel student loan debt.

Of Trump and Musk, Roy said: “They’re trying to say, ‘Let’s start with a clean slate, figure out which programs meet important objectives, and which are fraud and abuse.’ How much of that will survive legal challenge remains to be seen, but if some get knocked down and some lead to more government efficiency, that’s a good thing.”

Initially, few expected Musk to cause such seismic shifts. Musk said he wanted to remake the federal government from scratch — to “delete” all that he viewed wasn’t working and start over — but few took that ambition literally, said Joe Lonsdale, an investor and Palantir co-founder who is friends with Musk.

In the weeks after the election, Trump said Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” would be a nongovernmental entity providing nonbinding advice to the administration. Some Trump advisers described it as a place to sideline the overzealous billionaires who wanted to help Trump but knew nothing about how Washington worked.

But within hours of taking office, Trump signed an executive order placing DOGE squarely inside the White House, in an office responsible for information technology, the U.S. Digital Service.

Within days, it became clear that Musk’s ambitions were not merely to remake government technology, as some speculated, but to revamp the entire federal bureaucracy. DOGE co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur and former GOP presidential candidate, quickly left the project amid differences over Musk’s plans to dismantle government by foregrounding technology and bypassing Congress.

“Everyone in the DC laptop class was extremely arrogant,” Lonsdale said. “These people don’t realize there are levels of competence and boldness that are far beyond anything in their sphere.”

The DOGE playbook has been the same everywhere, according to more than two dozen federal workers with direct knowledge of DOGE activities, as well as records obtained by The Post. The workers — employed at OPM, GSA, FEMA, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Education Department — spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

DOGE comes in fast, going around lower-level IT staffers, who typically raise privacy concerns but are overruled by senior leaders who fold to DOGE’s demands. DOGE team members are then given superpowered user accounts enabling them to access and edit reams of government data with little to no oversight, the people said. That allows them to make changes at lightning speed, bypassing typical security protocols and alarming government employees tasked with keeping sensitive data secure.

At OPM, for example, DOGE team members gained the ability to delete, modify or export the personal information of millions of federal workers and federal job applicants. After The Post reported on security concerns over such access, OPM’s interim leadership on Friday directed DOGE agents to be removed from the sensitive personnel system.

Federal workers who have been in meetings with DOGE staffers say their driving mission seems to be slashing spending — both by canceling government contracts and eliminating jobs. They often appear tense, as if facing significant pressure from their bosses to move fast, said a person who has worked with them.

At the GSA, acting administrator Stephen Ehikian — a former Silicon Valley executive — and other Trump appointees have pushed aggressively to cut costs by at least 50 percent, in part by eliminating half of all federal real estate nationwide. That measure was outlined in an email Tuesday to real estate staff from Michael Peters, the new head of the public buildings service.

The messaging has appeared deliberately designed to increase attrition. In an email Tuesday, Ehikian warned of a “very high probability” that the 2,000 people who live more than 50 miles from a service station would be assigned farther away as part of his effort to reorganize the agency. Staff would not know whether they had been reassigned — say, from North Carolina to Colorado — until days after they had to decide whether to accept Musk’s offer to resign with eight months pay.

The Education Department may be furthest along the DOGE path to demolition. DOGE staffers there have begun using AI to analyze the department’s financial data, aiming to cancel every contract that is not required by law or essential to the department’s operations, according to two employees.

On Friday, records obtained by The Post show DOGE staffer Ethan Shaotran editing the department’s website. He also started putting together a new webpage that will track the cancellation of Biden-era grants that pushed “divisive and toxic ideologies through the K-12 system,” according to the records.

Under a heading called “Collected Lowlights,” Shaotran listed nixed programs: A “JEDI” (Justice, Equity Diversity & Inclusion) training for teachers; workshops on “Decolonizing the curriculum” and “Becoming an anti-racist educator”; and “Using taxpayer funds to establish an ‘Equity & Social Justice’ center.’”

“It’s an incredible snatch and grab blitzkrieg,” one Education Department official said. “We’re like the French in the Maginot Line on the border with Germany, and they’re like going around us through Belgium. They’re just … they’re so fast.”

A nascent resistance may yet constrain Musk’s ambitions. In addition to multiple lawsuits filed to limit DOGE’s access to sensitive federal material, Congress may object to entire federal agencies being abolished without its consent. And the civilian workforce has viewed “buyout” offers skeptically, with unions telling members who work from home not to accept any offers to resign while they plan a legal challenge.

But people who have known Musk for years say his single-minded willingness to break rules in service of a larger mission is unparalleled. He once told Tesla employees they would lose stock options if they joined a union — a comment deemed an unlawful threat by the National Labor Relations Board and the courts. He has tussled with the Federal Aviation Administration over launching rockets without proper permission and paid fines from the Environmental Protection Agency for dumping wastewater on protected Texas wetlands.

For now, most congressional Republicans are supporting Trump and Musk’s transformation of the federal government. But even some conservatives and longtime Trump allies have expressed reservations about their methods.

“It’s a wrecking ball, rather than a scalpel here. Not that I’d complain about that — I’ve always said we need a wrecking ball,” said Stephen Moore, an outside adviser to Trump who has been working to shrink government since the Reagan era.

“But how much authority does the Constitution really give the president to completely reorganize the government on his own?” Moore said. “We’re moving toward an imperial presidency. And whether or not that’s a good thing remains to be seen.”

Emily Davies contributed to this report.

The unusual request could put sensitive data about millions of American taxpayers in the hands of Trump political appointees.

By Jacob Bogage and Jeff Stein

Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is seeking access to a heavily guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country, according to three people familiar with the activities, sparking alarm within the tax agency.

Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is considering a memorandum of understanding that would give officials from DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency — broad access to tax-agency systems, property and datasets. Among them is the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which enables tax agency employees to access IRS accounts — including personal identification numbers — and bank information. It also lets them enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices, collection documents and other records.

According to a draft of the memorandum obtained by The Washington Post, DOGE software engineer Gavin Kliger is set to work at the IRS for 120 days, though the tax agency and the White House can renew his deployment for the same duration. His primary goal at the IRS is to provide engineering assistance and IT modernization consulting.

The agreement requires that Kliger maintain confidentiality of tax return information, shield it from unauthorized access and destroy any such information shared with him upon the completion of his IRS deployment.

IDRS access is extremely limited — taxpayers who have had their information wrongfully disclosed or even inspected are entitled by law to monetary damages — and the request for DOGE access has raised deep concern within the IRS, according to three people familiar with internal agency deliberations who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Kliger had not been granted IDRS access as of Sunday evening, according to a person with firsthand knowledge of his movement and access at the tax agency, as acting IRS commissioner Doug O’Donnell had yet to finalize the memorandum that would permit him to do more detailed work.

O’Donnell’s predecessor, Danny Werfel, resigned on Jan. 20, after Trump announced plans to replace him with former congressman Billy Long (R-Missouri). Long has not yet been confirmed by the Senate.

The news comes as roughly 150 million taxpayers prepare to file returns by the April 15 deadline. In his first term, Trump openly mused about sending IRS agents after political opponents, leaving agency officials on edge about the IRS’s independence.

The tax agency’s systems are widely considered antiquated — many were built using computer coding language from the 1960s — and overhauling the agency’s IT is in line with DOGE’s mandate to modernize government technology. IRS contractors are generally provided system access to repair or maintain IDRS and similar data systems.

But it’s highly unusual to grant political appointees access to personal taxpayer data, or even programs adjacent to that data, experts say. IRS commissioners traditionally do not have IDRS access. The same goes for the national taxpayer advocate, the agency’s internal consumer watchdog, according to Nina Olson, who served in the role from 2001 to 2019.

“The information that the IRS has is incredibly personal. Someone with access to it could use it and make it public in a way, or do something with it, or share it with someone else who shares it with someone else, and your rights get violated,” Olson said.

A Trump administration official said DOGE personnel needed IDRS access because DOGE staff are working to “eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, and improve government performance to better serve the people.”

The official said the “DOGE mission … to bring much-needed efficiency to our bureaucracy” is being carried out “legally and with the appropriate security clearances.”

A security clearance is not a sufficient credential for access to taxpayer systems, according to IRS procedures. IDRS access is governed by compelling needs for tax administration, not national security.

“IDRS users are authorized to access only those accounts required to accomplish their official duties,” according to IRS policy.

In a statement, White House spokesman Harrison Fields told The Post: “Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long. It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it. DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard earned tax dollars on.”

Representatives from the Treasury Department and IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kliger arrived unannounced at IRS headquarters on Thursday and was named senior adviser to the acting commissioner. IRS officials were told to treat Kliger and other DOGE officials as contractors, two people familiar said.

A White House official said Sunday, however, that DOGE personnel at the IRS were full agency employees and not contractors.

Kliger met with Ken Corbin, the IRS’s chief of taxpayer services, and Heather Maloy, the agency’s top enforcement official, during his first day at the agency’s headquarters, according to several of the people familiar with the meetings. The agency is preparing for Trump-ordered layoffs, as soon as this week, that could hit roughly 10,000 probationary employees. Kliger has not returned to IRS headquarters since those initial meetings.

Officials working with the U.S. DOGE Service are pushing agencies to turn over information on where people work, study and live.

By Rachel Siegel, Hannah Natanson and Laura Meckler

The Trump administration is using personal data normally protected from dissemination to find undocumented immigrants where they work, study and live, often with the goal of removing them from their housing and the workforce.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, officials are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing, according to multiple staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. Affiliates from the U.S. DOGE Service are also looking to kick out existing mixed-status households, vowing to ensure that undocumented immigrants do not benefit from public programs, even if they live with citizens or other eligible family members.

The push extends across agencies: Last week, the Social Security Administration entered the names and Social Security numbers of more than 6,000 mostly Latino immigrants into a database it uses to track dead people, effectively slashing their ability to receive benefits or work legally in the United States. Federal tax and immigration enforcement officials recently reached a deal to share confidential tax data for people suspected of being in the United States illegally.

The result is an unprecedented effort to use government data to support the administration’s immigration policies. That includes information people have reported about themselves for years while paying taxes or applying for housing — believing that information would not be used against them for immigration purposes. Legal experts say the data sharing is a breach of privacy rules that help ensure trust in government programs and services.

“It’s not only about one subgroup of people, it’s really about all of us,” said Tanya Broder, senior counsel for health and economic justice policy at the left-leaning National Immigration Law Center. “Everyone cares about their privacy. Nobody wants their health-care information or tax information broadcast and used to go after us.”

The White House did not reply to a request for comment. In response to questions, a DHS official said, “The government is finally doing what it should have all along: sharing information across the federal government to solve problems.”

“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, as well as identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense,” the department’s assistant secretary for public affairs said.

President Donald Trump campaigned on promises of the most deportations in U.S. history and has moved forcefully since his inauguration to pursue that goal, including reopening family detention centers, moving migrants to the former prison for terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel alleged gang members without a hearing. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem has also moved to rescind temporary protected status for Venezuelans and pare back protections for Haitian migrants.

The push is more extensive than administration officials have made public, staffers across multiple federal agencies said, mostly speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the policies publicly. It’s not clear whether or how a growing list of names or addresses would immediately translate into more deportations.

But the ramp-up is clearly starting. DHS had already asked the Social Security Administration for help with immigration enforcement and tracking down fraudulent use of Social Security numbers, according to a government official briefed on the matter. At the IRS, officials agreed this month to share data with DHS, which indicated it might seek to use tax information to find as many as 7 million people suspected of being in the country illegally, The Post has reported. The acting IRS commissioner resigned after the deal was signed.

Other federal employees have raised concerns that DOGE officials are bulldozing through guardrails meant to keep information accessible to only a small number of people and used only for specific purposes. That includes information people reported months ago, not knowing how it would eventually be used.

The push to link agency data with the White House’s policy goals comes from the top. Last month, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate “information silos.” The order said the move would boost the government’s “ability to detect overpayments and fraud.”

At HUD, Secretary Scott Turner announced an agreement in March to facilitate data sharing with DHS and ensure that taxpayer funds “are not used to harbor or benefit illegal aliens.” Turner told Fox News Digital that “those that are here illegally, that are living in HUD-funded public housing, we’re putting on notice.” He has said there are 24,000 “ineligible” people in HUD-assisted housing.

HUD knows which households include undocumented people because all applicants are required to report their status when seeking assistance. Undocumented immigrants are prorated out of the amount of assistance households receive but have been allowed to live in public housing for years. An undocumented grandparent or parent sometimes lives in public housing with other eligible family members.

The effort to locate and kick out mixed-status households is being led by Mike Mirski, a DOGE staffer at HUD who plans to target cities such as New York and Chicago first, according to one employee. The power to mine that information effectively lets Mirski “decide who is a citizen and who is not a citizen,” the employee said, adding that those decisions would be based on flawed analyses of datasets he doesn’t know how to use.

Mirski did not respond to a request for comment.

In most scenarios, HUD does not have the authority to knock on people’s doors and remove them from housing. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement and law enforcement do. Multiple people close to the department said public housing authorities are on alert, hosting webinars and internal meetings about what to do if immigration officials arrive en masse. They often conclude they have little recourse but to call the police.

In a statement, HUD spokeswoman Kasey Lovett said that “there are tens of thousands of ‘ineligible’ individuals in HUD housing, which more than likely translates to illegal aliens.” She added that the department currently serves only 1 in 4 American families who need help.

“Secretary Turner is using every tool at his disposal to reverse the wrongdoings and negligence of the Biden administration and is making certain that under the leadership of President Trump, American citizens are the only priority,” Lovett said.

At Social Security, DOGE representatives have spent the past month seeking access to data and asking questions that would allow them to ascertain people’s citizenship status, according to two staffers with direct knowledge of DOGE’s activities who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The team gained increasing access to claimants’ full names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, mailing addresses, contact information, bank details and more.

In March, DOGE advisers accessed a dataset with highly sensitive personal information, including applicants’ driver’s licenses, citizenship status and various other markers collected by DHS, which it shares with Social Security under existing interagency agreements. They later asked career employees how to understand, interpret and use Social Security data and wage data. Specifically, the staffer said, the data would permit DOGE officials to identify individuals who are working in the country without a Social Security number, a strong indication of illegal status.

Career staffers fielding the DOGE team’s questions grew increasingly uncomfortable. Employees asked themselves, “Is it better to try to mediate and correct from the inside, knowing that we are aiding them in an effort to track down noncitizens?” the staffer said. “Or is it better to wipe our hands clean of it, knowing they’re going to do it anyways but in a way that is likely to impact a greater number of people — some of whom very well could be citizens?”

The issue became moot on March 21 when a judge temporarily forbade DOGE team members from accessing sensitive Social Security data, leading the agency to boot all DOGE representatives from its systems. But in the days since, DOGE members have repeatedly asked to get back inside the datasets, which would be in violation of the court order, according to a staffer and records obtained by The Post.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Social Security said that it would work with DHS to “use all the tools available, including using data exchanges to their fullest potential, to protect all Americans.”

At the Education Department, officials are also seeking information that could be used to help immigration authorities find people to deport.

In February, the administration opened investigations into whether five universities properly handled allegations of antisemitism. Education Department political appointees told the attorneys handling the cases to ask the schools for the names and nationalities of protesters against Israel’s war in Gaza, according to documents and three attorneys with the Office for Civil Rights who have direct knowledge of the situation, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the cases publicly.

The move appears to echo a plan laid out in an essay in the Washington Examiner in December by Max Eden, then a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and now a White House official. The essay suggested that the department’s civil rights office could find “the identities of every single foreign student who supported the protests,” and then immigration authorities could “revoke every single one of the protesting foreign students’ visas.”

Asked why the department was seeking the data on protesters and whether it related to immigration, Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said the information was necessary to assess how the universities handled the antisemitism cases. His statement did not directly address the question of deportations.

Jacob Bogage and Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report.

Across the government, officials are rehiring federal workers who were forced out or encouraged to resign.

By Hannah Natanson, Adam Taylor, Meryl Kornfield, Rachel Siegel and Scott Dance

Early this spring, the Food and Drug Administration fired nearly 50 workers in the Office of Regulatory Policy — only to turn around and order them back to the office with one day’s notice.

After dismissing thousands of probationary employees for fabricated “performance” issues, the IRS reversed course and told them to show up to work in late May.

And some staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development, dismantled in the first days of the Trump administration by a gleeful Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the U.S. DOGE Service, checked their inboxes this month to find an unexpected offer: Would you consider returning — to work for the State Department?

Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.

Since Musk left the White House last week, he and Trump have fallen out bitterly, sniping at each other in public over the cost of Trump’s sweeping tax legislation and government subsidies for Musk’s businesses. But even before that, the administration was working to undo some of DOGE’s highest-profile actions.

Trump officials are trying to recover not only people who were fired, but also thousands of experienced senior staffers who are opting for a voluntary exit as the administration rolls out a second resignation offer. Thousands more staff are returning in fits and starts as a conflicting patchwork of court decisions overturn some of Trump’s large-scale firings, especially his Valentine’s Day dismissal of all probationary workers, those with one or two years of government service and fewer job protections. A federal judge in April ordered the president to reinstate probationary workers dismissed from 20 federal agencies, although a few days later the Supreme Court — in a different case — halted another judge’s order to reinstate a smaller group.

Some fired federal employees, especially those at retirement age or who have since secured jobs in the private sector, are proving reluctant to return. So the administration is seeking work-arounds and stopgaps, including asking remaining staff to serve in new roles, work overtime or volunteer to fill vacancies, according to interviews with 18 federal workers across eight agencies and messages obtained by The Washington Post. A Post review found recent messy re-hirings at agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, the IRS, the State Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In some cases, the government is posting new online job listings very similar to positions it recently vacated, a Post review of USAJobs found.

The ever-shifting personnel changes are yet another strain on a workforce already weary of Trump-induced uncertainty, said current and former employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“They wanted to show they were gutting the government, but there was no thought about what parts might be worth keeping,” said one FDA staffer who was fired and rehired. “Now it feels like it was all just a game to them.”

A White House official said in an interview that it is no secret Trump arrived in Washington determined to streamline the government. During that downsizing, the official acknowledged, some people were fired who shouldn’t have been. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss a complex issue that spans many federal agencies.

“Each agency has made an appropriate determination as to who should be on the payroll in the respective agency,” the official said. “If by chance mistakes were made and critical employees were dismissed, each individual agency is working diligently to bring these people back to work to continue the adequate functions of the federal government.”

In statements, some agencies also admitted to errors, while promising the government is working to fix them.

“During this process,” said an Agriculture Department spokesperson, “USDA has been transparent about any mistakes that were made.”

‘They need some of the expertise’

The administration has already had to race to undo its own cuts. In February, the Agriculture Department launched a campaign to rehire bird flu response workers after avian influenza sent egg prices soaring. That same month, the Trump administration fired nearly 17 percent of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s workforce, temporarily imperiling the safety and security of America’s 5,000 nuclear warheads — before hiring them back after an outcry.

In recent weeks, other agencies have seen similar patterns.

At the start of April, the FDA let go of thousands, including laboratory staff, librarians and those who helped manage the budget. The dismissals hit particularly hard at the Office of Drug Policy, the Office of Regulatory Policy and teams that worked on Freedom of Information Act requests and patent extensions, according to interviews with eight current and former FDA employees.

But three weeks later, fired workers began getting calls on their personal cellphones — and soon, a message to their personal emails: They were all due back.

The “Notice of Reduction in Force (RIF) issued to you … is officially RESCINDED [and] you will not be separated from employment,” read an email sent to terminated staff in May and obtained by The Post. “You are expected to return to duty the next business day following your receipt of this notice.”

One FDA worker said she complied only because she hadn’t found other employment yet.

“Being back feels like a funeral,” she said. “Morale is terrible. Everyone is stressed and feels the absence of our colleagues. … I’m looking for another job.”

At the IRS, managers received a notice on May 19, a Monday, that all probationary workers would be coming back to the office on Friday, according to a copy obtained by The Post. The turnaround was so swift that some probationary staff probably wouldn’t have a desk or a laptop initially, the announcement acknowledged: “If a seat assignment is not available … your employees should begin teleworking until local management secures a seat assignment for them.”

Asked about the FDA’s back-and-forth, a Health and Human Services spokesperson wrote in a statement that “any reassignment or restructuring is being done to strengthen outcomes. Our restructuring is delivering leaner and better government services to the American people.” The IRS did not respond to requests for comment.

At USAID, thousands have been out of work since early this year, when their agency became ground zero for Trump and Musk’s overhaul of government. But at the start of this month, some ex-USAID officials began hearing from former colleagues about potential new jobs at the State Department, which has assumed responsibility for distributing foreign aid, once USAID’s task. The outreach soon morphed into formal offers, with an application deadline of May 19.

One former senior USAID official said she decided to go for it.

“I was like, well, I definitely don’t want to work for this administration, but, yes, I need a job, so put my name down,” she said. “Why not? I have nothing to lose.”

Overall, few USAID workers are expected to return. According to documents shared with The Post, less than 200 total positions were advertised, a tiny fraction of the roughly 10,000 people employed by USAID before it was torn apart. Though the Trump administration has cut more than 80 percent of USAID programs, the State Department has taken over the remainder, controlling billions in foreign assistance.

A State Department spokesperson, who declined to be named, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio “approved the hiring of a small number of positions … in connection with the Department assuming responsibility for limited former USAID programming.

‘I’m not risking it again’

As other agencies grapple with fallout from dismissals and departures, managers are leaning on remaining employees to fill the gaps — and in some cases, hiring new workers to replace those who have left.

At the National Weather Service, waves of DOGE-led early retirements and probationary firings left some local forecasting offices without enough staff to maintain 24/7 operations, while others lost the ability to launch as many weather balloons, a key forecasting tool. In one Kentucky office, the agency had to stagger shifts ahead of a tornado outbreak to ensure enough meteorologists were working to cover the overnight threat.

Last month, as meteorologists and Democrats in Congress warned that staffing cuts could leave the Weather Service unable to fulfill its mission of saving lives and protecting property from extreme weather, the agency sought to make up for the cuts by reassigning staff from across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Weather Service director Ken Graham, meanwhile, assured employees throughout the spring that the agency was close to securing a public safety exemption to the government-wide hiring freeze.

It finally arrived Monday, Graham told Weather Service staff in an email, obtained by The Post, that began: “Big news! Fantastic news!” The agency will soon post job listings for 126 meteorologist, hydrologist, physical scientist and electronics technician roles, which Graham described as “a targeted number of critical positions” that would “further stabilize front line operations.”

“Together, these hiring authorities and staffing flexibilities will allow us to continue meeting our foundational mission, including issuing timely and accurate forecasts and warnings,” he added. The agency confirmed the hiring in a statement and said it was part of a series of steps to address staff losses.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, some offices saw so many people take Trump’s early resignation offer that officials are now seeking to redeploy staff to cover the absences. Community Planning and Development, a HUD department that responds to wildfires and hurricanes and administers billions of dollars in grants, is especially strained. That department’s Office of Field Operations has 13 field offices with two or fewer employees left, according to an internal presentation from May 27 obtained by The Post. More than 30 field offices have broader staffing concerns, the presentation showed.

Department staff sent a “voluntary reassignment” offer to employees within Community Planning and Development, where about 40 percent of employees had already resigned. Headcount dropped from 936 employees at the start of Trump’s term to 560 by May, according to a staffer who attended the presentation.

Officials “learned that certain Regions and Field Offices have lost serious staffing capabilities,” according to a May 23 message to staff obtained by The Post, which noted the reassignment offers are meant to “immediately cover skill gaps and critical functions.” Staffers would be required to work in person but will not have moving costs covered, according to the employee.

“In some cases, supervisors are left with no staff, or staff are left with no supervisors, or offices are left with nobody to keep programs delivered,” the email to staff read.

A HUD spokesperson wrote in a statement that, given roughly 2,300 employees are “taking the opportunity to find a new path, it only makes sense that the department would have a plan in place to ensure that mission critical functions and the highest quality service to rural, tribal and urban communities remain uninterrupted.”

Within the FDA, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research is struggling to recover from the loss of too many “timekeepers,” personnel who handle pay, leave and travel logistics, emails show. A plaintive message sent to the center’s staff in early May noted the department “is still working on a long-term solution for our timekeeping needs.” It asked for volunteers.

“If folks are willing to be trained as a timekeeper or have prior timekeeping experience (does not need to be recent),” the missive said, “please respond back to this email to let us know if you are interested.”

In other agencies, managers are having to fix problems from Trump- or DOGE-driven restructurings.

At the Social Security Administration’s call center in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, IT workers were told by managers in mid-April that they needed to request a transfer or face possible firing, said Barri Sue Bryant, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2809. Nearly all of the 40-plus workers in that office did so, sending their laptops and spare equipment to the agency’s Baltimore headquarters and awaiting a new assignment while the union attempted to explain to leadership how essential these employees were, Bryant said.

“We are critically understaffed in all of our departments,” Bryant wrote in an email to leadership. “Having systems and employees down is not contributing to the goals of this agency.”

But management would soon find out on their own.

A specialized scanner that can quickly input forms and scan barcodes broke down and was unusable for a day. A customer service representative who was supposed to answer the 800 number couldn’t take calls for three days while her computer was in disrepair.

“It really sent everyone for a loop,” Bryant said.

After three days, the agency told the union the decision had been reversed. The employees got back their equipment and resumed their normal jobs in Wilkes-Barre.

Asked about the IT workers, Social Security provided an emailed statement from an unnamed official, whom it declined to identify. The statement did not address the reassignments but criticized “the fake news media, specifically the Washington Post” for “pushing a false narrative about Social Security. The truth is that President Trump is protecting and strengthening Social Security just like he promised.”

Federal workers caught in similar situations described being on an unsettling roller coaster.

One USDA safety inspector remembered answering a call from their manager one weekend to learn they were fired for “performance,” even though they had received positive reviews, according to personnel documents reviewed by The Post. But by Monday — the day before the employee was supposed to turn in their badge — the manager called back to say the termination was rescinded.

In April, when the Trump administration offered early retirement, the employee leaped at it and was soon placed on administrative leave.

A few days later, former colleagues reached out: The government was now looking to fill the person’s job again. Did they want back in?

“I was like, yep, nope, I’m not risking it again,” the employee said. “I’m gonna try to take the money and try to find something else.”

Early resignation offers and other programs have reduced the workforce, but critics say the moves are also wasting money.

By Meryl Kornfield, Hannah Natanson and Laura Meckler

The government is paying more than 154,000 federal employees not to work as part of the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, according to two administration officials.

The number, which has not been previously reported, accounts for workers at dozens of agencies who took offers from the government as of June to get paid through Sept. 30 — the end of the fiscal year — or the end of 2025 and then voluntarily leave government, significantly reducing the size of several major agencies, according to two Office of Personnel Management officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the administration’s plans to scale down government.

The buyouts have rapidly sped up the process of slashing the federal workforce at an unprecedented rate, the officials said. But critics have argued that the administration’s tactics of using buyouts and administrative leave have been wasteful because the public is paying tens of thousands of employees not to work for months.

The two officials could not say how much the government is spending on salaries for employees who are resigning. The timing of buyouts has varied by agency, employees remain on their agencies’ payrolls as long as they are on leave, and some workers also got additional payments through other retirement programs. The officials also could not say how much they expect the cuts will save in payroll costs in the long term.

The employees who have resigned amount to about 6.7 percent of the government’s civilian workforce of 2.3 million people.

“Ultimately, the deferred resignation program was not only legal, it provided over 150,000 civil servants a dignified and generous departure from the federal government,” OPM spokeswoman McLaurine Pinover said in a statement. “It also delivered incredible relief to the American taxpayer. No previous administration has gotten even close to saving American taxpayers this amount of money in such a short amount of time.”

The White House declined to comment.

Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations have separately estimated that the government has spent billions of dollars paying workers who are on leave either through the voluntary departure program or because of ongoing litigation over mass firings, according to a report released Thursday. The Democrats, led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), argue that the U.S. DOGE Service’s race to slim government this spring led to mistakes and waste, estimating that the whole enterprise cost the government $21.7 billion.

In letters to agencies’ inspectors general Thursday, Democrats requested a review of the costs of DOGE cuts, including how much agencies spent paying workers who were sidelined or resigned.

Some agencies have publicly shared resignation numbers for their staffing changes, though the full scope of the buyouts has largely remained unclear until now. A Washington Post canvass of agencies and internal records counted 14 agencies that had shed more than 105,000 employees through early resignation offers. The higher figure from the Trump administration accounts for some agencies that The Post’s tally did not.

The administration and other Republicans seeking to reduce the footprint of government have argued that agencies have become too bloated and must be slimmed. They have projected long-term savings from the workforce purge once workers are officially off the books. Salaries make up a small fraction of overall spending, though, with most of the almost $7 trillion annual budget going to expensive health care and retirement programs.

Meanwhile, the government has spent about the same amount of money this year as it did last year to this point. Daily Treasury statements, which show the government’s ongoing expenses, are slightly higher now than last year. Expenditures on federal salaries are up about 5 percent this year compared with last year, according to federal spending trackers kept by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Researchers say that could be due in part to more hires last year under the Biden administration. But also, many federal workers who took voluntary exits are still getting paid.

The administration’s reliance on paid leave and buyouts to trim payrolls is highly unusual, especially because of the costs associated with these methods, experts say.

Cristin Dorgelo, a senior adviser at the Office of Management and Budget under President Joe Biden, said that normally the government would take a number of steps before placing workers on administrative leave to avoid the costs.

“It’s sort of hard to overstate how inappropriate and unprecedented this is,” Dorgelo said.

“It’s ridiculous. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Michelle Bercovici, an employment attorney who specializes in representing federal employees. “It seems so wasteful.”

Exactly how much the various buyouts and leave programs are costing is still unclear.

Blumenthal’s investigators estimated that the government has spent $14.7 billion paying workers who took buyouts, but the figure is based on multiplying the average federal salary against a rough estimate of 200,000 employees who left.

The report also calculated that the government has spent an additional $6.1 billion paying workers who were placed on leave during litigation over attempts to fire them, and $611 million for workers at the Education Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, U.S. Agency for International Development and U.S. Agency for Global Media, which have seen prolonged legal battles over plans to dramatically shrink or shutter these agencies.

“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “As my PSI investigation has shown, DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money. I urge Inspectors General to take up our investigation’s findings and initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s careless actions.”

‘Why do I get out of bed today?’

In some cases, federal workers have been on administrative leave since the very early days of President Donald Trump’s term.

One woman in her early 50s saw her job at the Education Department as the culmination of nearly 30 years of work in her field. Being put on administration leave — where she cannot work but is still being paid — has been gutting.

“My work is my whole identity,” said the employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “I’m also sensitive to the fact that the American public would say, ‘What are you crying about? You’re getting paid.’”

But she doesn’t see it that way. She can’t think of another position that would be as fulfilling. And her options for new employment once her pay runs out are limited by her family situation, which requires her to stay in the D.C. area.

She has spent her time working out at a local gym — cardio, a little yoga, a little swimming. But most of her days are spent in frustration — and depression.

“I will sometimes wake up and say, ‘Why do I get out of bed today?’” she said.

But the paychecks kept coming, and her federal health insurance remains in effect. Her annual salary is more than $130,000, which means the government has so far paid her more than $65,000 not to work. She’s also racked up three weeks or so of vacation since her last day of work.

Other federal workers were perfectly happy to be paid to leave.

Brian Griffin, a former marketing specialist at the Agriculture Department, had been planning to retire in December anyway.

He wasn’t quite ready to leave at the start of the year. Griffin thought his peers had been overworked for a long time, and he loved what he did. But the administration was threatening mass firings and was telling remote workers like Griffin that they needed to start reporting to offices. So instead of sticking it out for the rest of the year, Griffin took the deferred resignation offer and has been on leave since May, still drawing his $132,000 salary.

“When they are offering me full pay and benefits from May through September, you have to be kind of silly to say no to that,” Griffin said.

Another Agriculture Department employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, had worked in Kansas as a safety inspector but has been on paid leave since April.

He was fired, then rehired, as a probationary employee over Valentine’s Day weekend. The chaos left him convinced the government was no longer a safe employer. When a second resignation offer came in April, he jumped.

He slept through most of the first few days on paid leave, comforted by his three cats. He watched improv comedy, crafters on YouTube and a Dungeons and Dragons game played by comedians.

Eventually, he started looking for a new job, since his pay would run out in September. He applied to more than 130 positions over the next three months before he ultimately landed an offer from an animal health company. The salary and benefits were far higher than his $61,000 federal job — so much so that his wife could stop working, the inspector realized. Plus, his two salaries would overlap for six weeks.

Now he’s spent several hundred dollars on new fishing gear, dining out, new car tires and a pool pass — all while the government sends him a full paycheck to fish and watch the sun set.

“As much as I don’t want to admit it,” he recalled saying to his wife, “this ended up being a blessing in disguise.”

Federal workers describe struggling with panic attacks, depression, suicidal thoughts. “Why doesn’t anyone care?”

By William Wan and Hannah Natanson

For this story, Post reporters interviewed more than 30 current and former federal employees. To confirm those workers’ stories, they reviewed agency badge credentials, layoff notices and internal agency emails. Sources who spoke to The Post anonymously did so to avoid retribution from their agency or the Trump administration.

The president had called federal employees “crooked” and “dishonest,” and his deputies had vowed to purge them from government and make them suffer. And now, on the sixth day of Trump’s second term, a federal health researcher was missing.

Her husband searched every room of their Baltimore townhouse, calling her name. “Caitlin?”

Caitlin Cross-Barnet had struggled with depression, and now her husband, Mike, found her on their narrow, third-floor fire escape. As he tried to coax her back in, she replied: “It’s not high enough to jump.”

On the 26th day of Trump’s term, Richard Midgette, 28, was fired from his IT job at Yellowstone National Park. He drove to the only bridge in his town, stopping just past its edge. From the car, he listened to the rushing of the water and, for the first time, contemplated whether to end his life.

On the 30th day of Trump’s term, Monique Lockett, 53, tried to block out the stress. The U.S. DOGE Service was demanding access to sensitive databases she worked on at the Social Security Administration. Her top boss had just been forced to resign, and rumors of layoffs were brewing. Monique settled into her cubicle just before 8 a.m., then slumped to the floor.

When Trump took office in January, 2.4 million people worked for the federal government, making it America’s largest employer. In four months, Trump and a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk have hacked off chunks of government in the name of efficiency, with tactics rarely seen in public or private industry. The cuts so far represent roughly 6 percent of the federal workforce, but they have effectively wiped out entire departments and agencies, such as AmeriCorps and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was slashed 85 percent; the Education Department was cut in half.

In response, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said, “President Trump wants all Americans to thrive under his administration, and he has done more than any president to end the chronic disease crisis in our country.” She added, “It is an honor, not a right, to serve your country in a taxpayer-funded position, and workers unaligned with the American people’s agenda can take part in the growing private sector.”

Trump has blamed federal workers for “destroying this country.” He and his officials have vowed to eliminate employees promoting diversity, to force those who “aren’t doing their job” back to offices five days a week, and to slash $1 trillion from the federal budget — a still-distant goal, even with the layoffs. And more hits may be coming: Republicans in Congress are proposing to save $50 billion by forcing government workers to pay more into retirement benefits while shrinking the value of those benefits.

Many workers said they believe cruelty is part of the plan.

In a 2023 recording surfaced by ProPublica, Trump budget director Russell Vought said, “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.”

Vought, who was giving a private speech for a pro-Trump think tank, concluded: “We want to put them in trauma.”

‘Suddenly it felt like it was unraveling’

Before her husband found her on the fire escape that chilly morning, Caitlin, 55, had spent 12 years working for the federal government.

She studied creative writing in college and graduate school and took a job in 1994 teaching at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles — an elite private school attended by children of Hollywood executives. But the work felt like a betrayal of her values. Instead of fighting inequality, she told friends, she was perpetuating it.

So, at 35, Caitlin quit and moved with her husband and children to Baltimore to study sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She drove around with bags of new socks in her trunk for people on her commute who were homeless.

Within days of Trump’s second inauguration, the government was removing gender and minority health data from its websites. “All the progress she worked for, suddenly it felt like it was unraveling,” said one co-worker, who, like many federal employees in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

The cuts were not the only reason for her despair. Caitlin was recovering from a difficult hysterectomy. Family problems had recently taken a toll. She had struggled with depression on and off for years, but had never attempted suicide. As the threats to her job increased, however, so did her distress.

Along with more than 2 million other federal workers, she received the Jan. 28 “Fork in the Road” email, encouraging her to quit and warning that she could be fired. It worried her, but she decided against the buyout. She and other workers were warned they’d be disciplined if they didn’t turn in colleagues who continued work on diversity and equity programs despite a presidential order to stop.

“That one hit her especially hard because it was trying to turn her co-workers against her,” said Emily Cross, one of Caitlin and Mike’s three children.

To reach Caitlin that day on the fire escape, Mike folded his body out the bathroom window. He squeezed down next to her on the black metal grating and told her, “We can get you help.”

He guided her back inside, and soon after, he and Emily convened an emergency meeting with Caitlin’s psychiatrist. They persuaded her to check into a residential mental health facility in Virginia.

Before she entered the facility, Caitlin applied for several jobs outside government. The exhaustion and worry had become too much, she told her family. She wanted a way out.

‘A man-made disaster’

By sheer numbers, America has rarely seen sudden job losses on this scale. In 1993, IBM fired 60,000 people, setting the all-time record for largest layoff. Since Trump took office, the government has pushed at least 130,000 people out of jobs — with more than 50,000 fired and 76,000 accepting buyouts, according to media reports. Additional reductions planned in coming weeks could double that total.

Roughly a third of the 30 workers who talked to The Post had been fired. The rest feared being laid off or reassigned — having to move to offices hundreds of miles from family or leave behind the people and missions to which they’d devoted their careers.

Some interviewed by The Post said they had joined the federal workforce for the stability and security of a government job. Many noted that they could earn more in the private sector. Almost all mentioned the chance to help others and make a difference.

They worked at 12 federal agencies and in more than a dozen states. One had spent more than 30 years in government; another only two weeks.

A manager in the Midwest for the Department of Veterans Affairs, forced in February to lay off probationary employees, said she kept scheduling emergency meetings with her psychiatrist, who increased her antidepression meds from 25 milligrams to 50 to 100.

“You spend every day worrying about those under you,” said the VA manager. “The depression now is worse than during my divorce, worse than when my mom died of cancer.”

Phone operators for the Veterans Crisis Line said they’d seen a rise in calls from federal employees and others worried about cuts to the VA.

With so many federal workers seeking help, Rosalyn Beroza, a therapist in the D.C. suburbs, convened a network of more than 60 counselors to provide free and low-cost therapy.

“To so many people, it feels targeted to injure and break them,” Beroza said. “With natural disasters, we have mental health workers helping people on scene. This one’s a man-made disaster, but it’s no less traumatizing.”

A National Institutes of Health employee in the South, worried for weeks that she’ll lose her job, said she’s checked her government benefits to calculate how much money her family would receive if she killed herself. She took the job several years ago because the stable hours and job security helped her manage bipolar disorder, a family affliction she inherited. But in recent weeks, suicidal thoughts have come back so strongly that she’s depended on a safety plan with her husband — limited medication in their house, no guns, and emergency contacts on speed dial.

“Federal workers aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet,” she said. “We’re real people with families who are hurting and, in the worst cases, dying. Why don’t people out there see that? Why doesn’t anyone care?”

‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do’

On Feb. 14, Richard Midgette cleared out his desk at Yellowstone National Park headquarters. On the way home, he blasted indie rock music to drown out the sound of his own sobbing. The route home took him across the only bridge in Gardiner, Montana.

He had never suffered from depression or other mental problems, he said. But as he sat, newly unemployed, in his idling car just past the bridge, he was overwhelmed by dark thoughts.

He wondered how he would pay for a new apartment lease, his student loans and medicine for his Crohn’s disease. He’d worked at the park for only two months. He recalled the foolish pride he’d felt when he first put on a National Park Service uniform after besting 200 others for an IT job he had worked years to attain.

“I thought I was finally getting somewhere,” he said, “building a career and a life.”

He pulled into a gas station next to the bridge and considered calling his parents. His dad had voted for Trump, and for weeks had been cheering the president’s promises to purge the government.

Instead, he dialed Kat Brekken, 69, his boss from a previous job in park concessions. She immediately drove to the bridge and gave him a hug.

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told her.

They kept talking in her old Chevy Suburban until the sky grew dark and their faces were illuminated by the light of the gas station mini-mart.

Gradually, the suicidal impulse faded, replaced by fear, sadness and anger at the casual way he had been tossed out.

“I decided there’d be no greater failure than me throwing away my life,” he said. “It’s exactly what they want. I’m not going to give them that satisfaction.”

Last month, he was rehired only to be fired a second time — after courts ruled some of Trump’s layoffs illegal, then legal again.

“It’s like whiplash,” Midgette said. “I’ve given up on ever working for the federal government again, at least under this administration.”

‘Through the window or the door’

For decades, researchers have studied the mental effects of such layoffs in the private sector.

In one oft-cited study, people ranked unemployment as more traumatic than being cheated on or going through a divorce. Even more than abruptly becoming blind or deaf.

Sudden job loss increases risk of suicide, depression and anxiety, studies show. Mass layoffs magnify that impact.

In 2011, economists examined a decade of data and found that mass layoffs resulted in an additional suicide for every 4,200 men and for every 7,100 women losing their jobs. Mass layoffs can devastate entire communities, they noted, fracturing social networks and creating pools of applicants fighting over limited jobs.

“We’re seeing it in the federal workforce,” said Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist who has consulted on workplace suicide for Fortune 500 companies, first responders and health-care systems. “If you boil suicide down to its most common factors — a thwarted sense of belonging, feeling like a burden to others, having the mindset and means — that’s happening across government.”

One Trump administration tactic, made clear by Trump and Musk’s statements as well as their policies, is trying to make some workers so miserable that they quit. Experts on workplace mental health say it echoes a case in France two decades ago.

In 2004, leaders of a company then known as France Télécom wanted to cut 22,000 jobs but couldn’t outright fire many who had civil servant protections. Over several years, employees were demoted, reassigned to ill-suited jobs and forced to work far from families. “I’ll get people to leave one way or another,” the CEO reportedly told managers, “either through the window or the door.”

At least 35 employees killed themselves. Years later, the CEO and two executives were criminally convicted of “institutional moral harassment” in the deaths. Courts in France — which has some of the world’s strongest labor laws, including many that don’t exist in the U.S. — cited “a conscious scheme to worsen the work conditions.”

Suicide is a complex phenomenon, experts note, and teasing out the causes in any case is difficult. But research points to clear contributing factors: feelings of worthlessness, stress, lack of access to health care and insurance, and unemployment.

Some advocates are particularly concerned for veterans, who make up 30 percent of the federal workforce. Almost a third of all veterans already suffer from a service-connected physical or mental disability. Roughly 11 to 20 percent of those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. Many have training and access to firearms, which increases suicide risk.

“We are shattering people’s sense of mission, identity and value as human beings,” Spencer-Thomas said. “Those left behind by the layoffs are struggling with survivor’s guilt and this sense that their world is collapsing.”

‘She didn’t need to die’

The day he was inaugurated, Trump signed an order requiring federal workers to return to the office five days a week. Casting government employees as lazy, he predicted “a very substantial number of people will not show up to work.”

Social Security worker Monique Lockett, 53, rarely missed a day of work and didn’t intend to start. So she bought a new briefcase that rolled on wheels.

Into it went a keyboard and mouse, because Social Security’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland, lacked equipment for the droves of returning workers. She packed a heater, because the aging building was often cold. And a water bottle, because last year, inspectors found Legionella bacteria in the building’s pipes.

The job increasingly weighed on Monique, said her sister Neiksha Lockett, who shared a house with her.

With no basis, Trump and his lieutenants accused her agency of widespread fraud. They announced plans to cut thousands of workers from Social Security, already staffed at a 50-year low.

As many retired and took buyouts, Monique picked up the extra work, co-workers said. After long days at the office, she would collapse into her favorite armchair.

“I’ve hit my limit,” her sister recalled her saying, referring to demands from Trump appointees and members of the Department of Government Efficiency. “These people don’t know what they are doing.”

She worked with her agency’s most sensitive databases, containing the financial information of every taxpaying American. In recent days, DOGE engineers had demanded access to those databases. Acting commissioner Michelle King resisted; then on Feb. 16, King resigned.

On the morning of Feb. 18, Monique and others returned from the Presidents’ Day weekend to an office tense with news of King’s departure and rumors of more cuts.

Monique was at her cubicle on the third floor of headquarters when she collapsed, co-workers said. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as “hypertensive, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.” Monique’s family and many close co-workers blamed her heart attack on stress at work.

Monique had risk factors for heart disease, including obesity, high blood sugar and high cholesterol, according to her medical records. Two experts who reviewed her records at The Post’s request said in cases like hers, stress, uncertainty and tension at work can contribute to cardiac arrest.

“There is very good evidence that emotional upset can trigger acute and potentially even lethal heart problems,” said Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Duke University researchers in 2012 studied the work histories of more than 13,000 people and found that a single job loss raised a person’s risk of heart attack by 35 percent.

Her death in the middle of the office at a traumatic, pivotal moment left her family and co-workers shaken and angry.

“I’m angry because this didn’t need to happen,” one co-worker said. “She didn’t need to die.”

‘A humane, rational way to do this’

The last time the federal government massively shrank its workforce, President Bill Clinton was in office. Musk has likened his cuts to those reductions: “What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s. The current Dem party has just gone so crazy far left that it isn’t recognizable anymore!”

But former officials say the 1990s “Reinventing Government” initiative was undertaken slowly and carefully, with bipartisan authorization from Congress. Over the span of seven years, the program eliminated roughly 400,000 federal jobs — a 17 percent cut — mostly through voluntary buyouts and attrition. Back then, the White House pushed back on painting federal workers as lazy.

“Most federal workers believe in service and could be making a lot more in the private sector,” Robert Reich, who was Clinton’s secretary of labor, said in a recent phone interview. “There’s a humane, rational way to do this. You don’t need to parade around a stage with a chainsaw.”

For weeks now, Vought’s quote about deliberately traumatizing workers has played over and over in the mind of one U.S. Forest Service biologist in California.

He first came across it on a sleepless night in January, scrolling on his phone and wondering if he’d lose his job. That night, he said, his heart began juddering, as if it were trying to escape his chest.

He recalled turning to his wife, a nurse, to say: “These people are going to f---ing kill me.”

Asked to comment on Vought’s quote, the White House sent a statement from an unnamed senior administration official: “What about the January 6 defendants and political prisoners who suffered real trauma and committed suicide over the harassment, bullying and imprisonment by bureaucrats who weaponized the government against them?”

For the biologist, the panic attacks soon were coming three times a day. He’d never thought much about mental health in his 15 years of federal service, but now he signed up for therapy and went on meds. He declined calls from his mother, he said, because he didn’t want to hear her praise Trump for streamlining government — and say that if her son didn’t like it, he could find another job.

One day, the biologist’s 9-year-old son came home from school with a question. Schoolmates had been talking about Musk and Trump, the boy said, and how they were going to fire the stupidest workers.

“Dad,” he asked, “why would they want to fire you?”

‘I’m not enough’

Two weeks after her husband talked her off the fire escape, Caitlin checked into a mental health facility in Fairfax County, Virginia. She had no cellphone or laptop, and could talk to family only using the facility’s phone. In daily calls to her husband, she pressed for updates from her work, the latest layoffs and program cuts.

“I tried not to give her too much information that was upsetting,” Mike said.

Two weeks into her stay, on Feb. 27, the facility’s staff set up a computer for her. A nonprofit wanted to interview Caitlin for a job advocating for Medicaid — the program she had worked to improve for 12 years. That same week, House Republicans had voted for an $880 billion budget cut that would require severe reductions to Medicaid — a scenario Caitlin had long feared.

That night, on a call with her husband, Caitlin remained in good spirits. The job interview had gone well. She told Mike she loved him and missed him.

But when she called the next morning, Caitlin was inconsolable.

“I’m having a really bad day,” she told him.

Mike tried to reassure her, but Caitlin kept saying, “I’m not enough. I’m not good enough.”

Over the years, in her darkest moments, Caitlin had often told him she felt she didn’t measure up. She never felt adequate as a daughter, as a wife and mother, or as a researcher.

“Of course you’re enough,” Mike said over the phone. “You do so much. … You’re more than enough.”

Caitlin kept crying.

“You’re enough for me,” he tried to tell her. But soon after, she hung up.

The next call Mike received, 98 minutes later, was from a hospital in Virginia. He later learned that the mental health facility had staff checking on Caitlin every 15 minutes, but she saw an opening between checkups and killed herself.

‘What are we going to do?’

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services, where Caitlin had worked, laid off more than 10,000 workers. That came in addition to 10,000 lost to buyouts or retirement — a 24 percent total reduction. Caitlin’s unit, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, cut 300 jobs. In recent days, her HHS colleagues in D.C. and Maryland were forced to line up outside their offices to find out if they still had a job by swiping their badges at the entrance.

In a statement, an HHS spokesperson said, “HHS takes any loss of life or distress among our employees seriously, and our focus remains on providing the support and resources necessary to ensure their well-being.”

The week Caitlin died, one of her grieving colleagues at HHS found out that her husband, a federal contractor, was losing his job.

By week’s end, the colleague couldn’t sleep, struggled with suicidal thoughts and felt as if she were drowning in a pool of rising black water. “You have to get up,” she chided herself when the alarm went off at 6:30 a.m.

“You have to take the kids to school,” she said an hour later.

“You have to work,” she said as she sat down at the office, “to keep a roof over their heads.”

Meanwhile, Caitlin’s husband, Mike — who’d spent decades editing for newspapers in Los Angeles and Baltimore — worked hard on her eulogy, but then wondered after her burial if he should have been more emotional.

In their 34 years together, Caitlin had often been the spontaneous idealist. He was the steady one who planned everything.

They’d been planning a trip to Colombia to bird-watch. And India, for their son’s wedding celebration. And Africa for a safari. They had visited 48 states and were missing only North and South Dakota.

After her death, Mike avoided the headlines that had consumed Caitlin in her final weeks.

“What’s happening to our country?” she would often ask him about Trump’s latest orders and the future of American democracy. “What are we going to do about it?”

These days, the questions haunting Mike are smaller in scale. He wonders how to honor his wife’s work, how to grieve for her without getting lost in the same despair.

Sitting at night in their empty rowhouse, he asks, “What am I going to do without her?”

Aaron Schaffer and Alice Crites contributed to this report. To reconstruct the last days of Caitlin Cross-Barnet and Monique Lockett, the reporters interviewed more than 20 relatives, co-workers and friends and reviewed phone records, police reports, medical records and death certificates. The Post spoke to Kat Brekken to corroborate the scene at the bridge.

New procedures and requirements — some implemented in the name of improving operations — are slowing down federal agencies.

By Hannah Natanson

Somewhere in the world last month, a State Department employee began the routine process of hiring a vendor for an upcoming embassy event — but quickly ran into a problem.

The vendor was refusing to sign paperwork certifying that it did not promote diversity, equity and inclusion, or “DEI,” a new requirement under President Donald Trump’s executive order eradicating DEI from the government. The State employee — who spoke on the condition that neither he nor the location of his embassy be named, for fear of retaliation — sighed.

Then he got busy: The work-around, he knew, would take time. First, he got his ambassador’s signed approval to hire the vendor anyway. Next, he filled out an Office 365 form justifying the expense in 250 words before selecting which “pillar” of necessary spending it fell under, choosing from options including “Safer, Stronger, More Prosperous.” After submitting that to higher-ups and getting their sign-off, he filled out yet another form — this one destined for political appointees back in Washington.

A week later, the vendor was secured. Under any previous administration, it would have taken one day, the employee said.

Similar layers of new red tape are plaguing federal staffers throughout the government under the second Trump administration, stymieing work and delaying simple transactions, according to interviews with more than three dozen federal workers across 19 agencies and records obtained by The Washington Post. Many of the new hurdles, federal workers said, stem from changes imposed by the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, which burst into government promising to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse and trim staff and spending.

The team’s overarching goal was in its name: DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, although it is not part of the Cabinet. But as Musk departed government on Friday, many federal workers said DOGE has in many ways had the opposite effect.

DOGE’s intense scrutiny of federal spending is forcing employees to spend hours justifying even the most basic purchases. New rules mandating review and approval by political appointees are leaving thousands of contracts and projects on ice for months. Large-scale firings spearheaded by DOGE have cut support offices — especially IT shops — that assisted federal workers with issues ranging from glitching computers to broken desk chairs. And the piecemeal reassignment of staff is causing significant lags in work in some agencies, notably Social Security, as inexperienced workers adjust to new roles.

Meanwhile, most everyone, across every agency, is dealing with fallout from new policies or executive orders — even as colleagues continue to resign or retire, increasing the workload for those who remain.

“Leadership is overcome with meetings and questions from people on how this will all work. The Human Resource teams have conflicting information, and confusion reigns,” said one Defense Department employee who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. Every day, he said, it feels like “each person still standing is battling a dozen fires.”

Many presidents try to reshape the sprawling federal bureaucracy to achieve their specific policy goals, said George Krause, a University of Georgia professor who studies public administration. Such efforts span Democratic and Republican administrations back to Richard M. Nixon, whose political appointees were known for clashing with career federal executives, Krause said.

But the DOGE-driven efforts appear to be backfiring in ways that other initiatives did not.

“What Musk showed is that you cannot do this without a plan, and if you do it without a plan that respects some of the functions of government that everybody wants, then what’s going to happen is you’ll end up making the government less efficient, and not more efficient,” said Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton administration official.

White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement that, through DOGE, “President Trump is curbing government waste and reforming a system that has long burdened American taxpayers.” He added: “Anyone resistant to these critical reforms has had ample opportunity to step aside, but the work of DOGE will press forward unobstructed.”

The State Department on Saturday shared an emailed statement from a “senior official” it declined to name: “The State Department will never apologize for putting processes in place to ensure taxpayer dollars are used correctly. It’s what the American people expect and deserve.” But on Friday, almost exactly 24 hours after a Post reporter asked about the requirement that international vendors certify they do not promote DEI, State had issued guidance rescinding that mandate for staff overseas, according to a directive obtained by The Post.

‘Holding up everything’

At NASA, employees recently wrote several detailed paragraphs, across multiple rounds of emails, to win approval to buy simple fastening bolts, according to a staffer and records obtained by The Post.

Within the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate arm, more than 1,500 project requests — included fully executed leases and notices saying construction can begin — backed up in an internal tracker awaiting political appointees’ attention, records show. Some items waited for months, and almost 200 are still on hold, while about 300 were never approved, an employee said.

And at the Food and Drug Administration, once-routine tests on food — monitoring for accuracy in labeling, coloring and exposure to heavy metals — were delayed significantly, a former employee said. That’s because the agency began requiring department-level approval for expenses at every step: Purchasing samples to test. Paying to ship samples between labs. Buying lab supplies.

This hands-on approach reflects the Trump administration’s drive to rein in what officials see as decades of unsupervised, wasteful federal spending. Speaking in the Oval Office in early February, Trump said, without providing evidence, that there are “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse … That’s one of the reasons I got elected.”

Citing the example of the Treasury Department, Musk claimed the government is missing “basic controls that should be in place that are in place in any company,” such as categorizing payments by code and providing justifications for each expense. (Systems to do both already existed across agencies.)

And so shortly after Trump’s inauguration, DOGE imposed a $1 federal credit card freeze and limited purchasing power to only a handful of people in many departments, decisions that have incapacitated parts of agencies as varied as the National Park Service and the Pentagon. Soon, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Commerce Department required that political appointees green-light many funds before disbursement. In April, DOGE wrested control of a federal grants website used to dole out billions each year.

“These are things that people don’t think about, but clean windows are crucial for controllers,” the employee said. Because he is so often busy with purchase justifications, he has fallen behind on landscaping, fire alarm safety and pest control, all of which are “staples in the air traffic towers,” he said.

The added reviews extend beyond financial issues to questions of policy and political speech, including press releases.

At some parts of the National Institutes of Health, per an employee there, every grant must now be fed through an AI tool to screen for references to concepts deemed unpalatable by the Trump administration, such as “DEI, transgender, China, or vaccine hesitancy,” the employee said. Further delaying grants is another new requirement: NIH staff must check to ensure the recipient isn’t on the list of colleges and universities that have drawn Trump’s wrath, including Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, Brown and Cornell.

At the State Department, employees are spending hours combing through official documents to remove the words “diverse,” equitable” and “inclusive,” said a staffer there, months after Trump issued his executive order ending diversity efforts.

NASA, the NIH, GSA, the FDA and the FAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

‘Nobody is working at top efficiency’

The administration’s ongoing shake-ups of the workforce, from buyout offers to firings to sweeping reorganizations, are also undermining efficiency.

At the Social Security Administration, for example, Trump officials and DOGE pushed thousands of central-office workers to take lower-level positions answering phones in field offices, threatening to fire whoever did not make the jump, according to emails reviewed by The Post and interviews with a half dozen agency employees.

Chaos has ensued across field offices in the weeks since the reassignments took effect, staffers said. Claims processing has bogged down as regular field office staff — already overburdened because of widespread resignations and retirements — are pulled off their normal duties to train incoming administrators and analysts.

But the backlog means the trainings are being shortened and rushed through, employees said, so inexperienced, reassigned staffers start work unprepared. That leads to more mistakes, more requests for help and more backed-up claims — and more time wasted all around.

To sum it up, “you now have half the staff with very little knowledge of how to do the work,” one relocated staffer said. “And the other half of staff overwhelmed with work and unable to really train or mentor these new folks.”

Asked about the reassignments, Social Security provided an emailed statement from an unnamed official, whom it declined to identify. The statement said DOGE’s work at Social Security had charted a new, better course for the agency.

“The voluntary reassignment of approximately 2,000 employees to direct service positions has not caused disruptions at the agency,” the statement read. “As these employees complete their training and become fully proficient in their new positions, they will further accelerate the progress the agency is making.”

DOGE reorganized other agencies by dismissing gobs of technical staffers, or incentivizing them to resign, and centralizing IT services. Although it sounded good in theory, said one Interior Department staffer, in practice, it meant he lost his in-office IT contact. He used to pop around the corner to ask for assistance — now, help tickets take up to three days.

In other places, staff dismissals or departures are tripping up operations, as employees struggle to keep up with a sharply increased workload.

One office in the Transportation Department lost nearly 15 percent of its staff, who were fired as probationary employees, then rehired, then promptly took advantage of the administration’s second-round deferred resignation offer to leave for good, said a worker there.

“Now, all those jobs and responsibilities [have fallen on] everyone left,” the worker said. “There’s a learning curve, no knowledge transfer, and in some cases no access to do the job for a while. Lots of productivity lost.”

Within one FDA office, a reduction in force removed everyone who worked in administrative support, a former staffer said: The people who coordinated travel, ran purchasing and processed personnel paperwork. Remaining staff were given general email addresses to contact, the staffer said, “but no names.”

Asked for comment, a range of agencies asserted that Trump was improving efficiency, not hurting it.

“President Trump’s decisive actions have allowed us to eliminate bureaucratic waste,” said an Interior department spokesperson.

“We are replacing outdated, sluggish systems with streamlined, mission-driven operations,” said an HHS spokesperson, “following years of unchecked spending, bureaucratic bloat, and ideologically driven initiatives that strayed from serving the American people.”

But other employees say that strict imposition of Trump’s return-to-office rule and requirements that federal workers must be in their seats from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. sharp are frustrating staffers, who say their productivity and drive have dropped.

Within a research arm of the Defense Department, staff no longer take work home or travel to conferences on weekends, noted one employee.

At FEMA, people have to take a day off or work a half-day to make medical appointments, rather than working remotely and missing fewer hours, said a staffer there.

One Department of Homeland Security staffer noted that after her hours were changed to 9-5, it briefly prevented her from attending an 8 a.m. meeting — until higher-ups realized the problem and changed it. (DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a statement that “meetings being moved is a small price to pay for federal employees to finally be back in their taxpayer funded offices to do their work for the American people.”)

Atop everything else, frayed, fatigued federal workers have little capacity left to do their jobs well, or at all, they said.

“People are so demoralized, anxious and sleep deprived,” said a NASA employee. “Nobody is working at top efficiency.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi has curtailed the agency’s anti-corruption efforts, ratcheted up immigration enforcement and redirected the civil rights division.

By Jeremy Roebuck, Mark Berman, Perry Stein and Spencer S. Hsu

Pam Bondi vowed at her confirmation hearing this year that “politics will not play a part” in her time as attorney general.

Now she’s leading a Justice Department more visibly aligned with the political agenda of the White House than any in recent history.

In less than two months, Bondi and other top department officials have wielded the law to shield President Donald Trump’s allies and strike at his political foes. They have curtailed anti-corruption efforts that were sources of irritation for the president and ratcheted up immigration enforcement, while cutting national security expertise and refocusing the civil rights division on culture war fights that go beyond traditional conservative causes like religious freedom.

And they have pushed out dozens of prosecutors and FBI agents deemed insufficiently loyal, launching sweeping probes of past investigations and the veteran attorneys who led them.

The rapid-fire actions mirror dramatic changes underway at other agencies. They are moving the department away from long-held law enforcement priorities and norms, according to interviews with more than 30 current and former officials and law enforcement experts, leaving its leadership at odds with much of the workforce.

While Trump promised major changes at both the Justice Department and the FBI during his campaign, the speed and severity of the overhaul has stunned many observers. It is a stark departure from Trump’s first term, when his efforts to exert control were often blocked by agency leaders.

“The main theme here is that there’s sort of a breaking down of the independence of the Justice Department,” said Caren Morrison, a law professor at Georgia State University and former federal prosecutor. “This is not your mother’s Department of Justice. It’s just something very different.”

The transformation was on vivid display as Bondi welcomed Trump to the agency’s Washington headquarters last week for a speech in which he excoriated those who brought criminal charges against him and declared him “the chief law enforcement officer in our country.”

Attorneys general for decades have sought to maintain some measure of independence from presidential influence. Bondi, as she introduced the president to the crowd of senior Justice and FBI officials, said, “We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.”

Bondi and her deputies have touted a string of early accomplishments, including bringing alleged drug cartel leaders to the United States for prosecution, launching immigration-related lawsuits and arresting a suspect accused of helping plan a 2021 attack that killed 13 American service members in Afghanistan.

She declined requests for an interview. In a statement, a Justice Department spokesperson said the attorney general’s priorities include “prosecuting violent criminals, terrorist cartel and gang members, and enforcing our immigration laws. This DOJ will uphold the rule of law and ensure there is one tier of justice for all Americans.”

Trump and his allies are celebrating the change in direction for the department, which includes roughly 110,000 lawyers, support staff and federal law enforcement officers at component agencies like the FBI.

“We’re turning the page on four long years of corruption, weaponization and surrender to violent criminals,” the president declared in the Justice Department’s historic Great Hall. “And we’re restoring fair, equal and impartial justice under the Constitution.”

Helping Trump’s allies

Some of the most striking changes at Justice so far involve officials intervening on behalf of the president’s supporters and potential allies.

Within 48 hours of Trump’s inauguration, the department moved to drop charges against former congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R-Nebraska), a vocal backer of the president who’d been accused of lying to FBI agents about whether he’d accepted an illegal foreign campaign contribution. Trump had called the case “very unfair” and lauded its dismissal on social media. Fortenberry thanked Trump for “standing up to this injustice.”

In New York, then-acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove ordered an end to the prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams, saying the case was politically motivated and could hinder Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts. Eight prosecutors, including several who helped lead the office that investigates public corruption, resigned in protest.

Former pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer said she was fired after refusing to back the restoration of gun ownership rights to actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson, a Trump supporter who was convicted in 2011 on misdemeanor domestic violence charges.

“I was asked to provide cover for a decision that had already been made by the political leaders of the department based on the considerations of politics and relationships and not public safety,” Oyer said. Justice Department officials have denied her account.

This month, Justice Department officials alerted a federal court in Colorado that they intended to review the state prosecution of former election worker Tina Peters, who was convicted of illegally breaching voting equipment while searching for evidence to support Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D) panned the department’s involvement in Peters’s lawsuit challenging her conviction as a “grotesque attempt to weaponize the rule of law.”

Bondi frequently portrays combating weaponization as one of her key priorities at the Justice Department. In her telling, she is fighting to address years of misdeeds against Trump and conservatives.

She has launched a task force to examine a string of the president’s perceived adversaries, starting with special counsel Jack Smith, who brought indictments against Trump in 2023 over allegations he mishandled classified documents and his attempts to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. The nature of the task force investigations, including whether they could lead to possible criminal charges, is not clear.

More broadly, Bondi has deprioritized anti-corruption efforts, including some that have previously ensnared allies of the president. She curbed enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act — under which Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort was prosecuted — and disbanded the FBI’s foreign influence task force, launched in Trump’s first term amid concerns over Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The attorney general also paused probes under a law that bars U.S. companies from paying bribes to win business overseas — a statute Trump floated scrapping entirely during his first term, citing complaints from business leaders.

The moratorium has left dozens of criminal cases in limbo as prosecutors decide how and whether to proceed. The department also had open investigations into at least 19 companies, including at Pfizer’s operations in China and Mexico and a Toyota subsidiary in Thailand, according to a database of corporate filings.

“Even if some of those get dropped, I think it will dramatically shift norms,” said Eugene Soltes, a Harvard Business School professor who studies how companies navigate risk and regulations.

A focus on migrants, antisemitism

Even as they’ve pulled back in some areas, Trump’s Justice Department appointees have redeployed resources in others explicitly in support of the president’s policy goals — including immigration enforcement, which they have indicated will take priority above almost all else.

Officials ordered investigations of state and local officials who refuse to cooperate with Trump’s plans for mass deportations of people who entered the country illegally. They created a “sanctuary cities working group” to sue local jurisdictions whose policies clash with federal enforcement efforts, and the department already has filed lawsuits against the city of Chicago and state officials in New York.

But although more than a dozen top career officials in the Justice Department’s national security and criminal divisions were reassigned to the newly created sanctuary cities team, those lawsuits were not the product of their work. Instead, most of those transferred — including experts in environmental, national security and disability law — have been given little information on their roles.

“The ‘working group’ does not appear to be designed to do any actual work,” one civil rights division employee wrote in a complaint filed this month with the Justice Department’s inspector general.

New leadership has ordered a freeze on much of the work in the civil rights and environmental divisions, leaving the future of voting rights, pollution and police-accountability cases in question. The department withdrew from a challenge to Idaho’s strict abortion ban and cases alleging discriminatory hiring practices in police and fire departments in Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia and Indiana.

Meanwhile, much of its civil rights muscle has been redirected in support of conservative concerns.

Bondi appointed Leo Terrell, a former Fox News personality now working as a senior lawyer in that division, to a multiagency task force investigating college protests of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza.

The group has canceled federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over what the task force described as antisemitic harassment, and it launched a pattern-and-practice investigation — the type of probe used to explore allegations of abuses within police departments or prison systems — to scrutinize alleged antisemitism at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Bondi has further invoked antidiscrimination laws in vowing legal action against officials in California, Maine and Minnesota if they refuse to drop policies allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports.

Historically, the Justice Department’s civil rights division has been one of the most prone to drastic priority shifts when the White House changes hands. But William Yeomans, who spent 26 years at the department including as an acting attorney general for civil rights, described the changes implemented by Trump’s appointees as “qualitatively different.”

“I don’t think any of the positions they’ve taken are particularly surprising” given Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail, Yeomans said. “But I think it’s unfortunate that they think that the resources of the civil rights division should be used for those purposes.”

Tough talk and cable news appearances

To promote her new agenda, Bondi has appeared frequently on Fox News, often casting herself as an outsider fixing an agency that has “completely lost its mission.”

Patel alienated some of his staff when, days after his confirmation, he picked podcast host and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino to serve as deputy director, breaking his pledge to the FBI Agents Association to elevate a bureau veteran for the job.

Patel also told agency leaders he planned to move some 1,500 personnel out of the FBI’s Washington headquarters to field offices across the country. On what was supposed to be a routine welcome call with agents leading those offices, he surprised participants by stating he intended to spend much of his time in Nevada, where he lived before accepting the director’s job.

He also suggested the bureau should partner with the popular mixed-martial arts promotion company Ultimate Fighting Championship to improve agents’ physical training regimen, according to a person familiar with that conversation, who like some others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details not announced publicly. An FBI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Bondi, too, has been criticized for her actions in key moments.

At her first news conference, she said the Justice Department had “charged” several New York officials with interfering with Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts — language more typically used to describe a criminal case. It took several minutes for her to make clear she was referring to a civil lawsuit.

Bondi was flanked on the podium by agents from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies, none of which were involved in the suit. Justice Department officials had asked for personnel who could appear onstage in uniform behind her, according to multiple people familiar with the news conference’s planning.

Minutes afterward, Joshua Stueve, a Justice Department spokesman during both Republican and Democratic administrations, submitted his resignation letter.

“To be clear, the outcome of the most recent general election did not influence my decision,” he wrote. “Simply put, I cannot continue to serve in such a hostile and toxic work environment, one where leadership at the highest levels makes clear we are not welcome or valued, much less trusted to do our jobs.”

Bondi also drew criticism for her public rollout of case files tied to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Right-wing pundits, conspiracy theorists and some GOP members of Congress for years alleged that authorities had engaged in a cover-up to protect Epstein’s famous contacts and demanded the release of more records. But conservative influencers panned documents Bondi made public, saying there was little new information there.

The attorney general pivoted to attacking her own workforce, accusing the FBI’s New York office of withholding documents.

“Sadly, these people don’t believe in transparency,” she later told Fox’s Hannity. “But I think more unfortunately — I think a lot of them don’t believe in honesty.”

Retaliation and retribution

Since Trump took office, hardly a week has passed without dramatic personnel news: firings or forced retirements of prosecutors and FBI employees whose loyalty is questioned, or reassignments of career veterans to teams where they have little expertise. Current and former officials worry that the removals have villainized dedicated public servants and pushed vital experience out the door.

Christopher Piehota, a former FBI executive assistant director who retired in 2020, said his former colleagues who remain at the bureau are deeply uneasy. “They have a terrible sense of a lack of control over their own destiny at the moment,” he said. “It’s a vacuum of information; the rumors start. It’s an organizational cancer.”

That sense of uncertainty has spread to the nation’s 93 U.S. Attorney’s Offices. Trump has abandoned the traditional practice of leaving the top career official in charge of each U.S. attorney’s office until his nominees can be confirmed by the Senate. Instead, the administration installed its own interim leaders in key locations.

Nowhere has that strategy been more apparent than in the nation’s capital.

Right-wing commentator Ed Martin — Trump’s pick for interim U.S. attorney for D.C., whom he has since nominated to stay on in the role — has embraced the administration’s vision with gusto. He’s threatened to investigate critics and demoted or fired prosecutors who worked on politically sensitive cases, including the Capitol riot investigation. This week, he summoned D.C. police to help staffers from Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency take over the U.S. Institute of Peace.

The head of Martin’s criminal division quit last month over what she described as an improper order to freeze the assets of a Biden administration grant initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency. In a sign of how dynamics have changed, a different attorney in the criminal division said, some defense lawyers have sought to bypass line prosecutors when lobbying on behalf of clients, asking to speak to their Trump-appointed supervisors instead.

“You’ve got your top 5 percent or 10 percent of cases … where you assume the administration is going to be interested,” the prosecutor said. “I didn’t necessarily appreciate that [those requests] could seep down” to more mundane cases.

A spokesperson for Martin declined to comment.

Tensions remain high in New York as well. Since ordering the Adams case dismissed, Justice Department leaders derided the investigation and the prosecutors who led it.

“There are a lot of other people in the department who are wondering where this is going,” said Alberto R. Gonzales, an attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, of the fallout from the Adams case. “As attorney general, you must find a way to calm the waters.”

So far, though, the rhetoric from the top has remained combative.

“We’re starting at every level of the Justice Department and getting rid of the worst of the worst,” Bondi recently told Fox News. “There are a lot more people that shouldn’t be there.”

Salvador Rizzo, Douglas MacMillan, Hannah Natanson and Natalie Allison contributed to this report.

Customer service deteriorated by key measures as the agency enacted sweeping cuts in Trump’s second term, internal data and interviews show.

By Lisa Rein, Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson

The Social Security Administration — the sprawling federal agency that delivers retirement, disability and survivor benefits to 74 million Americans — began the second Trump administration with a hostile takeover.

It ends the year in turmoil. A diminished workforce has struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices — record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.

Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit, and hasty policy changes and reassignments left inexperienced staff to handle the aftermath.

Exaggerated claims of fraud, for example, have led to new roadblocks for elderly beneficiaries, disabled people and legal immigrants, who are now required to complete some transactions in person or online rather than by phone. Even so, the number of calls to the agency for the year hit 93 million as of late September — a six-year high, data shows.

The troubled disability benefits system is also deteriorating after some improvement, with 66 percent of disability appointments scheduled within 28 days as of December — down from nearly 90 percent earlier in the year, data shows.

One notable exception is phone service, which improved in the second half of the year but is still subpar. Average hold times peaked at about 2½ hours in March but dropped starting in July as employees were diverted from field office duties to fix what had become a public relations crisis. Average wait times for callbacks remain an hour or longer, however, while new delays have emerged elsewhere in the system, internal data shows.

“It was not good before, don’t get me wrong, but the cracks are more than beginning to show,” said John Pfannenstein, a claims specialist outside Seattle and the president of Local 3937 of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents most Social Security employees. “It is a great amount of stress on our employees that remain on the job, who haven’t jumped ship.”

Commissioner Frank Bisignano has authorized millions of dollars in overtime pay to employees in a race to clear the bottlenecks, which worsened dramatically after nearly 7,000 employees — 12 percent of the workforce — were squeezed out early in the year. The agency said it has made improvements: It reduced the processing center backlog by 1 million cases this fall, cut pending disability claims by a third and kept the website live 24/7 after a series of outages earlier this year.

The current crisis follows years of disinvestment by Congress and acting leadership, despite a surge in baby boomer retirements. Bisignano has promised faster service and a leaner workforce with a digital identity that he says will automate simple retirement claims and other operations.

“In the coming year, we will continue our digital-first approach to further enhance customer service by introducing new service features and functionality across each of our service channels to better meet the needs of the more than 330 million Americans with Social Security numbers,” the commissioner said in a statement to The Washington Post.

But responsiveness and trust in the agency have suffered, according to current and former officials and public polling.

This account of the crisis at Social Security is based on internal documents and interviews with 41 current and former employees, advocates, and customers, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about their concerns.

Social Security officials declined to make Bisignano available for an interview, though he did respond to written questions.

Three days before Christmas, Brian Morrissey, 65, arrived at the field office in Silver Spring, Maryland, for an appointment to apply for Medicare. He had tried the “MySSA” website, “but navigating it was just really hard,” he said. Morrissey owns a home improvement business, he said.

“If they can make the process easier online, great, but right now it is not well designed,” he said. So his wife waited 30 minutes on hold to schedule a face-to-face appointment for him.

Aime Ledoux Tchameni, an immigrant from Cameroon, waited in line at the Silver Spring office to get an appointment time to fix his last name from being listed as his first name — a mistake that occurred when he came to the U.S. two years ago. He has a provisional driver’s license from Maryland and needs to clear up his name with Social Security by mid-January, he said. But his appointment is not until Feb. 9.

“This is really going to cause me problems, because I need my driver’s license to get to work,” Tchameni said in French. “I don’t understand why I have to wait so long.”

‘I flipped the switch’

The table was set in February by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which installed a loyal, mid-level data analyst with no management experience to lead the $15.4 billion agency.

That former analyst, Leland Dudek, insists that he saved Social Security from a worse fate under Musk’s cost-cutting team. “I flipped the switch,” he said in a recent interview, referring to his disruptive four-month tenure as acting commissioner. “The casualty of that is a smaller SSA, an SSA that is being, for the first time, subject to the whims of being a political organization, which it was never intended to be.”

Regional offices abruptly disappeared in a rushed reorganization. New policies to fight fraud were rolled out only to be canceled or changed, prompting confused customers to jam the phones and the website, which crashed repeatedly. Daily operations in some respects became an endless game of whack-a-mole as employees were pulled from one department to another.

Along the way, Social Security also became ground zero in the administration’s quest to gather Americans’ personal data — largely in service of its mass deportation campaign.

The chaos quickly became a political cudgel, as Democrats saw an opening to defend one of the country’s most popular entitlement programs. Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), set up a “war room,” holding rallies with former commissioners in both parties and issuing demands for more resources to keep the Trump administration on the defensive.

“We’ve kept up the pressure and held Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Frank Bisignano accountable for the chaos they’ve caused,” Warren said in an interview.

Many critics note that Bisignano, a Wall Street veteran who became commissioner in May, now wears a second hat as CEO of the Internal Revenue Service — another massive portfolio with a multibillion-dollar budget.

In a statement, Bisignano said his shared leadership of Social Security and the IRS “will drive a better outcome for the American public.” He said he envisions “a Social Security Administration that is easier to access, faster to respond, and better prepared to meet the challenges facing Americans.”

Bisignano also said he is working to improve morale and “have the right level of staffing to operate at peak efficiency and deliver best-in-class customer service to the American people.”

‘Work piles up’

By the time Bisignano was confirmed by the Senate, Social Security had been led by three acting commissioners in six months. He pledged to stabilize the upheaval.

But he confronted immediate challenges. Dudek had reassigned 2,000 employees in administrative, analytical and technical roles to jobs dealing with the public. Many accepted the switch under threat of firing if they refused. Some began working the phones. But the national toll-free number was still in crisis, so an additional 1,000 staffers were assigned to the phones in July. The employees were thrown in with minimal training, multiple workers said — and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions. The phone staff was told to keep calls under seven minutes in what became a push for volume over quality, employees said.

Although officials have publicly claimed that wait times have improved to single digits in some cases, those numbers do not account for the time it takes for customers to be called back, according to internal metrics obtained by The Post.

An audit published by the Social Security inspector general’s office on Dec. 22 confirmed that millions of callers requesting callbacks were counted as zero-minute waits by the agency. The review concluded that the metrics themselves were accurate, however, and showed that customer service overall has improved.

Jenn Jones, AARP’s vice president of financial security, said that the improved phone service numbers were “encouraging” but that “more work needs to be done.”

“Wait times for callbacks remain over an hour, and more than a quarter of callers are not being served — by getting disconnected or never receiving a callback, for instance,” Jones said in a statement.

Public outcry and pushback from congressional Democrats derailed the planned closure of dozens of field offices that DOGE had said were no longer needed.

Meanwhile, Dudek’s workforce cuts led field offices to shed 9 percent of their employees by spring because of early retirement and deferred resignation offers. Overtime was restricted and hiring was frozen, even as customer visits continued to climb.

Shortly after taking office, Bisignano’s field operations chief, Andy Sriubas, wrote in an email to the staff that field offices “are, and will always remain, our front line — our face in the community and the primary point of in-person contact.”

In the near term, though, the frontline staffers were overwhelmed. Attrition was geographically uneven, with some offices losing a quarter of their employees to early retirement offers just as foot traffic grew, according to a staffing analysis by the AFGE’s research partner, the Strategic Organizing Center. The group calculated that there were about 4,000 beneficiaries for every field office employee in August of this year.

In several states that ratio is worse, the group found. Wyoming’s field offices, for example, have just 18 employees — or one for every 7,429 beneficiaries.

The shortages have created temporary office closures in many rural areas, some for days or months at a time. The office in Havre, Montana, has been closed for months, with the nearest one four hours away in Butte.

Today a majority of Social Security staffers who accepted reassignments have not been fully or properly trained, according to several employees with direct knowledge of the initiative. Instruction is often truncated so the staff can respond to customers. Officials said they provide training based on the employee’s level of experience and review the reassigned employees’ work.

“They offered minimal training and basically threw them in to sink or swim,” one veteran employee said of their transferred colleagues.

Training on the phone system and complicated claims and benefit programs lasted four hours for some reassigned workers when it should have taken six months, another employee said. As a result, some customers can’t get basic questions answered or are given inaccurate information, according to a half-dozen staffers who answer the phones or work closely with employees who do.

The increased workload, hiring freeze and departures have made it harder for the staff to complete their daily tasks, said Jordan Harwell, a Butte, Montana, field office employee who is president of AFGE Local 4012. The staff used to find time between calls to process pay stubs, take in new disability applications and schedule appointments, but now “that work piles up,” he said.

DOGE officials, citing fraud concerns, also required direct-deposit changes to be done in person or online — but getting online now calls for new identity verification measures that do not come easily to many elderly or disabled customers. Immigrants approved for green cards to work in the U.S. are now required to get Social Security cards in person under a Trump anti-fraud policy, producing a flood of new field office visits.

In one Indiana field office, one employee said she drags herself to work every day, dreading what will come next. Although she was hired as a claims specialist, she and her colleagues are being told to prioritize answering the phones, which never stop ringing now that her office is taking calls for parts of Illinois as well as Indiana because of reorganizations and reductions.

That means she is forced to let other work pile up: calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online and any forms submitted to Social Security — like proof of marriage — through snail mail.

As the backlogs keep building, she is taking calls from 25 or so people every day, knowing that she won’t be able to help five or six of them. These are elderly people, often poor or bedridden, who have no way to comply with the change requiring that direct-deposit actions take place in person or online. Usually they’re calling because something has happened to their bank accounts and they need to alter their financial information. But they can’t access a computer, the employee said, and driving is out of the question.

She received a call this month from a 75-year-old man who had suffered a massive stroke that left him unable to drive. He’d also had to switch banks and, as a result, hadn’t received Social Security checks for the last two or three months.

“I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, ‘You have to find someone to come in … or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?’” she recalled. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”

She ended that call by telling the man to call his bank, hoping they might be able to help when her agency, hampered by administration policies, no longer could.

‘Everybody started laughing’

As the staff races to answer the phones, other tasks are backing up, including Medicare applications, disability claims that require initial vetting by field offices and other transactions that cannot be resolved in one conversation. Any case falling in that category is redirected to a processing center, where the backlogs have been building all year.

These back-office operations, located across the country, often handle labor-intensive, highly complex cases that do not call for automated resolution. Among the tasks are issuing checks, including for back pay, to disabled people whose denial of benefits was reversed by an administrative law judge.

As Congress kept funding flat for Social Security over many years, the processing operations fell way behind, requiring headquarters employees to help handle the volume. But it was never as bad as it got this fall.

Many disability payments now take three to six months to process when they used to take weeks, advocates and employees said.

At the start of September, one benefits authorizer in a processing center was called into an all-staff meeting with her colleagues, she said. There, management explained that the backlog at the time — 6 million cases — was unacceptable and that everyone would have to work overtime in an attempt to drive it down to 2 million by Christmas.

“When they told us that, everybody started laughing,” she said. “Because there is just absolutely no way to get it down in that short period of time.”

Still, she and her colleagues have been hustling, she said, processing cases as fast as they can, even as they see that their haste sometimes causes errors. No time to fix them, she has decided: Best to just keep moving.

Meanwhile, another staffer, who answers phones at a national call center, said she has changed what she tells customers when she realizes that their claim can’t be finished in one conversation and must be referred to a payment center.

“I’m supposed to reassure people it’s being worked on,” she said. “But now I avoid giving people a firm date they can expect it to be done by.”

Just before Thanksgiving, Bisignano said that starting next year, he hopes to slash field office visits by half. More than 31 million people visited field offices in the last fiscal year — or tried to. Critics say the change will dismantle the fail-safe for those who cannot use computers, no matter how imperfect.

At the same time, in recent weeks, hundreds of employees who transferred to customer service operations have been recalled to the roles they were originally hired to fill. Others have been reassigned to a new “digital engagement” office.

Social Security has told Congress it plans to put more resources toward IT, with an expected increase of $591 million this fiscal year compared with fiscal 2025, according to the agency’s budget justification. The agency also expects to pay $367 million less on payroll than it did the year before.

Social Security also plans to roll out a new program that will allow customers to book phone appointments with field offices throughout the country, no matter where they live, according to two people familiar with the plans.

The goal is to reduce the number of field office visits, though one field office employee said the change will probably lead to a greater workload for staff keeping up with queries from customers outside their area.

“They’ve created problems, and now they are trying to fix problems they created,” the worker said.

During Christmas week, the grind continued for most frontline staff. After Trump signed an executive order last week closing most federal offices on Christmas Eve and Friday, Bisignano told his staff that field offices, teleservice centers, processing centers and more operations would remain open.

“In order to balance the needs of the public and our workforce, we will solicit interest from employees who would like to work on Wednesday and Friday,” he wrote.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article wrongly attributed a calculation to the American Federation of Government Employees that was done by its research partner, the Strategic Organizing Center. It also misstated the driving distance between Havre and Butte in Montana; it is four hours, not two. The article has been updated.

By Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson

Hours-long wait times. Endless looping music. Useless robot messages.

Millions of seniors and disabled people call Social Security’s 1-800 number every month. What they experience is often maddening.

When Rian Dindzans, 25, called in July, the California resident had a common issue: They needed to report income from a part-time job or else they would be at risk of losing disability benefits. The call didn’t start well.

“I need to report income,” Dindzans responded. The bot directed Dindzans to go to the Social Security website and said they could hang up. Dindzans tried again:

AI: Welcome to the Social Security Administration… How can I help you today?

Dindzans: Report income.

AI: We are here to help you by providing the critical services you need. We want...

Dindzans: Oh my God.

AI: ...to help as quickly and safely as possible.

A few attempts later...

AI: How can I help you today?

Dindzans: Connect me to a human representative.

AI: One moment while I transfer your call to an agent.

Dindzans: There we go.

Then came a dreaded message:

AI: The estimated hold time is 90 minutes.

Later on, Dindzans told the Post how that message felt…

I wanted to bang my head against the wall.

The Trump administration has said it is improving Social Security customer service and dramatically cutting wait times to build on a phone experience that callers have complained about even before President Donald Trump took office. But the agency’s public reporting doesn’t count the time people wait for callbacks from humans, and nearly three dozen callers who spoke with The Washington Post or let a reporter join their calls said their experiences have not matched the agency’s claims.

The average wait time for a callback peaked at about 2½ hours from January to March, according to internal agency data obtained by The Post. The average time dropped to about an hour since July, when the agency added more field office workers to the 1-800 number, even as the agency has sought to reduce its workforce by thousands.

In response to this story’s findings, SSA spokesman Barton Mackey said that “there have been significant advancements in customer service” over the past five months. “Cherry-picked instances may meet the goal of a preconceived, negative narrative, but they do not accurately reflect the experiences a vast majority of Americans have when interacting with SSA,” he said in a statement.

Most SSA phone services have been unaffected by the government shutdown.

Djuwana Washington, vice president of the AFGE Local 2809 and a customer service representative at the Wilkes-Barre data operations center in Pennsylvania, said callers frequently start their conversations with her by complaining about the long wait they endured.

“The first thing I do is apologize, and once I apologize for the long wait, I just assure them that I’m there to assist them from beginning to end,” Washington said. “We apologize for the wait and service them to the best of our ability.”

If you want a callback

Once callers get their estimated wait time, they might get offered a callback. The agency says 19.3 million calls were handled by callbacks this year, up from 6.8 million the previous year when the option was first introduced.

One Social Security worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the feature appeared helpful at first but has since deteriorated because of understaffing. Many of those she has called back don’t answer the phone because it has been hours or even weeks since their initial call, she said.

“I’ve had people answer the phone and say, ‘I called you guys a week ago. I just walked up to my local office because you guys never called me back,’” the employee said.

Mackey said the agency has reduced the proportion of calls handled by callback in recent months, from 81 percent in May to 65 percent in September.

“This is attributed to the positive impact technology and improved processes have had on significantly decreasing overall wait times,” Mackey said.

Shelley McLean, a 68-year-old technical writer from Brookhaven, New York, had been waiting for months for $31,000 that Social Security owed her in attorney fees as part of a disability case. She called on a Friday in August to check on it and was told her hold time would be 110 minutes.

McLean ended up getting a callback about 200 minutes later, after she already had personal plans and couldn’t answer the phone.

Still, other callers said they were relieved when they got the callback option.

Last spring in Upland, California, 72-year-old Kathy Stecher began the process of applying for benefits. On her first attempt, an automated voice told the retired public schoolteacher that the wait time would extend more than 120 minutes. Trying to be patient, she hung on — only for her call to be dropped after more than an hour.

Determined to get her benefits, she kept trying. For the next four days, she phoned once a day. She called early, she called in the middle of the morning and she called in the afternoon.

Kathy Stecher, 72

Calling about applying for benefits

And it didn’t matter when you called, whether it was early in the morning, or in the afternoon, or mid-morning, they immediately came on, and said with an automated voice, ‘Your wait time is over 120 minutes.’

The fifth day she phoned, her luck improved. This time, a recorded message offered her the option of a callback, meaning the agency would ring her phone when someone was free to speak. Stecher agreed.

Stecher couldn’t believe it, 3½ hours later, when her phone finally rang: Social Security was calling her back.

On hold

Those who don’t get the callback option or don’t want to use it must wait on hold.

Susan Kunkel, a 70-year-old in Tacoma, Washington, realized this spring that she had made a mistake when applying for her Social Security benefits. So, using her landline, she called the main number for the agency.

A half-hour in, she started to wonder if her wait for help was going to take longer than she had hoped.

“The wait music was electronic and played in a loop, restarting every five or 10 seconds,” she said.

“The tune just kept playing and I was thinking, ‘Is this like some kind of torture that they do in prisons to make people crazy?’”

To get away from the music, she put the phone on speaker and wandered elsewhere in the house. She sat down at her computer and started deleting emails from her inbox.

More than two hours later, someone picked up and told her she had to fill out a form and take it to her local office.

The hold music is periodically interrupted by recorded messages.

Vivian Mercer, a 64-year-old D.C. resident, can still hear the hold music ringing in her ears when she thinks about it. She and her lawyer at Legal Counsel for the Elderly estimate that they have spent 20 hours on the phone trying to get her back pay.

Vivian Mercer, 64

Calling about back pay

Once you make up your mind to call Social Security, the phone is pretty much attached to your hip because they will say ‘Hello,’ and if you don‘t say ‘Hello,’ they will hang up.

Callers described bringing the phone into the bathroom if they need to go during their wait.

For 37-year-old Cindy Garcia, the fatigue she feels from her fibromyalgia makes the long waits especially difficult. Garcia, who waited for 40 minutes on an August call, prepared for the wait in advance by making sure she had decent sleep the night before and resting on a recliner during her wait.

“I think it’s a lot more stressful for any person — not just someone with my condition — to have to wait for over two hours with the anticipation of the other line coming on,” Garcia said.

How the calls end

Former commissioner Martin O’Malley was aghast when he learned that the agency would sometimes let calls end with what they called “a polite disconnect” message, which would inform callers that the line was too busy and abruptly hang up.

He ordered the agency to stop using that feature. However, it has returned since the Biden-era commissioner left and is now getting used more this year, according to internal records. More than 3.3 million calls out of the more than 76.4 million total ended with busy messages from January to September, the data showed.

For callers who spend hours on the phone, being told that help isn’t available is aggravating.

Tim Sellers, 73, began trying to reach Social Security this spring, after being diagnosed with throat cancer. He had a question about the amount of spousal and survivor benefits his wife could count on receiving after he died.

The retiree, who lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon, sat on hold for two hours on his first try. Then, a recorded message came over the line, and Sellers perked up, he recalled. But it was bad news: The tinny voice explained that Social Security had now closed for the day, and instructed him to call back during business hours the next day.

Sellers tried three more times before he was able to finally reach a representative. Across several failed attempts, he waited fruitlessly for hours. Sellers said he put the phone on speaker and paced around his house, trying to get a handful of household chores done as his irritation grew.

“They never tell you where you are in the line,” Sellers remembered. “So you couldn’t tell if there was progress. … Really, you were just in the dark.”

Sometimes, no explanation is given for why calls suddenly end.

Keith Shearer’s leg was broken, so the 73-year-old decided he would try calling Social Security to ask for his W-2 form, because he couldn’t drive to his local office.

Shearer tried calling Social Security three times. Each time, he waited for more than an hour on hold, placing his phone on speaker mode and keeping it close by, he said. Three times in a row, his call was ultimately dropped without explanation, Shearer said.

Keith Shearer, 73

Calling about a W-2 related question

And, you know, the internet is not always available and it’s not always easy for older people to use. You want to pick up the phone, you want to call someone, and you want to talk to someone. And those days, unfortunately, are just about over.

Many older callers and people with disabilities are calling at the darkest moments of their lives. Coming away without answers feels even more devastating.

In August, 65-year-old Katrina Stirn found out tumors from her Stage 4 breast cancer were growing more aggressively.

Stirn was forced to think seriously about what might happen after she died. She lives alone in Wake Forest, North Carolina, Stirn said, with no children, grandchildren or other family to help. The funeral home and the executor of her will, Stirn realized, would probably need to reach Social Security to confirm her death.

So Stirn began calling — and soon found herself stuck in a maddening routine.

She would sit down at the desk in her bedroom at about 11 a.m., hoping to catch employees at a slower point in the morning. She would place the call and be sent to a hold queue almost immediately. She would put the phone on speaker and find ways to pass the time: Yoga. Deep breathing. Folding the laundry.

She waited for hours each time, but never got through. After her sixth call failed, Stirn decided she’d had enough: She would not be phoning again.

Katrina Stirn, 65

Calling about her terminal illness

It’s like I just don’t care anymore, you know, in fact I’m about to cry as I say this. I just can’t deal with it anymore. Just, I’m ready to just give up on so many things, and I just gave up on Social Security.

About this story

Reporting by Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson. Graphics by Kati Perry. Design and development by Irfan Uraizee. Illustration by Elena Lacey. Audio production by Bishop Sand. Editing by Dan Eggen, Wendy Galietta and Betty Chavarria. Graphics editing by Emily Eng. Photo editing by Christine Nguyen. Additional editing by Paola Ruano.

Average wait times to receive a callback from the Social Security Administration were provided to The Post by a source in the agency.

One federal worker was rejected three times from the administration’s early resignation offer. Would he blame the president he voted for?

By Hannah Natanson

PAHRUMP, Nev. — When the government’s resignation offer arrived, Edward Brandon Beckham had no way of knowing.

He was on leave caring for Mikel, his wife of 21 years, who was dying of colon cancer. Under the terms of Brandon’s absence from the federal Bureau of Land Management, he wasn’t expected to check his work email.

So Brandon, who goes by his middle name, had to learn from the news that the Trump administration was offering to let federal workers like him resign and get paid through September. In mid-April, he decided to accept.

Now, staring at his computer, Brandon, 45, read that he was too late. The offer had closed three days before.

Brandon looked at Mikel, across the living room in her hospital bed. She was asleep. Surely, he told himself, the new government run by President Donald Trump — the man Brandon voted for — wouldn’t penalize him for missing a message. He composed an email to his bosses just after 5 p.m.

“As my wife is continuing in Hospice and I am her continuing caretaker, at this time, I am formally requesting that I be placed on Administrative Leave until a deferred resignation date of Sept. 30, 2025,” Brandon wrote. “Considering my circumstances, I respectfully request that I be allowed to participate.”

That spring, Brandon was among hundreds of thousands of federal workers weighing whether to abandon public service. Trump had taken office vowing to slash the federal bureaucracy, then entrusted the task to billionaire Elon Musk and a newly created cost-cutting team called the Department of Government Efficiency. In a matter of months, Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in spending and the job security that once distinguished government work.

Of America’s 2.4 million federal workers, nearly 4 in 10 registered to vote had, like Brandon, cast ballots for Trump, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll. Brandon liked Trump’s vision for the country, which he thought reflected his own conservative values, and believed the president had a good shot at ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

But as the days passed, Brandon was becoming convinced that the Trump administration’s treatment of government employees — large-scale firings, emails he saw as harassing, and strict return-to-office mandates — was wrongheaded and cruel. If he was unable to resign, Brandon would be required to report to a federal building in Las Vegas more than 70 miles away. Round-trip, it would cost him three hours a day with his three children, for whom he would soon be the only parent and sole provider.

Brandon felt like he was witnessing two painful deaths: his wife’s, of course, but also that of his career. In his darkest moments, Brandon turned to his Bible — and next to it, his leather-bound diary.

“God is in control; … nothing we experience escapes His attention,” Brandon wrote in early March, citing the writings of Christian missionary Elisabeth Elliot. “I believe this,” he added, underlining “believe” twice, “which scares me all the more.”

Why was God doing this to him? Why was Trump doing this to him?

“I think He is going to let me fall & break,” Brandon wrote.

Four days after Brandon submitted his request to resign, a human resources officer responded.

“Per the department, you cannot be considered for this,” the email read, “since you missed the application window.”

Until January, Brandon had felt hopeful about his professional future. After a decade bouncing between agencies, from lawyering at the Small Business Administration to handling contracts for the Defense Department, he’d found stability at the Bureau of Land Management. He loved his remote job, distributing funds to fix farm fences, clear hiking trails and remove rural brush. He saw chances to rise: In December, he’d been accepted into a graduate program in resource management at the University of Idaho. His supervisor had suggested he apply for a congressional leadership course.

Pahrump, where the family moved in 2021 after stints in Idaho and Maryland, was working out well. The children — Elias, 21; Hannah, 18; and Gabriel, 14 — liked school and their new friends. Brandon and Mikel owned a home mortgage-free. They joined a local church whose pastor and congregants they adored.

Mikel’s cancer meant it couldn’t last. Still, the doctors were astonished by her resilience. Mikel was feeling good, she told Brandon. Her appetite was strong. At times, she felt so healthy she’d turn to him and ask, “Are you sure God hasn’t cured me?”

For a while, Trump’s victory in November seemed another blessing. Brandon, a lifelong Republican who had voted twice for Trump — after writing in Rick Santorum in 2016 — didn’t always like how the president spoke, but he believed what he said.

Trump would stabilize and strengthen the American economy, Brandon thought. He would be a dominant leader on the world stage, forcing countries into peace agreements and trade deals. Brandon liked the president’s plan to streamline government and eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse,” too.

Then the Trump administration fired tens of thousands of probationary employees without justification. Musk instituted a weekly email requirement he said was necessary to see if lazy federal workers “had a pulse.” Federal employees’ mental health declined precipitously; a few died under stress or by suicide. Trump removed protections for public lands, leaving Brandon convinced that the president cared little about his agency or its mission. And every day, Brandon felt as if he read another article about DOGE culling more jobs in a bid to automate the workforce.

In February, Brandon applied for a clerkship at a local courthouse. He was rejected without an interview, which stung. His pastor told him to pray about joining the staff of Calvary Chapel Pahrump Valley, so he did. The ministry had always been his ultimate goal — but now, it didn’t feel right.

Brandon couldn’t save other people’s souls, he told himself. He couldn’t even save his career. And he couldn’t save Mikel.

One night in early April, he guided Mikel to the bathroom to empty her colostomy bag. She watched, shivering. Her face looked gray. Brandon took off his denim jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders.

Mikel caught his hand, brought it to her lips and kissed it. “Today I was thinking, and I remember going on walks with you,” she said, referring to strolls the couple took at Boise State University, where they met. “I realized: We’re not going to have those walks anymore.”

Brandon hid his tears. The next morning, he pulled out his journal and wrote down Mikel’s words, as best he could remember.

He hated watching Mikel slip toward death. But it would be worse, he knew, to miss it because he was driving to and from an office in Las Vegas. So when the government rejected his first resignation attempt, he took less than two hours to try again.

Brandon tapped out the email on his phone, sitting on the couch next to Mikel. This time, he applied both for the April resignation program and an earlier one, offered in January. He attached a screenshot of Trump administration guidance saying agencies could offer “reasonable extensions” to workers who “missed the ... deadline due to approved absence.”

“Please note, I am not seeking to be adversarial,” Brandon wrote in one message. That night, he sent another: “My request for extension is based on my being on approved leave because my wife of 21 years is dying.”

“This is exactly the type of request,” he added, “that objectively would fall within the characterization of reasonable.”

One morning in late April, Brandon’s daughter Hannah walked over to Mikel’s hospital bed to help feed her the first of 32 daily pills, cut in half for easy swallowing.

But Mikel wouldn’t wake. Still warm, she was gone.

That evening, after funeral home personnel had taken his wife’s body from the house, Brandon opened his laptop. He planned to tell his bosses about the death and request bereavement leave.

He saw an email waiting.

“You are expected to return to work in-person at BLM, Southern Nevada District Office,” the message said. It gave a Las Vegas address where Brandon would have to report “on a full-time basis starting on your first scheduled workday the week of June 15.”

Two days later, his phone rang with an unknown number. When he picked up, the caller introduced himself as a human resources officer at BLM.

“I just wanted to let you know they’re denying it,” Brandon remembered the officer saying about his request to resign.

“Do they know my wife passed?” Brandon recalled asking.

“No, I told them that,” the officer said.

“Dude,” Brandon said. “That’s, like, sick cold.”

“I know,” the officer said. “I’m just the middle man.”

That evening, Brandon tried to apply for deferred resignation for a third time. He emailed a handful of the most senior people he could think of, including the BLM chief of staff and a top human capital officer. Brandon asked to be let into the first offer, or the second; he didn’t mind which.

“I have 10 years of service with the Federal government,” Brandon wrote. “This is a very cold response. … I just want to focus on caring for my 3 kids right now, focus on the details for my wife’s memorial service.”

Over the next several days, Brandon’s request was forwarded through layers of management. Reading the chain later, Brandon noticed one administrator’s signature, its words colored neon red and blue: “Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, for all the people you can, while you can!”

A week after Mikel’s death, still waiting for an answer, Brandon opened his laptop again. He had received little sympathy, but perhaps it would help to show some.

“I understand this to be an issue far above everyone’s pay-grades,” he wrote. “I don’t view this as having anything to do with the BLM.”

He bolded the sentence, then typed another: “I understand it to be an issue of policy and discretionary decisions being made at a much higher level.”

Recently, he’d been wondering: how high?

Much of Trump’s presidency wasn’t working out as Brandon had hoped.

Trump’s immigration policies were scaring Gabriel, who came home from school talking about Hispanic classmates who expected to be deported. The president’s tariffs had also upset the 14-year-old: He’d planned to launch a website selling his own line of clothing — sweatpants, tees and sweatshirts branded LoveInspo. But Trump’s trade war meant Gabriel couldn’t calculate prices and shipping rates, so he’d had to delay.

Brandon didn’t like Trump’s attitude toward the Supreme Court, either. The court had ordered the president to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran man living in Maryland who was wrongly deported to El Salvador. But Trump had declined to do so.

Brandon, who earned a law degree from the University of the District of Columbia, found this disrespectful. Trump was ignoring both the court and the man’s due process rights, he felt. (Abrego was returned to the United States in June, then arrested again, and now faces new deportation proceedings.)

Maybe, Brandon thought for the first time, he had made a mistake in voting for Trump. But he wanted to believe the results would justify some temporary pain.

On May 1, the government rejected his third attempt to resign in a two-sentence email: “The request for consideration of … acceptance at this time has been denied by the Department.”

The next day, Brandon pulled out his journal.

“I have serious concerns about the Pres. Trump’s commitment to en,” he wrote, then broke off.

Three lines lower, he started again: “I’m see” — but crossed it out.

“I’m begin,” he wrote two lines beneath that.

Near the bottom of the page, he finished the thought.

“I’m disappointed in this administration, specifically Pres. Trump’s failure as a leader,” he wrote. Trump, Brandon scrawled, was “abandoning his commitment to ensuring that the common person is protected.”

Fifteen days after Mikel’s death, Brandon’s phone buzzed with a call from the funeral home director. Finally, he thought: It was time to pick up his wife’s remains.

But that wasn’t why the woman was calling.

“We haven’t been able to verify Mikel’s insurance,” Brandon remembered her saying, stumbling slightly over the words. “So we haven’t cremated her.”

Brandon almost dropped the phone. He told himself not to picture his wife’s body lying in storage. When he could speak again, he asked: “Why not?”

“Well, I’ve called two to three times a day,” the director said, “but we haven’t been able to get a hold of OPM.”

OPM was the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm. Mikel had been a federal worker, too, employed by the same agency as Brandon. Because of that, Brandon had told the funeral home staff, her government life insurance could cover the cost of cremation. But the funeral home’s policies required hearing directly from OPM to verify the coverage — and OPM wasn’t picking up the phone, the director told him.

Brandon hung up and tried OPM himself. Nine times, he said, a robotic recording suggested he try again later. On the 10th ring, another automated voice said Brandon should expect to wait 10 minutes. Forty-five minutes later, a human being answered.

Brandon thought about the time he’d called OPM during the Biden administration, when his wife first became too sick to work. Someone had picked up immediately, he remembered, and helped him negotiate Mikel’s early retirement and disability benefits.

Now the woman on the line sounded tired, Brandon thought. She promised someone would look into the matter and reply to the funeral home. But no one did. So on May 8, 16 days after Mikel died, Brandon charged $1,729.60 for her cremation to his credit card.

It was more than he made in a week.

Funeral home personnel confirmed Brandon’s recollection of the phone call, and his cremation purchase, and said they never heard back from OPM despite repeated attempts to reach the agency. Asked about the incident, an OPM official who would not provide their name to The Washington Post said the government paid “all life insurance benefits” due to Brandon following Mikel’s death. (OPM does not pay for expenses like cremation directly, the official said, although family members of the deceased can use federal life insurance payments to cover such costs.)

The OPM official added in a written statement that “call wait times ... is unfortunately an issue we’re frustrated with and predates this administration,” noting the agency is “working to create a more efficient system.”

A few days later, Brandon got ready to drive by himself through the desert at sunset. On Spotify, he clicked to a list of speeches from President John F. Kennedy, whose eloquence he found soothing. Scrolling, Brandon pressed play on “The President and the Press,” an address Kennedy gave to newspaper publishers 64 years ago.

Brandon backed the car out of his gravel driveway and started driving, the mountains looming purple over his shoulder. As he passed a gas station, then a casino, Kennedy declared no president should fear scrutiny from the press. Brandon recalled a clip he’d seen recently, in which Trump called an NBC News journalist a “jerk.”

“This administration intends to be candid about its errors,” Kennedy said. “For as a wise man once said: ‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’”

Brandon hit pause. Trump’s treatment of the federal workforce was clearly an error, he thought. The president had delegated authority to bad people, especially Musk and the young engineers running DOGE, who didn’t understand or care about the government and the people who made it function. But Trump had a lot to manage, Brandon thought. He probably didn’t know about everything Musk and DOGE were doing.

Suddenly, Brandon thought he knew why God was testing him: It was his job to help Trump correct the error, before it became a mistake.

As soon as he got home, he sat down to resign a fourth time. He addressed this email to the secretary of the interior and to Stephanie Holmes, the department’s acting chief human capital officer, who, he’d read, had run human resources for DOGE itself. These people had power, Brandon believed. So he asked them to use it.

“Please have some compassion on my situation,” he wrote, attaching a copy of his wife’s statement of death.

Almost two weeks later, the day before Gabriel’s graduation from eighth grade, Holmes replied to say he could resign. “Please find attached an agreement for your review and signature,” she wrote, signing off with “kind regards.”

Brandon’s prayers were answered, he thought.

He opened the PDF.

He had been accepted into the second resignation offer, which placed most employees on paid leave starting in late April, as Brandon understood it. He sat back, relieved. Under that schedule, he would receive what amounted to four weeks of badly needed back pay.

Brandon had run out of paid leave a few weeks earlier, so he was barely due to make any money in May. It was a blow, given his family was almost wholly reliant on his roughly $80,000-a-year income. But the pay provided under the resignation program would cover the missing month — signaling financial salvation.

As he kept reading the document, though, he felt his chest tighten.

Even though Brandon had been asking to resign since April 12, the department would count his resignation as taking effect more than four weeks later, meaning his paid leave wouldn’t start until May 21 at the earliest. He was out a full month’s pay after all.

Asked about Brandon’s resignation attempts and the details reported in this story, the Bureau of Land Management declined to comment. The White House referred comment to OPM. Holmes did not respond to a request for comment.

Around the same time, Brandon’s oldest son, Elias, finished his shift as a part-time janitor at Walmart and walked to the cereal section, where he picked out six 32-ounce bags of Colossal Crunch and Dyno-Bites. He crossed to another aisle and grabbed three 24-packs of ramen.

It’d be enough, he figured, to feed his family for two weeks.

A few days before, Brandon had pulled him aside to tell him he’d run out of paid leave. “I only got paid $900,” Brandon had said. “You’re probably going to have to help pay for some things.”

They never talked more about it. But checking their pantry, Elias saw Brandon had purchased a $10 bag of food for the family’s three dogs, instead of the usual $50 container. And four rolls of single-ply toilet paper instead of the typical 36-pack of Cottonelle.

Now, looking at his own grocery cart piled with cereal and ramen, Elias — the liberal in the family, and the only one who didn’t believe in God — wondered again about Brandon’s admiration for Trump. The president’s policies were hurting them, Elias thought. Why couldn’t his father see it?

Brandon had begun taking Elias on drives recently, to run errands or just ride through the desert, talking. Elias suspected his father missed driving with Mikel. Elias missed her, too. But in her absence, Elias was opening up more to Brandon. And his father was listening.

Elias wanted to become a firefighter, he’d recently confided. Brandon promised to take him to the gym so he could get in shape for the job. Brandon shared how discouraged he felt by the government’s repeated refusals to let him take the deferred resignation offer. Elias told him to keep trying.

Most conversations eventually turned to politics. Brandon brought up whatever the president had done that day, seeking his son’s opinion. Elias often responded by asking questions: “Do you still believe that?” “Do you see Donald Trump any differently now?” And, again and again: “If you could do it over again, would you still vote for Trump?”

Discourse was the way to change his father’s mind, Elias had decided. His dad, Elias realized, was like him: He didn’t want to be told what to think.

Elias was making progress, he thought. Brandon kept saying it was unfair to revisit the election with the benefit of hindsight. But he also said that, if he’d known Trump would do illegal things, he wouldn’t have voted for him.

The day of Mikel’s memorial service dawned hot and dry. Inside the chapel, decorated with flowers from Home Depot and a handmade quilt, her three children made it through their speeches without tears.

But Brandon, reading from a piece of paper, couldn’t get past the sentence that started: “Love never fails.”

When his father broke down for a third time, Elias rose and walked onto the stage. He held Brandon in an embrace that lasted almost a minute. He stayed there, one hand on his father’s shoulder, until he finished.

After both men sat down, Calvary Chapel’s lead pastor, John Gundacker, took the lectern. Mikel was a fighter, he said, who had finished her race. He’d been thinking about what she would have said today, if she could have spoken. Then he addressed Mikel’s husband and children one by one.

“We haven’t finished our race, our course isn’t complete,” the pastor told Brandon. “So we continue to fight the good fight, because that’s the exhortation that I believe Mikel would give us.”

Brandon nodded. He thought about all his attempts to resign. He’d sent another email the morning before Mikel’s service, accepting the government’s offer but urging Stephanie Holmes to do what he saw as the right thing and grant him the April back pay. He’d quoted Kennedy’s speech about errors and mistakes.

“If my case is any reflection of the general way some Federal employees are being treated by this Administration’s Leadership,” Brandon had written, “then I pray the Administration learns from what I’ve endured and properly correct errors that are being made, so that these errors do not become willful mistakes that tarnish the legacy and leadership of this Administration.”

Brandon was fighting, he thought. Just like Mikel would have wanted.

The pastor looked at Elias. “Your mom’s prayer, in her heart,” he said, “was that you would come into a personal relationship with Jesus.”

Elias kept his face blank. He had expected this. He didn’t like the pressure, but he was used to it.

A few hours after the service, Brandon got in the car, asking Elias to ride with him. As they drove past fast-food chains and mobile homes, interspersed with stretches of desert, Brandon started talking about Trump. On the campaign trail, he said, the president seemed controlled and statesmanlike. But now, back in office, he was “attacking” people.

“He needs to adjust in some significant ways,” Brandon said, “like how he leads.”

They reached the outskirts of town, passing a sign listing the distance to Las Vegas.

Elias thought about what the pastor said that morning. It was true that his mother wanted him to believe Jesus Christ died for mankind’s sins. But it was also true, Elias thought, that she liked her son the way he was. She liked how he treated other people with dignity. She liked that Elias accepted those from different backgrounds and ethnicities. That, he thought, was another way of being Christian.

He considered a moment. Then Elias said something he hoped would make his mother proud.

“Donald Trump is really good at finding what people want, and, like, sticking to that, which is obviously why he won,” he told his father. “But I almost feel like that’s a little bit dangerous. Don’t you think? Someone who’s willing to just say what’s popular?”

Brandon paused. He guided the car onto a mostly empty highway. He said again that Trump needed to make changes — to “temper himself,” which would help not only his reputation, but the country. Still, Brandon said, the president’s fundamental approach to everything wasn’t wrong.

“I think what I’m saying, the point I’m making about how he’s bringing in his business mentality — that is who he is,” Brandon told his son. “You know what I mean? He is who he is. … There’s a genuineness to that.”

It was too soon, Brandon felt, to give up on Trump’s vision for America. The president was a strong leader, making difficult decisions as he fought for a better future. Some people were going to suffer along the way. It was okay, Brandon decided, if he and his family were among those hurt.

Trump, he told Elias, still had his support.

The next morning brought a final email from Holmes: The government would not grant Brandon’s plea for back pay.

About this story

Audio by Bishop Sand. Animations by Daron Taylor. Story editing by Mike Madden. Photo editing by Max Becherer. Design by Tyler Remmel. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Project editing by Ana Carano. Copy editing by Anne Kenderdine and Phil Lueck.