U.S. President Donald Trump and his advisor Elon Musk are hellbent on cutting down the size of the federal bureaucracy. The newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has become a platform for Musk to run amok in seeking to pressure civil servants to step down or else force them out of their jobs.
During Trump’s first few days in office, federal workers woke up to emails urging them to consider a deal in which they would receive pay and benefits until Sept. 30 if they choose to “resign” by Feb. 6. One of the president’s first actions was a back-to-work executive order that requires federal employees to come back to the office—with the hope that many will decide to stay home. Trump won’t stop going after diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, determined to gut them from every office possible—including private institutions and state governments that receive federal money.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been folded into the State Department, diminishing its autonomy to protect workers, while large numbers of staff overseas were told that they were being put on paid leave. This comes on top of the administration cutting ties with the contractors that constitute more than half of USAID’s workforce. Trump has said that the top priority for Linda McMahon, his nominee to become the education secretary, is to put herself out of a job, meaning to get rid of the entire department.
Musk also set off the alarms when he gained access to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, which is responsible for distributing millions of dollars of payments—including the salaries of federal workers—despite internal efforts to stop him.
And all of this is just the start. With so much attention in the 2024 campaign having been focused on immigration and inflation, Trump’s war on the administrative state has moved front and center, with Musk as his top henchman. Back in early 2017, then-top Trump advisor Steve Bannon had called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In 2025, Trump is trying to make that dream come true.
None of this is a total surprise. After all, Republicans—and some Democrats—have been railing against government for decades. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan set the tone in his inaugural address by warning that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Attacking civil servants has been a favorite pastime for the right. Who doesn’t have a bad story from the Department of Motor Vehicles that doesn’t allow them to relate to public figures questioning why some people still have their jobs? Many citizens living in every state, red and blue, have pulled out their hair when dealing a government worker on the other end of a phone who doesn’t have a satisfactory answer to very basic questions.
In making the need to cut down government employees one of his top goals, Trump joins a long tradition of turning public service into a problem to be solved rather than a career to be celebrated.
But, of course, that doesn’t mean that it is the right thing to do or that the strategy will succeed—as history demonstrates.
Federal workers received protection from partisan attack through civil service reforms in the 1880s that made it more difficult to remove employees. Since that time, though, politicians have tried to go after the workforce in many different ways.
Although the assault has been ongoing, these attacks greatly intensified after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, when the size of the federal government had vastly expanded as a result of the New Deal and World War II.
The fiercest approach has been the purge. The Cold War induced both Democrats and Republicans into the game. A 1947 executive order by President Harry Truman created a loyalty program that federal employees had to follow if they wanted to remain employed.
Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy went much further as he trained his eyes on the State Department. McCarthy perfected the art of the smear. He lobbed accusations that there were communists lurking in the office buildings of the federal government who posed a danger to national security. Between 1947 and 1956, according to the historian Landon Storrs, more than 5 million federal workers were screened and 2,700 fired; 12,000 resigned.
In 1953, fueled by fears of McCarthy, President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order that defined a threat to national security as constituting “any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, sexual perversion.” Approximately 7,000 to 10,000 people would lose their jobs or step down for fear of being exposed in what has been called the “Lavender Scare.”
In 1972 presidential advisor Fred Malek was the architect of the “responsiveness program” that secretly planned to remove long-time civil servants, particularly in the newly created Environmental Protection Agency, and replace them with loyalists to the administration who would be “more responsive to President Nixon.” The Watergate investigations would bring these efforts to light, resulting in the 1978 civil service reform. Malek also revealed the effort to channel federal grants to organizations that would help the reelection campaign.
Other presidents have found avenues to simply fire federal workers despite their protections. In August 1981, Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who went on strike. Although the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) endorsed Reagan in the 1980 campaign—despite long-standing union support for Democrats—the president used their strike as a show of force. When the workers walked off the job to demand better wages and decent hours, Reagan gave them two days to come back.
“I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning,” Reagan warned in remarks to reporters on Aug. 3, “they are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.” When they did not, he delivered a major blow to unions more broadly when he announced that they would not return to their jobs.
The “memory of PATCO’s destruction,” noted the historian Joseph A. McCartin in his book Collision Course, “long haunted American workers.”
Another death knell for workers has been the reorganization of the executive branch and the termination of agencies, usually because Congress ended programs or allowed them to expire. The Civil Aeronautics Board, established in 1938, was terminated in 1985 after the congressional deregulation of the airlines industry rendered the agency unnecessary. “I declare the Civil Aeronautics Board closed forever,” the last chairman, C. Dan McKinnon, said on the final day. By the time of its shutdown, the workforce had already gone down from 840 people in 1978 to just 300.
The Office of Civil Defense closed its doors in July 1979, and the Office of Technology Assessment—which had been a target of House Speaker Newt Gingrich since he took power in 1995—shuttered its doors later that year after more than two decades of providing legislators with scientific and technical expertise.
Finally, presidents from both parties have sought to pursue efficiency by streamlining personnel through reorganization, retirement incentives, stricter work obligations and outsourcing work out to private contractors. President Bill Clinton was one of the most successful. During his two terms, Clinton shrunk the federal workforce by more than 270,000 people. The administration increased funding for contracts with private actors to take over more jobs that were formerly handled by the government.
President George W. Bush also moved forward with a mix of buyouts, contracting, and incentives, though he was less successful as a result of the massive expansion of government via national security in the aftermath of 9/11.
Though conservative presidents such as Reagan and Bush were frustrated when the size of the federal workforce actually expanded during their terms (under Reagan, the workforce grew faster than under his predecessor, Democratic President Jimmy Carter), in the long run, the numbers have held roughly steady even as the responsibilities of the government keep growing.
For this reason, much of the federal workforce has been strained and struggled to keep up with the many demands that are placed on them. As Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution found in a report published in January, the size of the workforce is about the same as it was 50 years ago even though the national population has risen by two-thirds and federal spending has increased as well.
Freezing the workforce has been more effective than severely cutting it. One of the main challenges is that government is difficult to retrench, not because there some sort of “deep state” that protects itself, but because Americans want most of the services that government provides—from national security to administering health care benefits.
It is one thing to talk in the abstract about a government that is bad and to blast its workers as incompetent or worse, but it is another to leave jobs unfilled so that when citizens go to claim their benefits or seek help, nobody is behind the desk.
Trump is in a league of his own based on the way that he is going about this plan. Though he draws on many elements from the past, including attempting to purge workers with DEI as the new stand-in for communism, he is acting in Nixonian fashion by attempting to usurp congressional power by dismantling agencies through executive fiat. He is testing the constitutional boundaries of contemporary politics by seeing if anyone will enforce the Impoundment Act of 1974—which prevents presidents from withholding funds for programs—and trying to tear down agencies without legislative approval.
At the same time, he is sending one of the wealthiest business leaders in the world, a private citizen who has not gone through any election or confirmation process, to handle the dirty work, without much apparent supervision. Musk, whose private and political interests are so intertwined that it is hard to know what is being done for his vision of the public good or the needs of his bottom line, appears to have little regard for the differences between government bodies and a private entity such as X. Silicon Valley rules should apply equally to both.
Nor does Trump appear to have much of a plan other than to destroy. Whereas Clinton and Bush carried out their reorganization with a genuine effort to make the government more efficient and responsive (though each faced pushback and controversy as well), Trump just wants to burn down the house without much of a sense of what comes next.
Democrats should not downplay his ability to succeed. The history books are filled with successful initiatives that have cut down federal workers or frozen their numbers in the place. But the record also shows that very often, these are the moves that make Americans more aware than ever before about why government workers are not enemies but hardworking fellow citizens trying to make daily life better for the nation.
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