Amid the the fourth week of Donald Trump’s presidency and Elon Musk’s unprecedented blitz against the federal government, dread abounds for the country’s federal civil service — the 2.3 million career government employees who handle everything from managing national parks and taxes to overseeing public health and homelessness aid.
Some 75,000 federal employees, or 3 percent of the workforce, have accepted the murky offer for “deferred resignation.” Since roughly 7 percent of federal workers voluntarily resign every year, there’s no indication yet that these voluntary departures will exceed typical levels.
Still, Musk and his allies have made clear they have no plans to stop their broader crusade to shrink the federal government, automate more of its tasks, and potentially cut spending by dismantling agencies one by one.
The aggressive campaign against the civil service parallels a long history of attacks against another type of public sector worker far more familiar to most Americans: teachers.
The current portrayal of civil servants as “deep state” bureaucrats pushing far-left ideology draws from the same playbook conservatives have long deployed against the 5.4 million Americans who teach in K-12 public schools. Examining these movements together reveals striking similarities in both rhetoric and strategy — and offers clues to the longer-term dangers ahead.
While the most immediate risks from the civil service attacks include a collapse of critical services, economic fallout, and a security vacuum, the consequences could reverberate far beyond this particular purge. Though civil servants have weathered previous onslaughts, the assault from the Department of Government Efficiency stands alone in both its scale and ambition. The warning signs are already visible in another public sector — just as teaching has become an increasingly embattled profession, the prospect of joining the federal workforce may become so diminished and insecure after the DOGE ambush that we face a more lasting degradation of policy implementation, accountability, and enforcement. A nation that devalues its public servants ultimately devalues its own future.
Attacks on “efficiency” and a “bloated public sector” didn’t start with DOGE
When conservatives talk about shrinking government, they draw on decades of ideas that took root well before Donald Trump. The push to deregulate began in earnest during the Ford and Carter years, when both Republicans and Democrats worked to slash rules governing everything from airlines to banking. Education was part of this campaign, too: The right-wing Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, made public funding for private schools one of its early priorities, and Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist who wielded enormous influence in conservative circles, championed school vouchers as a way to bring free market ideas into education.
Ronald Reagan would later cement these policies as Republican gospel, elevating privatized, bare-bones government as essential for economic growth and reducing federal overreach. Government wasn’t just inefficient, Reagan argued — it actively stood in the way of American prosperity. This anti-government philosophy found its perfect target in public education with the release of the 1983 federal report, “A Nation at Risk.”
This influential (though empirically flawed) analysis concluded that American public schools were failing — “eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity” — with ill-prepared teachers and low-quality standards. Conservatives seized on the findings, tied them to the nation’s Cold War fear of falling behind Russia, and painted a picture of failing public schools run by bureaucrats who cared little for student learning.
The attacks on public education gained new momentum in the 1990s when Bill Clinton and his “New Democrat” coalition joined the push for school reform. Worried that traditional liberalism had become too politically toxic, synonymous with bloated bureaucracy, these centrist Democrats saw education reform as a way to prove they could be tough on government waste and special interests while still supporting public services. This bipartisan embrace of market-based education reform laid the groundwork for even more aggressive attacks after the 2008 financial crisis, when conservatives argued that teacher salaries and benefits were bleeding taxpayers dry.
More than 120,000 teaching positions were ultimately eliminated across the United States in the two years following the market crash, with state funding for K-12 education falling roughly 8 percent below 2008 levels. This decline in employment had lasting impacts — by 2020, despite enrollment growth, public schools still employed fewer teachers than they had in 2008.
Teachers were cast as “deep state” infiltrators first
Today’s attacks paint federal workers as “deep state” subversives, echoing the long history of targeting educators as dangerous ideologues. During the Cold War, public school teachers faced intense scrutiny as potential communist sympathizers, with hundreds pushed out of their jobs through what amounted to political purges.
Suspicions of teachers as secret radicals never fully went away. Instead, they morphed as American politics changed. Attacks ramped up during the Obama years, when conservatives began labeling ethnic studies courses as “un-American” and pushing back against a revised history curriculum they alleged cast US history in too dark a light.
The playbook took on new life during the pandemic. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is now advising Trump on federal diversity and inclusion policy, helped transform vague anxieties about what kids were learning into specific accusations about “critical race theory” — a term that came to mean nearly any curriculum that refers to systemic or structural racism.
And when the “CRT” controversy started to fade from the public’s attention — largely because most voters just didn’t know or care about it — the political attacks shifted to claims about gender identity and “woke ideology” — a term increasingly used to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in schools and government. Republicans doubled down on these attacks in the presidential election, and within his first few days as president, Trump issued an executive order calling to “end radical indoctrination” in public education. In February, Musk tweeted that California teachers are “indoctrinating kids in DEI racism & sexism & communism” — capturing how these different accusations still blur together.
Undermining public servants puts all Americans at risk
As anti-teacher tactics spread to target federal workers, the battered teaching profession stands as a warning.
Decades of attacks on teachers have wrought serious consequences for schooling in the US. Research published last year by Melissa Arnold Lyon of the University at Albany and Matthew Kraft of Brown University found that interest in teaching among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 48 percent since the 1990s, and 40 percent since 2010. Over the last two decades, the number of people earning a teaching license annually dropped by over 100,000, and the proportion of college graduates who go into teaching is at a 50-year low.
The crisis isn’t limited to recruitment. For those who have chosen the classroom, deteriorating conditions and mounting frustrations are driving more teachers to quit. Lyon and Kraft find that teachers’ job satisfaction recently reached its lowest level in five decades, declining by 26 percent in the past 10 years. While many commentators point to the pandemic as the culprit, the researchers find that most of the declines occurred steadily throughout the last decade, preceding the Covid-19 crisis. This kind of sustained dissatisfaction has led to increased turnover, which is linked to poor student outcomes and a worsened school climate overall.
The consequences of pushing talented teachers out of the field and deterring ambitious young people from entering at all are becoming impossible to ignore. School leaders are struggling more than ever to fill empty teaching spots, and average teacher pay has barely moved in three decades, unlike other jobs that need a college degree. The teacher shortage has gotten so bad that some states are lowering their standards just to get more adults into classrooms — a desperate move that risks putting unqualified people in charge of children’s education.
Perhaps most importantly, these developments have hurt student learning. Teacher quality is consistently identified as the most influential school-related factor affecting student achievement, graduation rates, college attendance, employment, and lifetime earnings. The impact is particularly pronounced for low-income students, who stand to gain the most from quality teaching.
This should all serve as a wake-up call: If these DOGE purges teach a generation that working for the federal government, once attractive for its prestige, decent pay, and job security, is actually precarious and prone to attack, all of us will be worse off for a long time.
The public sector is democracy’s backbone — it handles the big stuff we all share like parks and highways, plays the long game when businesses won’t, and actually has to answer to voters, not shareholders. Getting these things right depends on attracting and keeping talented people who want to serve.
Federal workers are taking unprecedented hits right now, and many are asking themselves if staying in government is worth it, even if current legal challenges get resolved in their favor. It’s a fair question that every person will have to figure out for themselves, and that teachers have long been asking. But here’s what we know for sure: The work of the public sector will matter long after any administration changes, and we should be doing everything we can to make people want to be part of that mission.
The post Elon Musk is using the anti-teacher playbook against the entire civil workforce appeared first on Vox.
