A Forest Service employee spent his own money to mow the lawn at a government property he manages. Spending freezes and new bureaucratic sign-off requirements meant the agency could not pay for the routine service in a timely way.
A social scientist with the Internal Revenue Service went into the office after months on leave and found that his co-workers had already left the government or were on their way out.
Calls to the General Services Administration about routine work might or might not be answered because so many people have left, an official there said. Employees depart without any planning for who will take over their roles.
Elon Musk’s time with the federal government is up, but his chain saw approach to firing workers, freezing spending and canceling contracts continues to reverberate in the empty halls of agencies in Washington and around the country.
Current and former federal workers describe a government that in some cases remains paralyzed with uncertainty, waiting for direction from senior officials. Everyday tasks now take much longer, with added layers of supervisory approvals that they say make their work harder. Thousands of government employees are now being paid not to work, all in service of Mr. Musk’s efficiency mandate, which President Trump billed as a way to purge the government of diversity initiatives and as a cost-cutting initiative to better serve the American public. (There is scant evidence of any savings.)
And while Mr. Musk is going back to running his companies, the federal work force reductions he set in motion have yet to fully take effect. Tens of thousands of government workers have been braced for layoffs for more than a month.
Moreover, some of the aides that Mr. Musk installed in agencies remain in place, seeking to continue their version of the efficiency and modernization drive.
The current and former federal workers who described morale and working conditions in the wake of Mr. Musk’s initiatives did so on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Even people who have left government asked to remain anonymous out of concern that speaking out could jeopardize their severance agreements.
“Musk leaving is a little bit like the departure of Godzilla after there’s an attack on the city,” said Max Stier, the president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that works to promote best practices in the federal government. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s been flattened, and the damage is profound, but it’s not actually over.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. In his social media post on Wednesday noting that his time in Washington was coming to a close, Mr. Musk said that the efficiency initiative he began “will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”
But while Mr. Musk succeeded in shuttering one agency, U.S.A.I.D., and thinning the ranks of workers in others, his legacy in the minds of many federal workers is one of shattered morale and growing job frustrations, large and small.
In one of its first moves, Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, changed many government credit card spending limits to $1, a step that federal employees say has only made their work less efficient.
An official with the National Park Service said that if he needs to purchase something for work, he has to track someone down who has a card with more than a $1 limit. Then he has to see if that person is willing to pay for basic utilities. In other words, he said, two or three people are now needed to carry out a task that one person used to do.
The Forest Service employee who paid for lawn care out of his own pocket said multiple new versions of contract forms have emerged this year, going from version five to version 11. It was so difficult to get approval for a snow plowing contract for property in New England that a contractor was plowing on good faith until the payment was approved two months later, the employee said.
And the silence about what is coming next is deafening, the employee with the General Services Administration said. In addition to learning about departures from email error messages, the lack of information from supervisors is unprecedented, especially as workers await word on the timing of planned layoffs. People are scared and nervous, the employee said, adding that colleagues who are typically calm under pressure are freaking out.
Mr. Musk did not consider the impact of programs he directed agencies to cut and showed little interest in understanding the bureaucracy he so loathed, said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“He has managed to inflict maximum pain with no discernible gain,” Ms. Murray said in a statement. “I fear we are going to be living with the devastating consequences of his actions for years to come, especially since President Trump is plowing ahead with Elon’s cuts.”
At the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there have been so many changes that employees struggle on a daily basis to keep track, one wildlife conservationist said.
So many senior officials have taken the voluntary retirement options that there is a significant “brain drain” across the agency, she said. People are getting shuffled in and out of jobs with very little notice. Morale is at an all-time low, particularly with the string of insults from Mr. Musk and others about government workers being lazy. Those who still have jobs are in survival mode status, she said.
The rash of personnel changes and legal challenges have left thousands of federal workers in a state of job limbo as well, as they wait for court developments to inform them of their employment status.
The goal for many is to stay out of the line of fire, an archaeologist with the Department of Agriculture said. If they or their work does get hit, she said, the goal is to direct the bullet to the leg instead of the heart, so that there is still something left once the destruction ends.
So far there is no end in sight, and Mr. Musk’s loyalists are still embedded in government agencies.
On Wednesday, Bryton Shang, a former tech executive now serving as a senior adviser at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, was spotted in one of the agency’s elevators, an employee there said. Mr. Musk was never actually around the office, she said. But his staff is very much still there.
Donald F. Kettl, professor emeritus and the former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, said Mr. Musk’s departure from government casts a long shadow.
“DOGE was never so much an entity, but an unguided missile that crushed programs and people in its way, and a recruitment machine” that embedded DOGE staff throughout the government, he said.
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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