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Kathleen Walters was only 23 days away from qualifying for early retirement at the IRS when she decided to quit, rather than acquiesce to a Trump-administration request that she break the law and compromise millions of people’s privacy. She’s one of hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have left or been fired from their federal-government jobs in the past year. In this episode, host Anne Applebaum speaks with Don Moynihan, an expert in the history of public policy from the University of Michigan. He explains how the destruction of America’s civil service is part of the administration’s greater effort to create a government that derives its power through unprecedented means and fundamentally disrupts democracy as we know it.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
Kathleen Walters: I thought I would be at the IRS for six months when I joined, and those six months turned into almost two decades. My name is Kathleen Walters, and I was an executive at the IRS for nearly 20 years, most recently serving as the agency’s chief privacy officer. I’ve kind of worked with every administration all the way back to the early ’90s. No other administration has personally ever asked me to do anything that was illegal, no. No.
Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum. In this new season, I’m asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today’s episode examines the destruction of the civil service: the removal of professionals, and their replacement with loyalists. I’ve seen this kind of transformation before, in other failing democracies. Everyone suffers from the degradation of public services. Government institutions run by lackeys are also more easily manipulated by autocratic leaders, and no longer serve the public interest. Kathleen Walters found herself in the center of this story in 2025.
Walters: So on day one of the second Trump administration, it was clear things were going to be different because of the flurry of executive orders that were issued. I got word that some of our leaders might be negotiating with DHS over a memorandum of understanding—an agreement to share tax data. I was contacted by our acting commissioner, and they wanted to have an agreement signed with DHS to share data on immigrants. Certainly name, address, contact information was high on their list and, really, whatever we could give them. And they wanted to compile it and mix it with the data they received from all the other agencies, and—they didn’t use this term, but it was very clear—create the most updated profile on each of the immigrants. I asked DHS for a sense of volume, and the individual representing DHS stated that he believed it would be about up to 7 million immigrants’ data that they were requesting.
That is very, very sensitive data, and we have one of the most complex privacy laws in the federal government. The lawyers determined that we could not give it to them legally. I had decided that I was not going to be able to facilitate something that, based on our attorney’s input, was not lawful. So that weekend, I sent a resignation email to the acting commissioner.
The decision to leave the IRS was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and yet the easiest decision. We all have boundaries in life. I had a clear one, and I was committed to it. So that made it easy. On the other hand, I also am the mom to a 9-year-old, who I’m responsible for caring for and paying for. I was 23 days shy of qualifying for early retirement, which would’ve given us some payments monthly and health insurance for life. So I had to tell my daughter what was going on, and I said, you know, We are gonna have to not spend as much money. We’re probably not gonna go out to eat much. But this is what I did and this is why. And it still chokes me up. She said to me, Mom, even if we have to live in a tent in someone’s yard, you made the right decision.
Integrity, to me, it’s the most important thing to maintain, because if you lose a job, you can get another job. But if you lose your integrity, it is very hard to get it back.
[Music]
Don Moynihan: I don’t think this is an anomaly, and I think what it tells us is about the way in which Trump is managing the civil service in his second term in a fashion that’s quite different from how he did in the first term.
Applebaum: Professor Don Moynihan is an expert in the history of public policy, and teaches at the University of Michigan.
Moynihan: And a lot of these disagreements really boil down to whether the president can order people to break the law. It’s a red flag when you see so many people saying, My god. This is so illegal that we cannot, in good conscience, stick around any longer.
Applebaum: Don, there are now many, many civil servants who have left or been fired, so tell us more about how this term may be different from President Trump’s first term.
Moynihan: I spent a few years at the end of Trump’s first term trying to think about how bad could it get in his second term. I did not anticipate just how bad it would become, partly because I didn’t anticipate that so many laws, civil-service laws and other laws, would be broken with seeming impunity. One of his big lessons from his first term was that there are a lot of lawyers in government who are telling me, No, I can’t do things. I need lawyers who will tell me, Yes you can. And so he’s systematically pushing the envelope on policy and, in many cases, breaking the law. And then also replacing those lawyers with more amenable actors. And so we see again and again, principled public officials saying, We think this crosses the boundaries, effectively being put on administrative leave, being told to resign, or, in some cases, being fired.
Applebaum: I want to ask you about the implications of all that, but first I think it would be helpful to give a little background here, because the United States hasn’t always had a professional, nonpartisan civil service. Until the Pendleton Act of the 1880s, we had something called the “spoils system,” which meant that only loyal party members could get jobs in government. And that system created corruption. It encouraged bribery. It was inefficient. How did that change?
Moynihan: The first major civil-service reform bill is introduced during the Civil War by Charles Sumner. And it’s a response to the perception that a lot of money is being wasted, the war effort is less efficient than it should be, partly because of the corruption that’s embedded in the use of public funds. We see stories of, basically, large contracts going to people aligned with the party. And so it became clearer to the public that you couldn’t really trust that the politicians were acting in the public interest when there was so much money sloshing around the public sector.
Applebaum: And so instead of that, we created a system that requires people to be hired and fired based on merit. And the Civil Service Reform Act, which comes later in the 20th century, also says you can’t hire or fire people because of their political affiliations. Correct?
Moynihan: That’s exactly right. The Civil Service Reform Act is the first act to actually write down what those merit principles are, and it specifies, very clearly, that employees cannot be treated differently because of their political affiliations.
Applebaum: And is the current administration adhering to this act?
Moynihan: Neither in spirit or in the letter of the law is the current administration adhering to this act, in my view. I think we’re at the most dramatic attack on the civil-service system since its creation in the 1880s. It feels that there is an element of the spoils system that is returning, but also, there is this much more direct attack on democracy that is part of the mechanization and the weaponization of the civil-service system right now.
Applebaum: And is this an effective strategy for improving government efficiency?
Moynihan: We know that research tells us that more politicization leads to generally worse outcomes. And this is for a variety of reasons. One is that you get less competent people who work for government under more politicized regimes. The more talented people tend to leave. You also have officials who don’t want to share bad news with their political principals. And so the presidents or the agency leaders are simply making worse decisions because they don’t have good access to information.
I’ll give you two examples of pieces of research here. One is that after the Pendleton Act, and the post office was no longer driven by patronage, you saw the accuracy and speed of mail delivery improve. So in a very specific way, you could see how performance got better. Another example is: The Bush administration used to rate agency programs on a one-to-five scale from “not performing” to “excellent.” And one analysis found that programs that were run by career civil servants tended to perform better than programs that were run by political appointees, all else being equal. Once you add politicization, things tend to get worse; once you give autonomy to capable professionals, things tend to get better when it comes to performance.
Applebaum: I mean, is there a precedent of other countries that had meritocratic civil service sliding backwards? The only example that comes into my head, since my background is in writing Soviet history, is the Bolsheviks, in the Soviet Union. The Soviet state created a civil service in which you could only advance if you were a party member, and not only that, you had to publicly state your allegiance to the party and its constantly changing principles, whenever you were asked to do it. Is there another country, another example, that you think of?
Moynihan: In Hungary, they put party cronies in charge of major parts of the system through a privatization scheme. In Turkey, we saw mass purges of people who were perceived as not being aligned with the administration. And so there is a common pattern there that I think serves as a warning sign.
Applebaum: And where do you see those warning signs now, in America?
Moynihan: So I think we’re seeing a multipronged attack on civil-service capabilities. Partly it’s through hiring. They want to put more loyalists into civil-servant positions. Partly it’s through firing. People who won’t go along with breaking the law are being shown the door. And partly it’s also through just instilling a culture of fear within our government.
Applebaum: Let’s break those down. What is unprecedented about the way the Trump administration is hiring civil servants?
Moynihan: The Trump administration announced a new hiring process, which it claimed would bring in better candidates for public-sector jobs. There were a couple of really unusual aspects to that. One is that people would submit essays where they would be asked to name their favorite Trump executive order and how they would help serve President Trump. And so that is new—the idea that job candidates will be asked, How are you gonna serve this particular president? Even though the job is, you’re supposed to serve every president, not just this individual president. The second part of the hiring process that’s changing now is that political appointees are directly involved in choosing these civil servants, and so it eliminates any barrier between the political appointees—those who are directly loyal to the president—and the people who are hired, which makes it much more likely that the people who are hired are also going to share those same political loyalties to President Trump.
Applebaum: Of course, political appointees have always had some involvement with the civil service, but there still seems to be something different now. There’s a culture of fear around these appointments that didn’t exist before, and we know that that culture of fear is being created deliberately. And we know that because the architect of a lot of these changes, Russell Vought, at the Office of Management and Budget, has said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want to put them in trauma.” How are we seeing that play out?
Moynihan: I certainly think that was his goal. He has been upfront about viewing the government as an enemy, wanting a much smaller bureaucracy. And I think he has succeeded. One thing that’s important to understand is that this culture of fear that we’re seeing is not just driven by Trump officials. It’s also driven by Trump-aligned actors in broader society. And so, for example, Elon Musk might tweet about an individual government employee. They then get doxxed; they have to leave their home. You see private actors who are sort of conservative commentators identify individual civil servants. These could be FBI agents. And you read the next week: Those people have been fired.
And you also see a very organized effort, and some funded by organizations like the Heritage Foundation, to FOIA individual civil servants, to basically go through their emails, see if they can find any damaging language that would allow them to be fired, and to create, effectively, enemies lists, where individual civil servants are put on a website somewhere. There are lists of alleged crimes, which are often things like, Served on a DEI panel once, are listed. And then, again, you predictably see sometimes formal retaliation for that—a person might be put on leave or fired—but also informal attacks, where people get nasty phone calls, emails; sometimes people will turn up at their home and threaten them. And so the fear is not irrational. It is not just in the workplace; it’s in the broader society that these civil servants are now working in.
Applebaum: The third warning sign you listed is the mass firings. Since the Trump administration has taken office, hundreds of thousands of civil servants have been fired or have quit. Are these mass firings legal? I had always assumed, prior to this administration, that it wasn’t that easy to fire civil servants. In fact, this was one of the complaints that was sometimes made about them, is that they can’t be fired. How is it possible that this administration can just tell thousands of people to leave their jobs?
Moynihan: There are so many things I thought were illegal that now appear to be legal. It’s hard to keep a full list. If you asked me a year ago, Can the president eliminate an agency? or Can the president impound funds? I would’ve said, No, those are illegal things because that takes up congressional prerogatives too great an extent. They’re clearly unconstitutional. And now we have seen the president do both of those things. When it comes to firing individual employees, it is onerous to fire an individual employee. You can fire them for calls. That is to say: If they’re poor performers, you can fire them. They can appeal that decision. It can take a while to do that, but if you document the basis for the firing, it is possible to get rid of them. Ironically, it’s somewhat easier to fire lots of employees, because there is a legal “reduction in force” process—RIFs—where agencies can say: Because we need to save money, or because of some reorganization, we are going to eliminate a lot of positions.
Whether the Trump administration is using those reduction-in-force authorities legally, I think, is a very open question. RIFs are very technical documents and there’s a lot of procedures. It looks to me that the Trump administration has not followed in implementing those RIFs. Also, a huge number of people left through the deferred-resignation program, the so-called “fork in the road” voluntary-resignation program that Elon Musk introduced. It feels fairly clear to me that that was not following statutes, but a lot of people simply did leave, and it doesn’t seem like the Supreme Court is gonna do anything about it. The ways in which there was mass firings of probationary employees—a judge has ruled those to be illegal, but he’s also said: Well, it’s too late to fix it now. And so there is this sort of disturbing trend where things that really do appear to be illegal in terms of how federal employees are treated are allowed to move forward. And then maybe, down the line, the court will say, Well, that wasn’t right. But at that point, the remedy has pretty much walked out the door. Too much time has passed. So, for example, USAID doesn’t exist as an agency anymore. And so even if the courts were to say, That was illegal, there’s no workable solution for the employees who were laid off or for the programs that they were trying to implement.
Applebaum: Coming up after the break: The attack on the civil service may be part of a bigger project: Trump’s entourage wants to change our system so that they can stay in power.
Moynihan: He’s issued executive orders claiming authority over elections that constitutionally he doesn’t seem to have, but that doesn’t mean that a weaponized Department of Justice couldn’t sue or investigate or harass states or individual election officials for what they regard as improper behavior, which could be behavior that’s actually trying to maintain a free and fair election.
Applebaum: That’s after the break.
[Break]
Applebaum: Don, talk about the practical impact of these firings. Of course they are felt by the people themselves, who’ve lost their jobs, but how will this affect the public at large?
Moynihan: I think there are two ways to answer that question. And so the first way is to think about the federal workforce as a group of employees who work for you. Do you want a group of employees that are knowledgeable, committed to their job, really dedicated to the goals that they’re trying to implement? And I think, historically, in America, we’ve mostly said yes. We get to hire some very smart people in government, partly because they care a lot about the mission, partly because they like the stability of government work. And so we probably get people who are coming not just for the paycheck—because they could earn more in the private sector—but because they’re really committed to the statutory goals of protecting the environment or emergency management. If you think of yourself as a mini-CEO overseeing this workforce, what we’re seeing is a bunch of structural changes that is gonna make it less easy for you to attract and retain good employees. They don’t appreciate the lack of stability. They don’t appreciate the toxic work environment, or being demonized. And so a lot of those people will exit, or they will never join the public sector in the first place. The stock of human capital in the workforce just gets worse.
Then we get to specific public services. And here, it’s harder to say, Planes are going to drop out of the sky tomorrow because there’s a 5 percent cut of FAA employees. And this is something about public services that is sometimes maybe a little different from private services, which is that the erosion of quality can be slower and harder to observe. I do think there are places we are starting to see this. Social Security has been struggling to serve its customers. I think the IRS—the fact that they’re hiring back people now is an admission that they simply don’t have enough people to manage the inflow of tax forms that will come at tax season. I think emergency management, to me, is a huge red flag, where FEMA did not have an especially bad summer in terms of natural disasters, but with flooding in Texas, it clearly was not as able to respond, partly because of the cuts and services, partly because of the extra layers of red tape that the DHS leadership imposed upon it. And so I think there will be more stories like that, where failures occur in a visible way. And then if you look at those failures honestly, you can say, Well, partly, this is because the Trump administration chose to reduce the capacity of these agencies.
Applebaum: So if things do begin to erode and government services begin to decline and more accidents happen with pollution or food safety, do you think people will make the connection between those accidents, and that erosion, and the attacks on the civil service?
Moynihan: What I do think is true is that there is a moment here of opportunity for civic education between the citizens of America and the government that serves them, where we can explain to them: Here it is; here’s what your government does. Here’s how your taxpayer dollars are spent. And when you sort of pull out these capacities, here’s how things start to collapse. We mostly don’t have those moments of opportunities, because they’re mostly moments of really bad outcomes. I think about Hurricane Katrina. That was an opportunity where we understood that putting unqualified people in charge of FEMA contributed to some very bad outcomes for the residents of New Orleans. So I think the work to be done there is to connect these failures that we see with choices made by the administration to undermine state capacity.
Applebaum: Earlier, you directly linked the civil-service firings with a decline in democracy, and you’ve also written elsewhere that President Trump is trying to build a more authoritarian political system. Let’s talk more specifically about what that means. For example, direct control of some state institutions could give a ruling party or leader advantages. So if the president can use the IRS to steal data or information, and use it in campaigns, or to initiate investigations against his enemies for political reasons, then the next time we go to vote, the playing field isn’t level. And that’s why neutral institutions that are meant to serve all of us shouldn’t be politicized.
Moynihan: Yeah. You need nonpartisan institutions to, I think, also create trust in government. And if we look at independent agencies, or, let’s say, take the Merit Systems Protection Board. This was created with the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. These were the actors put in place, where if some employee is saying, I’ve been fired because of my political affiliation, or I’ve been fired because I wouldn’t do something illegal, they have the final sort of judgment on whether discrimination on political basis took place. But President Trump has basically taken control of that entity, removed any Democrats and put only Republicans on it. And so it’s no longer a credible check on government abuses at this point.
Applebaum: All of us have begun to focus on the midterms, and, clearly, the administration is nervous about them. How does the absence of thousands of federal civil servants, or the politicization of the civil service—how could it affect the elections? Do mass firings create an atmosphere of fear that impacts voting? What’s the connection between these two things?
Moynihan: One part of the authoritarian checklist that Trump has struggled most with is elections, and that’s partly because the constitutional system delegates the actual running of elections to state governments. And historically, the federal government has had minimal involvement over these processes. And, you know, right now that seems like a very good thing. But that doesn’t mean that a weaponized Department of Justice couldn’t sue or investigate or harass states or individual election officials for what they regard as improper behavior, which could be behavior that’s actually trying to maintain a free and fair election. It doesn’t mean that the president might not deploy the National Guard to election sites, or put ICE around election sites, on the claim that mass fraud is taking place. It is, I think, the area where Trump has made the least progress. But he’s clearly interested in this as a topic, and he’s issued executive orders claiming authority over elections that, constitutionally, he doesn’t seem to have—as he has done in other areas.
Applebaum: This seems, to me, to be the central point: the possibility of elections being shaped or manipulated by the executive. It’s not necessarily going to happen, but it’s also important that we take the possibility seriously. How do you think we should be thinking this? Should we be behaving differently; should we be acting differently?
Moynihan: We’re currently operating under an administration where you probably can’t retain a significant job if you don’t go along with the idea that somehow the 2020 elections were crooked. It does mean that the leadership of these agencies, like the Department of Justice, are going to be very much driven by people with this conspiratorial worldview, who are perhaps less dedicated to constitutional principles.
So I think in the blue states, you will have attorney generals who will be anticipating these efforts and will be, in some cases, responding to Department of Justice investigations. In red states, you’re gonna have this partisan alignment between the president and the actors in charge of individual states. And so I think, in both cases, public support for elections, public support for maintaining the integrity of elections, will become very important. Visible demonstrations by members of the public, if they can start to realize that there are real threats here, will become, I think, useful in reminding society as a whole that these elections do not run themselves.
[Music]
Applebaum: Don, thank you so much.
Moynihan: It was my pleasure. Thank you, Anne.
Applebaum: Autocracy in America is produced by Arlene Arevalo, Natalie Brennan, and Jocelyn Frank. Editing by Dave Shaw. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado and Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Anne Applebaum.
Next time on Autocracy in America:
Stacey Abrams: We cannot be so naive as to think that this is just about who wins a race. This is about who wins America. We could win. But we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.
Applebaum: That’s next time, on our final episode of the season.
The post Purge the Public Servants appeared first on The Atlantic.
