Public service jobs are not ordinary jobs. All two+ million public servants in the federal government take an oath to support and defend the US Constitution and to faithfully carry out the duties of their office. This is what Americans want: according to a mid-2024 poll by the New Partnership for Public Service, despite historically low levels of trust in the federal government, more than 90 percent of respondents said that a professional, nonpartisan civil service is essential to democracy. During my twenty years as a diplomat with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), I and the public servants around me – both in the civil service and the foreign service – took our oath quite seriously.
Nonetheless, the Trump administration has been dramatically disrupting and dismantling the public service, starting with USAID. Mere days after they assumed power, political appointees abruptly removed dozens of agency senior leaders, including senior ethics attorneys, from government computer systems. One agency-wide notice placed extreme and inefficient layers of supervision on speech and necessary collaboration: “All communications outside the Agency, including to the State Department, must be approved by the Agency Front Office.” The new leadership has warned that disobedience will carry consequences.
As threatened, when brave USAID staff exercised their right to due process in the face of questionable directives, they were accused of insubordination and punished. One public servant who refused to carry out orders to fire a group of employees without following established procedure was escorted out of the building. Senior security officials were put on administrative leave after attempting to block DOGE staff, who lacked security clearances, from an area known as a SCIF – a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility where classified information is shared. The agency’s independent auditors were also quickly dismissed – a strange move for people who claim to be rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.
Such actions, which are being replicated across the US government, are consistent with the Trump administration’s plan to destroy the public service. Russell Vought, who now heads the Office of Management and Budget, explained in speeches delivered prior to Trump’s re-election the radical right’s strategy to dismantle the administrative state, including the explicit intent to traumatize federal workers so they would not want to go to work. That strategy, laid out in detail in Project 2025, has guided the administration’s actions to this point.
On February 4, just two weeks after the Presidential inauguration and one day after dismissing the head of human resources for refusing to send an agency-wide email, a political appointee sent the message putting the remaining direct hire staff – all civil servants and foreign service officers around the world — on administrative leave. Soon thereafter, a judge issued a temporary restraining order that reinstated those employees to their jobs. The order remained in effect until Friday, February 21. During that time, the confusion about their operating status led to the loss of standard institutional support for several foreign service officers during at least one overseas medical emergency and political violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Meanwhile, the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a short-fuse resignation offer called the Fork in the Road (commonly referred to as “the Fork”). Public servants were given just nine days to accept the offer – not the generally required 60 days – and they were given little information and no guarantee that federal funds would be approved by Congress and available for this purpose. The legality of this offer has yet to be addressed in court.
As uncertainty over their employment and future financial security dragged on, and as false and toxic messages about USAID and its staff pinballed around public information and social environments in recent weeks, I’ve heard from many USAID public servants who have had trouble sleeping, are physically ill due to stress, and, in some cases, have experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
I’ve watched this unconscionable attack on American public servants unfold and remembered my time in the Republic of Georgia, where I served as the Director of USAID’s democracy assistance portfolio during a historic democratic transition. Shortly after arriving there in 2012, I was thrilled to be an official observer for the country’s Presidential and Parliamentary elections. To everyone’s surprise, a new political party won those elections. It was the first time in the country’s history there had been a democratic transfer of power through the ballot box!
The Georgian people have long wanted to join the European Union (EU). Only twenty years after independence, the country’s democratic systems were still young and evolving. Following the 2012 election, the new government enthusiastically embraced the democratic reforms required to advance their chances of future EU membership.
A much-needed reform, given the country’s history of politically motivated dismissals of government employees, was to professionalize their civil service. USAID worked closely with the Prime Minister’s office to support this process. We brought in experts from other post-Soviet countries to share good practices and supported meetings between the government and civil society to design a new system. The collaboration was the stuff of democratic dreams.
When the time came for a cabinet vote on civil service reform, the Georgian government invited me to meet with them. I presented the important features of the US civil service to a group of cabinet ministers. I explained that the public service is part of the government’s checks-and-balances on the rule of law; with professional public servants in place, it is more difficult for political appointees to violate both the law and professional codes of ethics. I showed them the “skills matrix” that outlines the resource management and leadership skills our civil servants must have to do their jobs effectively. In Georgia then, most government positions didn’t even have position descriptions. It was eye-opening for them to hear that we needed to prove we were meeting pre-established criteria to get hired and promoted!
The Georgian cabinet soon approved a strategy for professionalizing the civil service. According to the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, “Civil Service Reform would not have been possible to such a high standard of inclusiveness and quality without support from USAID.”
And yet …
Last summer, Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the premier civil service union in the US, said, “Project 2025 … is a threat to our democracy. It’s a takeover of our federal government in a manner that is not loyal to the Constitution and the law… and will force employees to take orders, legal or not, or be terminated.” Other AFGE officials expressed concern that implementation of Trump’s second-term agenda would eviscerate collective bargaining rights and replace the 150-year-old merit-based civil service system of today with a “spoils system” that rewards political loyalty with taxpayer-funded government positions.
In addition to violating the labor rights of public servants and traumatizing them, the new administration is also attacking the institutions that were established to protect them. The US courts have ruled a few times that labor unions who represent public servants don’t have standing to bring suit against the government, suggesting instead that unions should seek adjudication with the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), and individuals should seek redress through the Merit System Protection Board (MSPB). However, on February 11, President Trump illegally fired FLRA Chairwoman Susan Tsui Grundmann, whose term was not set to expire until July 2025. The President can remove FLRA members, but “only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” and must receive a hearing first. This move diminishes the independence of the agency and weakens its ability to support federal workers when they most need it.
Trump has also tried to fire the head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which protects whistleblowers, and the leader of the MSPB. In the case of the MSPB Chairwoman, a federal judge invalidated Trump’s attempt and ruled that her term in office is protected by the Civil Service Reform Act, which is meant to ensure the Board’s independence from partisan politics. The Supreme Court intervened in the case of the OSC Chair, also blocking Trump from firing him – at least temporarily. Nevertheless, these actions limit the ability of civil servants to fight for their rights.
As AFGE officials feared, we are now in the midst of an administrative coup – an authoritarian overthrow of our democratic systems and the rule of law through a dismantling of the government bureaucracy.
So, what comes next?
The Justice Department, through Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris, wrote in the OSC case that the lower court had crossed “a constitutional red line” by blocking Trump from firing the chair. She urged the Supreme Court to use that case to check federal judges who “in the last few weeks alone have halted dozens of presidential actions (or even perceived actions)” that encroached on Trump’s presidential powers. In essence, the Solicitor General was asking the highest court in the land to uphold the “unitary executive theory”, which considers that Article II of the Constitution gives the President sole and absolute power to do as he wishes – apparently including violating the law and ethical standards.
To defend and preserve our long history of building a professional, nonpartisan public service as a critical strength of American democracy, the courts will need to push back, not just in individual and collective cases of rights violations, but also against the “unitary executive theory” more generally.
Critically, as civil servants work through their confusion, fear, and trauma, they will need to live up to the oath they took upon entering public service to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. More than ever, we’ll need them to embrace the leadership skills outlined in their skills matrix. Sending memos and getting standard approvals won’t be enough to stop the dismantling of the administrative state. Public servants will need to stand up and speak out for the rule of law and their rights – because their rights are our rights. Hopefully, the rest of the country – all Americans – will recognize the risks to our democracy and join them. Through collective actions, we will ultimately determine if the civil servants who are the backbone of our government will be able to continue their mission of service to the nation.
This is not a reality TV show, nor is it fiction. This is real life. But we are well on our way to becoming a make-believe democracy.
The Evolution of Public Service
For most of the country’s first hundred years, the federal workforce was ruled by a “spoils system” in which government positions were typically awarded to supporters of whichever political party held the White House. After almost 20 years of failed efforts at civil service reform, Congress finally passed the Pendleton Act in 1883, establishing a merit-based civil service in which people hired by the government had to possess the skills required to contribute to the mission of their respective agencies. While not perfect, the administrative state created by this law became foundational to our thriving democracy.
To strengthen the merit system, Congress established a voluntary early retirement program for civil servants in 1973. Later crystalized in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the objective of the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA) is to provide the federal government with operational flexibility, while, at the same time, protecting employees from unfair or unwarranted practices.
That law also established independent agencies to strengthen and protect the rights of government workers, including the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), which oversees federal labor-management relations, and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), a quasi-judicial agency that serves as the guardian of federal merit systems.
This legal framework transformed what it meant to be a federal employee, replacing loyalty to the president for loyalty to the Constitution and to the democratically-supported institutions and missions they serve.
Author: Danielle Reiff
Published: February 27, 2025
Feature image: Danielle Reiff, photographed under the government of Georgia seal during a strategic partnership meeting between the US and Georgian governments.
