Government workers on the prospect of DOGE-fueled layoffs: ‘It kind of feels like we’re being villainized’

Federal employees are reporting mixed feelings about President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency and its ideas to cut costs by laying off workers and enforcing return-to-office mandates.

Some are worried, some are optimistic, and most are considering their other career options, 10 people who spoke with B-17 said. Most asked for anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.

“We’re just workers. We work in a nonpartisan way,” one Department of Health and Human Services employee said, adding that they were nervous, especially because they recently bought a home. “It kind of feels like we’re being villainized.”

On the other hand, Jesus Soriano, who’s been a program director at the National Science Foundation for 13 years and is president of the agency’s American Federation of Government Employees union, said that while employees were scared, there were “reasons for optimism with DOGE.”

Trump said his picks to lead the unofficial commission, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, “are technologists.”

“They have — both of them in their own fields — translated science into products that have tremendous impact on the public and that contribute to America being a preeminent powerhouse,” he said.

Musk is the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and other various companies, and Ramaswamy started a tech-focused pharmaceutical company called Roivant Sciences.

In the wake of the DOGE Commission, many government workers said they were updating their résumés, networking more, or assessing new career options — regardless of their political beliefs.

“Everyone is putting their ducks in a row,” a Department of Housing and Urban Development administrative worker of 10 years who worked under Trump’s first term told B-17. “You can’t be lackadaisical, regardless that the government may take forever to do something. You better be one step ahead at all times.”

While it’s still unclear how exactly DOGE would cut government spending, Musk and Ramaswamy have pledged to eliminate some government agencies, which could mean laying off thousands of federal workers, and compel others who have been working from home to return to the office.

The federal government is the largest employer in the US, paying more than 2 million civilian workers. The Departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and Defense are among the top employers, with workers earning average salaries near $100,000. Just under half of all workers across 24 agencies were telework-eligible as of May 2024, according to an Office of Management and Budget report.

“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote about their cost-cutting plans in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

Brian Hughes, a Trump-Vance transition spokesperson, told B-17 the administration “will have a place for people serving in government who are committed to defending the rights of the American people, putting America first, and ensuring the best use of working men and women’s tax dollars.” He didn’t offer any details on cuts.

Soriano, the National Science Foundation program director, said government workers were “still scared.” He said five colleagues he’d talked to were actively seeking new jobs or opting to retire.

Increased efficiency is a welcomed idea. In-office mandates, not so much.

Trimming government spending and improving efficiency is an idea often discussed on both sides of the political spectrum.

President Ronald Reagan pursued a similar goal with the Grace Commission, a team of 160 private-sector executives who proposed more than 2,000 cost-cutting measures. President Bill Clinton also attempted to reduce federal spending and improve government efficiency with the National Performance Review, led by federal employees.

The efforts had mixed results. Many proposals from the Grace Commission that relied on congressional acts didn’t end up happening, while executive orders were successful in reducing the head count of federal workers. Clinton’s panel similarly succeeded in cutting 300,000 federal workers but managed to get only a quarter of proposals that required legislative action through Congress.

An operations manager at the US Postal Service who has worked in the department for 27 years told B-17 every company had inefficiencies, and “that’s what we all strive to decrease.”

He has concerns, however, about people stepping in to make suggestions for the Postal Service without having “tribal knowledge” of the department.

“If you’re just going to be appointed to this type of commission or committee with no knowledge of what exactly the Postal Service does, then that could potentially be a problem,” he said.

DOGE’s intent to eliminate remote work is also a concern for some workers. The HUD employee, who’d been working remotely, said return-to-office enforcement would “absolutely” be enough to cause them to resign. They’re preparing for layoffs under DOGE by looking at other employment opportunities, and they said their colleagues at HUD were taking similar steps.

Joyce Howell, an attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency — who’s been at the agency for more than 31 years and serves as executive vice president of its AFGE union — said the incoming administration had stoked concern about layoffs at the EPA and fears that its mission could be compromised.

“We have town halls once a month, and we’ve actually broken our Zoom account in terms of the number of people attending,” she said of union meetings.

Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in the Journal op-ed that the commission would target more than $500 billion in what they called unauthorized government spending. They said federal employees who were laid off would be offered early retirement and severance payments.

An employee at the Food and Drug Administration said it wasn’t that easy: “We’re here to support a mission. We have families to feed, and it’s not as easy as just quitting our jobs,” the FDA employee said.

“We’re just normal, everyday people — we’re being portrayed as inefficient, lazy people,” they added. “It feels like they’re coming for us just for their own agenda, not realizing that we’re the backbone of the federal government.”

Another federal-government lifer said many workers like them — people who’d been there for years — were nervous they might be the first to go. The career tenure of a median federal government worker was 6.5 years in 2024, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, well above the median 3.5 years private workers have spent in their roles.

One senior official at the Commerce Department said they anticipated a civil-servant brain drain. “The scientists are the most concerned,” the official said, with those in climate, meteorology, and environmental science particularly worried.

The Department of Education has meanwhile been singled out as an entire agency that could be on the chopping block.

Sheria Smith, the president of the AFGE union at the Department of Education and a civil rights attorney at the agency, said department elimination was “on the lower end of concerns” because it would take time and need to go through Congress.

Rather, being turned into a “Schedule F” workforce, which allows government agencies to reclassify workers and remove certain protections that make them easier to fire, could mean employees who aren’t “aligned with the executive wholly” could be laid off based on performance.

And given the widespread denigration of the Education Department and return-to-office threats, people are most likely looking for other work. “I’d be surprised if they weren’t,” Smith said.