Chapter 1: What events led to the mass exodus of federal workers?
I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.
And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats.
We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.
I always tell people to kind of picture their cell phone and like navigating somewhere you've never been.
This is Ryan.
My name is Ryan Hippenstiel.
And he's explaining to me how the work that he and his colleagues do helps a person like me, who has no sense of direction, get around. Or I should probably say he and his former colleagues.
First, your cell phone is using GPS technology, and then you have all these layers, right? It might be a layer of restaurants so you can find a new pizza joint. All of those layers need to be on top of each other in the right place for your car and your iPhone or whatever it might be to know what road it's on.
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Chapter 2: How did Trump's administration impact the federal workforce?
It kept the ground under my feet stable. I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, one year since Donald Trump was re-inaugurated, we're talking about the federal government workforce that was.
President Trump is only ramping up his unprecedented push to effectively take a wrecking ball to the federal government, laying off thousands.
Last April, Hip and Steel accepted a voluntary resignation package. He joined a mass exodus of federal workers. In Trump's first year back, over 300,000 Americans left the government.
We're removing all of the unnecessary, incompetent, and corrupt bureaucrats from the federal workforce.
Many forced out or fired.
If they don't report for work, we're firing them. In other words, you have to go to office.
Pressured to unceremoniously leave.
An offer or a threat. This morning, millions of federal workers are faced with a choice. Stay in their jobs with an uncertain future or leave the government, leave their jobs with a buyout from the Trump administration.
Careers ended in capricious, even cruel ways.
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Chapter 3: What role does geodesy play in modern navigation?
Frank's interviews are compiled in the February issue of the magazine. You'll hear some of their voices throughout the episode. You talked to how many people?
I lost count, but let's call it like 75-80. Okay.
So you talked to 75-80 people. I'm sure there were themes that emerged.
There were so many people who took on government service because they had either been veterans themselves, or they'd grown up in military families, or they'd grown up in families where government service was some sort of a tradition. And You know, we think of the military as totally divorced from the civilian part of government.
But I think that there's a lot of the ethos that's, you know, not quite the same, but the same spirit. The level of satisfaction that I think government workers experience is different than most careers. You think of government bureaucrats as being so gray. But what I experienced as I talked to these people were people—
who couldn't wait to go into the office in the morning and people who generally thought that they were doing something, you know, transcendently important. Now, there's a downside to that, right? You know, if you have all of this power and you consider yourself on this profound mission, you can become arrogant, you can become abusive. But these were people who love their jobs.
So that's not a cliché.
It's not a cliche, and I think that explains a lot of the hurt that they felt when they were kicked to the curb in such an undignified sort of way. Now, I admit this all sounds kind of gauzy as I'm presenting it, but I think that the gauziness of it was kind of part of the surprise for me in the course of doing this, that I felt like... I would be meeting people who were more bitter.
And I was very self-conscious about saying, we're going to talk about the end at the end of this conversation. But really, most of the conversation is about what you did. I want to hear about your job.
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Chapter 4: What insights did Franklin Foer gain from interviewing federal workers?
I worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Region 5. That's the Chicago office, the Great Lakes office. And my job was the Children's Environmental Health Coordinator there. I helped people not just at the agency, but our partners across the six states we served. figure out ways to make better decisions on behalf of children.
I'm from Kentucky, grew up in Kentucky, and so I've spent a lot of time in coal country. And so seeing the devastation that coal mining can do on Appalachia, that sort of drove me into wanting to work in the environmental field. The children's health role was absolutely my dream job. As soon as I found out it even existed at EPA, it was something I knew I wanted to do. We got to help families,
make better decisions to keep a healthier home. We got to help schools reduce exposures. We got to do really amazing things to help children experience environmental exposures differently, both from a physiological standpoint, but also a behavioral standpoint. And so we need to make sure that we're being as protective as possible to vulnerable populations.
In early 2025, Milwaukee discovered that lead paint had poisoned at least four students in its public schools. Poole was ready to descend with tests and guidance, but the Trump administration forbade her team from working on the crisis, an allegation that the EPA disputes. In March, she resigned. So it truly was my dream job.
I had no plans on leaving until the change in administration when I just knew They weren't going to let us do it the right way. They weren't going to let us really protect children in a meaningful, scientifically sound way. We could see the writing on the wall coming from miles away. So my position was not backfilled. I don't know if it ever will be backfilled.
I try not to talk to my former colleagues about what's going on because I can't imagine how stressful it is for them. You know, Russell Voight said he wanted to traumatize the federal workforce. They're also being traumatized on a daily basis.
Part of, I think, our cultural inclination as Americans, kind of the innate
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Chapter 5: How does the loss of federal employees affect government functions?
libertarianism that's baked into all of us and the fact that we've had kind of distrust of government and the sense of its inefficiency hammered into us for so long, we're not inclined to think of bureaucrats charitably. But when you actually think about what they do and you learn about their jobs, you see that
it's not just an academic exercise, it's not just a bunch of paper pushers, that there was a reason that Congress decided to create these jobs, that there was some good, some essential service that they were providing.
So think back to when you started the project. What did you expect going into it?
I wanted to get a portrait of the government in its entirety across hierarchies. But I did it, I entered in a way where I was pretty confident. I was like, I am a native Washingtonian. I've grown up in the city. I've grown up around bureaucrats. I feel like I've written about politics for my entire adult career. I felt like I knew what the U.S. government was. And I
I actually was pretty surprised over the course of doing this. There were parts of the government that I didn't know existed.
So what surprised you going through this?
You know, I didn't understand the way in which the government was constantly making investments in human capital. You can't walk in off the street and know how to do a lot of government jobs because they're esoteric or they're filling a void. And so the government has all of these improvised processes for helping people get better at what they do.
And so as I was thinking about this, this simple fact kind of dawned on me that when you're pushing somebody out of the government or you're firing them or you're forcing them to retire, you're not just losing an expert. You're losing all this investment that the taxpayer had made in the development of that expertise.
The government invested an immense amount of human capital in terms of getting me to the point where I was when I was forced out.
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Chapter 6: What were the personal experiences of those who left government jobs?
It caused me to reflect that 9-11 had not really changed my career path at all. In all candor, I felt a little bit ashamed that I, who had many more advantages than they ever did growing up, did nothing to help the country that made that possible while they immediately answered a call to service. Shortly after overhearing that conversation, I applied to the FBI.
Feinberg joined the FBI, and his career was a perfect example of what Frank discovered about the investment in human capital.
The mere application process takes 12 to 24 months.
Legal training, lessons on how to interrogate people.
Hand-to-hand combat and firearms and tactics. The Bureau sent me to summers of immersion training in Mandarin.
He went from speaking not a word of the language to being able to conduct interviews and interrogations.
There is a myth among many people who have not worked for the intelligence community or law enforcement agencies before that personnel are fungible, that you can easily force somebody out of retirement age and just have them replaced by by a new recruit.
In reality, every year that somebody spends in the community, they are providing more value than they did the year beforehand, simply because they have more expertise and better judgment. It's not just a question of the millions of dollars that the government spends training us.
It is, more importantly, a question of what we learn over time that cannot be taught through any manner other than experience.
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Chapter 7: What historical context is important for understanding the federal workforce?
After the break, we talk to two more federal workers. One reminds us of why the civil service existed in the first place, and the other of the civil service in its heyday.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
That's after the break. I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.
And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats.
We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. After the Civil War, the federal government's footprint expanded, and the civil service began to change.
Some of that was thanks to universities. They were shifting from being more or less finishing schools for aristocrats to places that produce scientists, engineers, and other professionals. And this expertise made its way to D.C.
we stop hiring friends of the party in power to do the work of government. And we start seeking out people who are actually equipped to do these problems. We get rid of the patronage system and the civil service starts to grow and it starts to hire all these experts, whether they are economists or lawyers or scientists. And they start to do these things that, that make American life less harmful.
They start to make sure that the drugs are, aren't toxic, that we're actually measuring things in an accurate sort of way so we can make good predictions about the weather or about the future of the labor market. And all of these things help America expand as a country and help us become an economic power.
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Chapter 8: What is the future of the federal government after these changes?
I was a food inspector and consumer safety inspector. We inspected the meat and poultry products that you'll see in the grocery store. I am also the National Joint Council chairwoman for the union, AFGE, presently, even though I am retired from the federal sector. I worked in Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin.
When you think of regulations, you think of someone behind a desk in D.C. But that is the wrong image for Soldner and her work.
An inspector has to have a very strong tolerance for blood. You've got to be able to have that strong stomach to endure the blood, to endure the guts. All those internal organs that surgeons on a daily basis see, whether it is a hot dog, whether it is a bratwurst, whether it's a summer sausage, the gamut of what happens on a week
could go from slaughtering to deboning the animal to watching all the processes to get to that final finished product. And that's where having the knowledge of somebody getting trained that has been around for years. That's lost. It's completely lost. The other experiences of what we as the veteran inspectors did is long gone.
You can be as book smart as you want to be until you step into the reality onto that slaughter floor.
In April, Paula accepted the Trump administration's offer of early retirement. Many of her colleagues did the same.
I dread the long-term effects. When there is life that is lost because of food safety issues that are not getting corrected, I think losing the experience and the training of these inspectors out there is so critical. And now that it is lost, are we ever going to get it back?
Frank, you talked about the early evolution of the federal workforce after the Civil War, turning away from the patronage system, hiring experts, regulating drugs and keeping things safe. So that was the beginning of the modern federal government. What was its heyday? What was the peak of its growth?
I think that it really starts in the earliest decades of the 20th century where these concepts are starting to get embedded. And then, of course, it kind of explodes ultimately during the wars that we fight and especially World War II and then the aftermath of World War II when we had the Cold War and the extension of a lot of government.
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