From American Bar Association Human Rights Magazine:
Villainizing the Federal Workforce: The Assault on Civil Servants and the Americans They Serve
Summary
- Federal civil servants who protect public health and safety are being demonized and stripped of jobs, rights, and protections, with especially severe effects on vulnerable communities.
- Weakening the federal workforce increases the risk of preventable disasters, and the harm comes not from “bureaucrats,” but from the administration dismantling the institutions that serve the public.
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.
—Russell Vought
Russell Vought, director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, characterizes federal civil servants as villains deserving of trauma. Who are these villains? What is being done to them? And does their destruction serve the rest of us?
Vought’s villains are the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspector who keeps contaminated food off our dinner tables, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) coordinator who arrives to support victims after the hurricane, the nurse who treats veterans.
They are federal civil servants doing work the private sector cannot and will not replicate. The FDA arose because patent medicines killed children. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency exists because rivers caught fire. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was established because workers were killed on their job sites at unconscionable rates. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created because an economic crisis financially devastated millions of families.
The civil service protections that allow these workers to do their jobs without fear of political retaliation started with the Pendleton Act, enacted after the assassination of a U.S. president by a job seeker. The Civil Service Reform Act followed Watergate; Congress created the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board and the U.S. Federal Labor Relations Authority after finding that labor organizations “safeguard the public interest” and “contribute to the effective conduct of public business.” Each protection exists because Americans rejected the idea of a society suffering from preventable harms.
Vought promised trauma, and the Trump-Vance administration is delivering it. The assault on federal workers has been swift, deliberate, and devastating. More than 320,000 departed in a single year. Some employees were fired outright. Thousands of probationary employees were terminated for “poor performance” despite having received excellent reviews. Their only offense was that they lacked full civil service protections, making them easy pickings. Others were driven out through chaos and coercion: a “deferred resignation” program with unclear provisions and few guarantees, leaving workers, stripped of appeal rights, to choose between bad options with unfair deadlines. Those who left face delays and errors in processing their benefits and retirement.
But the assault extends beyond firings and dysfunction to a systematic dismantling of the rights that protect career civil servants and the missions their agencies serve.
Schedule P/C, short for Schedule Policy/Career, is a new civil service classification finalized in February 2026 over the opposition of 94 percent of public commenters, which will reclassify an estimated 50,000 workers as “at-will employees.” This will remove their due process protections under Title 5 and their right to appeal terminations to the Merit Systems Protection Board. They will also lose eligibility for student loan repayment benefits, as well as for recruitment, relocation, and retention incentives. Complaints of prohibited personnel practices that would have gone to the independent Office of Special Counsel will now be handled by each agency’s own general counsel. The fox is now guarding the henhouse.
The enforcement infrastructure for workers’ rights has been gutted in parallel. Executive Order 14343 eliminated collective bargaining rights for approximately 85 percent of unionized federal workers, the largest dismantling of union rights in American history.
The human cost falls hardest on those who can least afford it. Federal employment has historically offered the best careers for communities of color, women, veterans, and people with disabilities. The pay gaps as compared to white male counterparts are smaller than in the private sector. The geographic and demographic reach extends to communities that the private sector abandoned long ago. These are not workers with easily transferable skills. A U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs benefits counselor, a U.S. Department of Agriculture meat inspector, a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office examiner: Their expertise was built for public service. The private sector has no equivalent roles and no interest in creating them.
Every gutted agency represents a disaster Americans swore not to repeat, which is now in danger of happening again. FEMA entered the 2025 hurricane season at 12 percent incident management capacity. After nine consecutive years with a landfalling hurricane, and five straight years (2020–2024) with a major hurricane landfall, Americans got lucky; the United States escaped a hurricane landfall for the first time in 10 years.
Staffing shortages alone rarely cause disasters. But understaffing impacts the margin between safety and catastrophe. When more than 100 people drowned in a Texas flash flood in 2025, the Austin-area National Weather Service office was short key staff who had taken buyouts just weeks prior. When 67 people died in a midair collision over Washington, D.C., in 2025, the air traffic controllers managing that airspace were overworked and understaffed.
Get rid of the people who work to prevent disasters, and you are left with the disasters. While hundreds of thousands of federal workers may be the immediate victims—fired, forced out, their expertise discarded, their rights stripped, their recourse eliminated—the next disaster, whether financial collapse, pandemic, natural disaster, or industrial accident, could affect any or all of us.
Vought called them villains. He wanted them gone and largely got his way. The rest of us are living with what comes next. The time is now to rise up and right these wrongs. The pattern of American history tells us we will eventually rebuild. The question is not whether but how much preventable suffering we tolerate before we do. While Vought demonized what he calls bureaucracy, it is Vought and the current administration that have wreaked havoc within the agencies charged with protecting our country. Hundreds of thousands of civil servants with deep institutional knowledge are gone, and it will take the rest of us—lawyers and citizens alike—to undo the destruction that this current administration, the real villain, has unleashed.
