The purge began late Friday night, four days after Donald Trump returned to the White House. Seventeen inspectors general—internal watchdogs embedded throughout the federal government—received emails notifying them of their termination. Three weeks later came the Valentine’s Day Massacre: the ousting of tens of thousands of federal employees with little discernible pattern, across agencies and across the country. By April, entire departments—the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—had been gutted.
Workers the administration couldn’t fire were coerced into leaving on their own. Toxicity became HR policy. Employees received an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” It offered eight months’ pay to anyone who resigned, and no assurances of job security to those who stayed. A follow-up email encouraged them “to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” At the end of Trump’s first year back in office, roughly 300,000 fewer Americans worked for the government.
That number understates the destruction. When Trump anointed Elon Musk to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, he did so in the name of clearing out mediocrities and laggards. The bureaucracy does harbor pockets of waste and paper-pushing positions that could easily be culled. But the administration showed little interest in understanding the organizations it was eviscerating. Any sincere attempt to reform the government would have protected its top experts and most skilled practitioners. In fact, such workers account for a disproportionate share of the Trump-era exodus. Many of them accepted the resignation package because they possessed marketable skills that allowed them to confidently walk away. The civil service thus lost the cohort that understands government best: the keepers of its unwritten manual, the custodians of institutional integrity.
Grover Norquist, one of the chief ideologists of modern conservatism, used to fantasize about drowning the government in the bathtub. The Trump administration has realized that macabre dream—not merely by shrinking the state, but by poisoning its culture. It has undone the bargain that once made government careers attractive: lower pay offset by uncommon job security and a sense of professional mission.
The American government grew in bursts of reform, crisis, and optimism—not from the sketching table of an engineer but from the rough contingencies of history. The outraged response to a 1969 oil fire on the Cuyahoga River catalyzed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The failure to prevent the September 11 attacks gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security. This accidental architecture was part of the federal government’s genius. It nurtured corners of national life—declining industries, obscure sciences—that a management consultant obsessed with optimization could never properly value. It embodied the wisdom, as well as some of the imperfections, of American history. For all its flaws, the American state was a source of national greatness and power: It ushered in an age of prosperity and discovery; it made everyday existence safer and fairer. It deserves, at the very least, the dignity of a proper burial.
In the late 19th century, as the American government took on its modern form, a single word captured the spirit of the enterprise: disinterestedness. The duties of civil servants, who remained in their chairs as presidents came and went, were supposed to transcend patronage and partisanship. Their professional obligation was to present facts and judgments that reflected an objective reality—not to flatter the preferences of the administration in power.
The nascent American state aspired to become a branch of science. It measured; it mapped; it studied. After its founding, in 1879, the United States Geological Survey recruited scientists and experts from Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Harvard. Using the most advanced techniques, it tracked river flow to forecast floods and to irrigate the arid West. It charted mineral belts in the Appalachians and the Rockies, which supplied the raw materials for industrial growth.
In the earliest decades of the 20th century, the National Bureau of Standards established common definitions for such basic measurements as the volt and the ohm, making it possible to build and trade at scale. The Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled data on wages, prices, and productivity that became the basis for economic prediction. The U.S. Weather Bureau allowed farmers to foresee storms.
The spirit of disinterestedness became the foundation for a regulatory state. Armed with scientific studies, the government could intervene to prevent disasters, protect consumers, and guard against recessions. Out of that faith in expertise arose the Federal Reserve and the Food and Drug Administration. Granite and marble buildings proliferated across Washington, D.C., housing a growing constellation of university-trained specialists. In their research and reports, they described what became the shared American reality.
The flaws in this system were obvious enough, at least in retrospect. Data points might be objective, but the decisions drawn from them were not. Handing power to experts—on the assumption that they alone were qualified to exercise it—sometimes bred insular arrogance. When the Army Corps of Engineers built levees on the lower Mississippi, it inadvertently magnified the devastation of the floods it had intended to prevent. Federal policies encouraging farmers to plow the prairie led to the ecological catastrophe known as the Dust Bowl. Those tendencies, many decades later, fueled the rise of Ronald Reagan, who famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”
Yet regulators also prevented immense human suffering. Before the advent of the modern state, the economy convulsed with financial panics roughly every 20 years. After the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation were created in the 1930s, confidence replaced chaos. Generations passed without bank runs. American markets became the safest bet on the planet.
At the dawn of the 20th century, American medicines were often laced with alcohol, opiates, or narcotics. Thanks to the FDA, those potions were gradually replaced by pharmaceuticals tested for safety—snake oil gave way to science.
The postwar era brought more triumphs. Following the arrival of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1970, which mandated crash tests and new safety features, fatality rates from car accidents were cut by more than 70 percent. After the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1971, workplace fatalities fell by nearly 70 percent. The state smoothed the roughest edges of the market; it tamed intractable dangers; it made American life more livable.
In the vernacular, the federal government is synonymous with Washington. That conflation obscures the fact that roughly 80 percent of its workforce is stationed outside the District of Columbia. Still, there’s no denying that Washington contains the densest concentration of civil servants—and the story of that caste is a morality tale.
In the 1970s, Washington was a city distinctly devoid of flash. Even its most powerful denizens drove beat-up Volvos; its dandies shopped at Brooks Brothers. The elegant houses of Georgetown were ostentatiously weather-beaten. The children of wealthy law-firm partners and humble bureaucrats attended the same schools.
But beginning in the late 20th century, lobbying became a boom industry. Those law partners, who sold their ability to influence policy, began raking in seven-figure salaries. A gap in wealth—and lifestyle—started to separate the lawyers in private practice from the civil servants. They lived in different neighborhoods, shopped at different stores, sent their kids to different schools.
That high-end lifestyle was seductive, and it attracted many government workers who wanted a beach house of their own. But the surprising thing, really, was how many preeminent experts—scientists, intelligence analysts, economists, even lawyers—stayed in their government job for the entire arc of their career.
They stayed because the work allowed them to accumulate new skills, to test themselves in crises, to solve novel problems. At its best, government work supplied the rush of being in the arena, a sense of professional purpose—a higher meaning than most jobs can muster.
Until the purges of the past year, the U.S. government housed an unmatched collection of experts, capable of some of the greatest feats in human existence. The achievements of this corps bear legendary names: the Manhattan Project, Apollo, the Human Genome Project. These aren’t just gauzy tales from the past. After the National Institutes of Health helped sequence the genome, it funded research that turned that knowledge into pioneering medicines with the potential to treat hundreds of rare diseases. It kept refining technology to make those treatments more affordable—and those therapeutics have dramatically improved survival rates for illnesses, such as pediatric leukemia and spinal muscular atrophy.
Under Trump, the expertise capable of such achievements has begun to vanish. His administration isn’t simply committed to shrinking government; it sees career officials as the enemy within, an entrenched elite exploiting its power and imposing its ideology on the nation. Its demise is not collateral damage but the imperative. What took generations to build is being dismantled in months, and with it goes not just expertise but what remains of the shared American faith in expertise itself.
Bureaucrats extol their ethos of service. They describe government work as a calling. Thirty percent of federal workers are military veterans who sought to extend their patriotic devotion into civilian life. Even those who never passed through the armed forces cast their career choices in similar terms. A generation of bureaucrats, now in the prime of their career, entered government after September 11. They were moved to emulate the commitment of the first responders they saw on television. They felt an obligation to serve.
Donald Trump has betrayed those workers. By describing them as a hostile force, he’s questioned their patriotism—and robbed the sense of mission from their work. Employees who signed up to serve a transcendent national interest, who understood their duty as being to the American people, now find themselves instructed to follow the whims of a corrupt, narcissistic leader.
What’s been lost isn’t just a sense of purpose, but a body of knowledge—a way of making the machinery of the state function. Early-20th-century bureaucrats may have aspired to govern as if they were practicing science, but the reality is something more like craft. The American state, a product of compromises, is tricky terrain to master. Organizations duplicate one another; agencies are overseen by political leaders who arrive with minimal understanding of the workplace they will manage. Succeeding in such an environment requires savvy veterans who have learned how to operate such an unruly machine and can model how to do so for fresh-faced co-workers. By wiping out many of the bureaucracy’s most experienced practitioners, Trump has severed the chain that allowed one generation of civil servants to pass on the habits of effective government to the next.
Some of Trump’s firings have drawn attention, such as the peremptory dismissal of C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of hundreds of military officers who have been removed alongside civil servants. But for the most part, the crumbling of the American state has unfolded as a quiet catastrophe. Bureaucrats are the definition of anonymous. Their prestige suffers because it is conflated in the public’s mind with long lines at the DMV, fastidious building inspectors, parking tickets—the stuff of local functionaries. So much of the civil service is devoted to long-term national flourishing—preventing disease, safeguarding financial markets—that its achievements go unappreciated.
The toll of the purge will become clear only gradually. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service loses the biologists who track bat populations, vulnerable species can no longer be rigorously protected. When bat populations dwindle, insects proliferate. Farmers will likely compensate by deploying insecticides, which government studies suggest can do significant prenatal harm. Government, too, is part of a delicate American ecosystem—as it erodes, crises that lay bare its indispensability will multiply.
Capturing the magnitude of the destruction is an almost impossible task. Statistics can convey the scale, but only individual stories reveal what has actually vanished, the knowledge and skill that have been recklessly discarded. The damage will ripple through every national park, every veterans’ hospital, every city and town.
Over the course of four months, I interviewed 50 federal workers, both civilian and military, who were either fired or forced out—who took early retirement or resigned rather than accept what their job had become. I wanted to understand how their time in government came to such an abrupt end and, more than that, to understand the career that preceded their departure. When The Atlantic asked their former agencies to comment, many declined, citing the privacy of personnel matters. In the name of protecting these workers, the government refused to defend the decisions that had upended their lives. What follows is their story—a portrait of the void that will haunt American life, a memorial to what the nation has lost.
