“What do you do,” asked Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, if
you work at a place where the leader “avowedly renounces the work of that agency?”
“All of a sudden, you are faced with a real moral dilemma,” continued Mr. Connolly,
whose district just outside Washington is home to thousands of federal workers.
WASHINGTON — Across the vast federal bureaucracy, Donald J. Trump’s arrival in the White House has spread anxiety, frustration, fear
and resistance among many of the two million nonpolitical civil servants who say they work for the public, not a particular president.
“People are just wary — is the shark going to come up out of the water?”
This article is based on interviews around the country with more than three dozen current
and recently departed federal employees from the Internal Revenue Service; the Pentagon; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Justice and Treasury Departments; the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development; and other parts of the government.
“There was a group of people who were planning some public display of protest with the purpose of leaving,” a federal employee in Washington said.
“It’s almost a sense of dread, as in, what will happen to us,” said Gabrielle Martin, a trial lawyer
and 30-year veteran at the Denver office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where colleagues now share daily, grim predictions about the fate of their jobs under Mr. Trump’s leadership.
“It’s like the movie music when the shark is coming,” Ms. Martin said, referring to “Jaws,” the 1975 thriller.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, a group of scientists strategized this past week
about how to slow-walk President Trump’s environmental orders without being fired.
