Trump administration inspires distrust, dread, resistance among federal workers

WASHINGTON — Across the vast federal bureaucracy, Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House has spread anxiety, frustration, fear and resistance among many of the 2 million civil servants who say they work for the public, not a particular president.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, a group of scientists strategized this past week about howto slow-walk Trump’s environmental orders without being fired.

At the Treasury Department, civil servants are gathering information about whistleblower protections as they polish their résumés.

At the United States Digital Service — the youthful cadre of employees who left jobs at Google, Facebook or Microsoft to join the Obama administration — workers are debating how to stop Trump should he want to use the databases they made more efficient to target specific immigrant groups.

“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 share daily, grim predictions about the fate of their jobs under Trump’s leadership.

“It’s like the movie music when the shark is coming,” Martin said, referring to “Jaws,” the 1975 thriller. “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 IRS; 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. They reveal a federal workforce that is more fundamentally shaken than usual by the uncertainties that follow a presidential transition from one party to the other.

Federal workers are more likely to be Democrats, according to surveys. But partisanship and ideology explain only some of the intense feelings among workers, many of whom have seen Democrats and Republicans in the White House come and go.

They worry about Trump’s freeze on hiring and regulations, his pledge to reverse environ- mental protections, and his executive order shutting down immigration for refugees and people from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Some federal workers welcome Trump’s promises to create new jobs, build infrastructure and lower taxes. Others say they are focusing on doing their jobs and trying not to be distracted by the political noise. Still others say they are struggling with the question of whether they want to work for a president with whom they so strongly disagree.

“What do you do,” asked Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., 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 Connolly, whose district just outside Washington is home to thousands of federal workers.

Career employees are particularly nervous at the EPA, which Trump repeatedly singled out for attack on the campaign trail, vowing at one point to “get rid of” the agency. On Monday, about 100 employees at the agency’s Chicago office used their lunch hour to protest the Senate’s confirmation of Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, to lead the agency. Pruitt was a fierce critic of its mission under President Barack Obama.

“I have been through several transitions, but I have never had or seen this level of alarm,” said Nicole Cantello, an EPAlawyer in the Chicago office.

“It’s like the movie music when the shark is coming. People are just wary — is the shark going to come up out of the water?” Gabrielle Martin, trial lawyer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission