Federal employees struggling to grasp President Donald Trump’s flurry of new executive orders are feeling the “chaos” that has taken over their jobs in the opening days of the administration.
Civil servants across multiple agencies expressed “fear” about being fired and described work morale as “low” as the new administration swiftly upends the U.S. government in Trump’s name, NBC News reported.
“There’s a lot of fear about returning to the office,” one official at the U.S. Agency for International Development told the outlet. The agency that administers foreign aid has seen some of the biggest shakeups over the last 10 days, which the official said, “has sent a chill through the building.”
Government workers this week began receiving emails allowing them to take a “deferred resignation,” which includes a severance package of approximately eight months’ pay with benefits. But that appears to have added to their stress levels.
“There’s a lot of skepticism about that, given the fact that this email seemed to model Elon Musk’s email to the Twitter folks who never got paid,” the official said, according to the news report. “So it’s caused a lot of chaos and turmoil. I think the point is to really scare people and make them think that their jobs are threatened. It’s definitely working.”
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“It is chaos over here right now,” a second USAID official told NBC News this week of the work atmosphere at the agency. “People in the halls are getting texts saying to log off of all government equipment and leave the building. No official announcements have been made, but individuals are being notified. People are walking around, whispering and crying. It’s like watching a sniper work through a captive crowd.”
An official at the Department of Transportation viewed the move to end remote work as offensive.
“They’re trying to insult us, to be honest, to say that we’re not being productive,” the official told NBC News. “And that’s simply not the case for a lot of people who are working remotely. … We have so many different series of jobs that don’t require people to be in the building.”
“It’s very low,” an employee at the Social Security Administration told the network of office morale. “There are a lot of people looking for other work. … We’re afraid to get fired. I don’t have a backup job right now and I understand that the market is getting ready to be saturated. We already have several people who are leaving our office.”
Still, White House officials have defended its efforts to dramatically alter federal agencies – a key campaign pledge of Trump’s.
“For far too long, a bloated federal bureaucracy has cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars each year while strangling American enterprise and families with burdensome rules and regulations,” according to a statement from White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “President Trump received a resounding mandate to streamline our gargantuan government to better serve the needs of the American people. He will use every lever of executive and legislative power to deliver.”