In the first official week of his presidency, Donald Trump has done as promised: taken a wrecking ball to business as usual in the federal government. As expected, those who have most benefited from that business as usual are not doing well, in particular, the federal workforce. 

President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting the federal workforce have injected a fresh wave of anxiety among employees across the bureaucracy — stoking fears the president is coming for their jobs.

Just a few days into Trump’s second term, some federal workers are contemplating quitting. Others are preparing to file grievances with their unions or moving communications with each other to secure platforms like Signal. Some, fearing they’ll be caught up in the White House’s purge of diversity programs, are leaving their names off of memos and documents they worry could be labeled as DEI-adjacent.

As federal employees searched this week for clues within the orders to see how they’ll be affected, a staffer with the Environmental Protection Agency said they were cleaning out their inbox and waiting for information about early retirement and buyout programs.

“Trump version 1.0 was bad,” said the EPA employee. “I’m already done with version 2.0.”

Cry harder. 

Politics makes me 🤬 & 🤦‍♀️. Why r people so distraught over federal employees losing their jobs but when middle/low income Americans were losing theirs nobody cared?Have they read about layoffs from big companies? What about those people?Why are they outraged over federal workers?

— 🐶🐾Angela Pitts ❤️🖤 (@angela_pitts) January 24, 2025

American workers in private industries have gone through multiple versions of this. Seen their industries shuttered, lost jobs, lost insurance and protections on the regular. And lest we forget, the 2021 vaccine mandates where public and private sector employees were told in no uncertain terms: Get the jab or lose your job. Federal workers and their all-powerful unions have been insulated from it all for far too long. So, it's about time these folks experience what life is like for the rest of us.

I'm in a group with a federal employee who is married to a federal employee. She's freaking out because they just had a baby and neither can work from home anymore. Welcome to the real world, lady. Most Americans weren't treated like feds.
Stay home and raise your own kid.

— Jeanna Hoch (@JeannaHoch) January 21, 2025

But entitlement is real, and it hasn't stopped them from melting down. First up, employees were not happy about being told they had to return to an actual office to do their jobs. One GG12 Court Services and Offender Supervision employee, who makes at least $104,000 a year, is highly upset over the fact that the "Cheeto" has taken away her telework.

Genesis Cuesta, a federal employee at @DC_CSOSA, publicly rebuking @POTUS as “Cheeto” and mad as hell that telework is canceled pic.twitter.com/G2JGsgk35d

— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) January 26, 2025

One would think that court services and dealing with offenders would be something you don't want to do remotely, but what do we know?

Second, and what really has federal employees buggin', is that their pet diversity projects — the DEI initiatives that many of them were hired on or promoted for — have been taken away.

At the State Department, the shutdown of those programs was something many saw coming. But some were startled by the directive that they report individual cases of people’s job descriptions being changed to “disguise” the DEI element to a special Office of Personnel Management email address. Some saw it as an order to snitch on colleagues. 

Others, who prepared for Trump’s return to office, had begun working months ago with outside nonprofits to archive websites they feared would be taken down by the Trump administration — including information on ending gender-based violence around the world.

Taking government-generated websites and working with outside agencies to archive them? Isn't that a violation of their civil service contract? And CNN reports that certain federal agencies are scrubbing titles of their DEI employees in order to shield them from being swept up in the DEI removal. This is deceptive and fraudulent. 

DEI: CNN is confirming federal agencies are scrambling to change the titles of their DEI civil service employees. These actions are an effort to defraud the government and should be prosecuted. pic.twitter.com/GTh2kp4Vjh

— @amuse (@amuse) January 23, 2025

The very fact that these employees are suing to hang on to their entitlements, and that they are hell-bent on having their own way and doing their own will, tells you everything you need to know. These people may have begun government service to "serve the American people," but have ended up only serving themselves. Time will tell, but let's hope this shake-up of the status quo results in a federal workforce that is serious about doing the business of the American people and not for their own initiatives or agendas.