Bulwark Takes - The Government Is Coming Undone, Scared Federal Employees Give Us the Inside Scoop

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

We received tons of emails from federal workers and many who are affected by the mass confusion created by Elon Musk's initiatives at government agencies. Sam Stein shares insights from viewers and the importance of transparency as government workers continue to sift through chaos. For any information or insight, submit tips to https://thebulwark.com/tips

Hey guys, it's me Sam Stein back again. It's Monday. Crazy weekend. A lot of stuff happening. Doing the best we can to keep up with all this stuff. Last week, at the end of last week, we talked about federal websites being taken down and sort of the impact it was having on the workforce. And at the end of it, I offered up my email address for people to drop me a line and give me some tips and insights into what's going on. I don't regret doing that. But, boy, there were a fair number of emails from you guys. I appreciate it. Like 50 to 60 to 70 emails.

And I tried my best to work through all of them. And I apologize if I didn't get through them all and respond to you. But what you told me was really actually quite fascinating. And I think it gives a really good insight and indication into what's going on in the federal government and the impact that the Trump and Elon Musk policies have had so far in the workforce. Now, we are talking about a couple things here. One is the directive to stop grants, to stop external communications. And then, of course, we're talking about Elon Musk and what he's doing to basically get a hold of internal documents, internal government data, and reduce the size of the federal workforce through these Office of Personnel and Management buyouts, but also just going in and more or less shutting USAID and getting his hands on Treasury payments and things like that. So, you know, again, it's a lot to unpack. And what we're trying to do with this video is just to give you some

insights into how federal workers are feeling about it all. If you want even more than we're giving you here, I would encourage you to go to Reddit where they have this incredible Fed News feed that people should be looking at. It's a great clearinghouse. But I'm going to go through some of the responses. And again, this is just a little bit, this is just a slice of it. And I'll try not to be over-prescriptive here. But a lot of federal employees responded about receiving that HR memo, the fork in the road memo. And by and large, it really angered people. It angered people for a couple of reasons. One is because they're freaked out by it. The other is because it didn't imply it, outwardly stated that they would have more productive careers if they switched into the private sector.

And a lot of people just didn't trust it. And that was even before getting more insight into it. They just thought it looked fishy. They thought it was a fishing expedition, so on and so forth. So one federal employee said to me, quote, our internal HR team is still waiting on direction from leadership, but I think that is the intended result to put this offer on the table, give us no time or fine print to make a proper decision. And then added, if you don't take, we might just eliminate your job anyway. Another federal employee, you know, this is what you're talking about is people who are like now now thrust into these very difficult decisions. They wrote, I can retire now, but wanted to wait five more years to finish paying off my mortgage.

I have never been contacted directly by OPM with a mass email since I started working for the VA. That's the Veterans Administration in 2004. I mean, this is just what we're talking about left and right. And then there's the stuff around DEI. So if you might remember early on in the administration, one of the first executive orders was to eliminate any semblance of are out, gay, lesbian, transgender employees, employees who are minorities, things like that. I had a clinical psychologist at the VA again, who wrote the following. She said, I'm not a DEI hire, but I am a lesbian. I'm out to all my coworkers, but not the vets. Fortunately, my supervisor, who is the chief of psychology, totally has our back. She held two optional virtual meetings for us to ask

any questions about what's happening and not happened. A great leader. Another person contacted me in this. I don't feel totally comfortable putting up the full email, but you know what? Why not? It was an employee at the Centers of Disease Control Prevention. They noted that they got the email from the administration and they were tasked with removing all references to gender identification under the guise that it was going to defend women. They were instructed to remove the word gender and replace it with sex. And it created this really awkward situation. This employee wrote, my manager is an LGBT white woman married to a woman. Yesterday, she was crying in a meeting

while at the same time instructing us to follow these orders. Yeah, that was tough. Imagine your manager who is being forced to read these instructions, more or less kind of downgrading or erasing her existence and being like, well, this is now the policy. And she's just sitting there and you're standing there and crying. You know, I put that up online and you'd be shocked that the reaction on Twitter was fairly disgusting, but that's Twitter. Programmatically, people are talking to me about real concerns and problems with what's happening internally. I had someone reach out.

They are working at USAID. Again, this is the agency that Elon has basically said is a criminal enterprise and is going to shut down. They're working on health-related issues in Africa. This is the email they sent. Shit has hit the fan. Our entire project has been put on ice for 90 days. Suspension of all foreign assistant projects. The issue is we won't survive as an NGO organization for 90 days because USG,

that's the United States government, won't allow USAID to pay our salaries during the review. So layoffs will be starting soon. Wow. Okay. Yeah. 85% of our revenue base comes from us, a U S government USA. So we are screwed. Hey, not great. Um, someone who works for a federal funded, uh, community health centers, uh, I'm redacting the area of the country where this person works, uh, to protect their identity. Um, but they wrote the following, please tell your viewers that CHCs, those are the community health centers across the country, went into panic mode earlier this week when the PMS, that's the payment management service.

This is how they stopped allowing grants to go out. Went dark and the memo came out. Many, most of our staff voted for Trump. Now they're scared of the upheaval and what it might mean for their jobs. So on, so on, so on. Just a bad situation there. Public health grantee. Again, they're freezing communication.

So people who work in public health sphere, they might not have access to CDC, NIH funds. This is their lifeline. This is how we fund the vast majority of our biomedical research, scientific research. Those are on pause. The pause may have been lifted because of a federal inj scientific research. Those are on pause, or the pause may have been lifted because of a federal injunction, but they were on pause. This is what a public health grantee wrote us. I work in public health, and we were in the middle

of submitting grant proposals for the five-year grant cycle, and the portals are all closed. We are unable to obtain additional guidance from my, our, that's their spelling error, not mine, project officer due to restricted communication. grant support salaries of public health staff and run vital programs in the community this is very concerning because people will lose their jobs and communities will suffer yeah that's where we're at a ton of people wrote in who aren't necessarily federal employees but but are related to or married to them. And their lives are in incredible people. I guess I want to share this because this shows this. It's not just like, oh, well, you know, one employee or, you know, one grantee is going to, you know, have a, you know, money taken away or their job taken away. People are, you know, there's tangible ripple effects from there.

So it happens in the family, in the community, you can feel it. And here's the husband of a VA nurse who said, I'm more worried about, who said he was more worried about his wife than she is about herself. He said, I advised her to reach out to her superiors at the VA for direction. I don't trust any part of this administration, especially the erratic billionaire overseeing this initiative who thinks the federal government can be run like a business. To point, I don't put anything past what he will do to target employees. I've warned my wife she could just stop receiving paychecks or she could try to badge into the hospital one day and her badge could just not work. When he sent that, this was over the weekend and it seemed extreme but possible.

Today, this morning, people just couldn't get into USAID. Badges didn't work or the security guard wouldn't let them in. Their email addresses were shut off. So maybe not that crazy. Not great. Yeah, so this is happening across the board. Now, I will say there were occasionally some emails that went against the grain. So, for instance, I talked about how the vast majority of people who responded were inclined to not take the Elon Musk offer for a buyout. But I did get an email from a FEMA employee who said there was a lot of interest in the deferred resignation possibility, far more than I would have expected. People are appropriately cautious due to the lack of amplifying guidance,

but also lack of trust in the Trump administration. However, if DHS FEMA guidance does come out that echoes guidance from other agencies, saying the offer is legitimate and will be honored, I think there will be many takers. We'll see. One last thing I want to mention, and I don't necessarily need to put these emails up, but one thing that happens when you have these types of directives coming at this type of pace with absolutely no clarity from the administration is that it creates a real tangible sense of panic.

And people begin to worry about things that may not actually be happening, but they fear could be happening. And this was omnipresent in the emails that I received. There were people worried that they wouldn't be able to get their passports for their kids. There are people who were really worried, multiple emails came in, that they were not going to get social security payments. I think that was tied to the fact that Elon and Doge went into the treasury system that is responsible for all these federal payments that includes the social security payments that come to you. And people wrote, I mean, one person was like checking the social security website, login

for retirees, just to see if they could access the data. Another person wrote in that she and her husband were not getting in to the website and couldn't get information. And they were really freaking out. And their payments hadn't posted. And hers hadn't either. And then she sent me a follow-up email the next morning. And she's like, okay, the portal did open at 8 a.m. And I'm feeling better about it.

You know, this has an effect on people psychologically, right? I mean, this is not normal or, frankly, a healthy way to live. But this is where we're at. We're two weeks or so into the administration. A raft of decisions has created an incredible amount of confusion and chaos. People are really worried about their futures. People are really uncertain about their futures. People are really uncertain about their current prospects. And rumors are rampant about even more things happening.

And it's tough to keep track of it all. So I don't envy how these people are coping. But this is just the reality we now live in. And one last thing, just so my inbox, my personal inbox doesn't get completely overwhelmed, although I loved it. I did love it. We have set up a tip line, and I will be checking that religiously. So be assured it's, again, thebullwork.com backslash tips. Go there, send us what you're hearing, send us what you're seeing. Ideally, if you have primary documentation, that's emails, pamphlets, photos, things like that, that's the stuff that can really help us tell these critical stories. Not that we don't care about your thoughts. We do. We love them. But that's the real good. So if you have those,

send them along. I do want to thank everyone for helping me out by giving me some insights into what's going on here. As always, I want to thank you for subscribing to this stuff. We are keeping tabs of everything that's happening. It's a lot. We're a small staff, but because of your support, because of the decision you made to subscribe and support what we're doing, we're able to bring on more people to help with this mission. So tell your friends, tell your family, subscribe to the Bulwark. We're going to be doing stuff like this. And thank you for sharing what you're hearing.