Ruthless, cruel and destructive: Trump’s purge of America’s public servants

FEBRUARY 26, 2026

Sasha Abramsky introduces his new book American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government.

In January 2025, with a triumphant, and wrathful Donald J. Trump returning to the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was unleashed on the federal civilian workforce. Its tech-savvy shock troops had a mission: to either fire, or drive into resignation or retirement, hundreds of thousands of workers, and to bludgeon entire agencies into a state of terminal decline.

Uninterested in the niceties of constitutional government – including the fact that “departments” have to be created by Congress, which didn’t occur in the creation of DOGE, and that agencies and departments brought into being by Congress can only be killed off by that branch of government – they set to work on their wrecking ball expedition. Within months, one in seven federal workers had left government employ.

The parts of the federal government that worked on overseas aid, public health, workplace protections, education policy, environmental issues – in particular relating to climate change – and racial and economic justice all found themselves in the DOGE crosshairs, their employees essentially labeled by the most powerful people on earth as “the enemy within,” and their work denigrated as being un-American.

As the DOGE purges accelerated, I began putting out feelers to find federal workers who would talk to me about what was going on in their workplaces– and, by extension, how their lives were being upended. In the months that followed it rapidly became clear that DOGE was less to do with efficiency – after all, if Trump and Musk really wanted to save the US taxpayers money, they wouldn’t have thrown their muscle behind an unprecedented, and extraordinarily costly, expansion of ICE as well as a massive military buildup – and more to do with destroying the parts of the professionalized civil service that might have acted as braking mechanisms against Trump’s authoritarian power grab and extreme ideological agenda.

A year into Trump 2.0, large parts of the American civil service have been destroyed, while other parts have been coopted to implement not only MAGA’s broader political agenda but also Trump’s vengeance campaign against individuals who investigated him or took part in efforts to understand what had happened on January 6th, 2021. My book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, explains that story, focusing on eleven individuals, across eight government agencies, as they were buffeted by the hurricane force winds unleashed by Trump and Musk.

Some of them, like USAID staffer Taly Lind, were senior figures who had been in government service for decades. Others, like the young man I wrote about who had gotten a job, fresh out of college, with the Internal Revenue Service answering phone calls from taxpayers needing advice, were right at the start of their careers. Still others, such as Hannah Echt – who agreed to speak to me in her capacity as an American Federation of Government Employees union member and steward — had carved out niche areas of expertise only to suddenly find that the work they did was no longer valued by the United States government.

Ever since her father had taken her to his place of work at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Echt had always wanted to work at NIOSH. Other kids dreamed of being astronauts or firefighters; Echt desired nothing more than to be an industrial hygienist, investigating dangerous workplace conditions and coming up with solutions that would help save workers’ lives. As a young adult, she realized that dream, conducting workplace evaluations at places as diverse as railyards, construction sites, and cannabis processing facilities. Then, in early 2025, everything ground to a sudden halt. Following Donald Trump’s January inauguration and DOGE’s onslaught against federal employees, her Cincinnati office’s “funds were frozen, travel was paused, and external communications, including our ability to publish and present our findings, were stifled.” Months later, large parts of the NIOSH operations were still non-functional and she and all of her colleagues were in the fight of their lives to keep their agency, and their jobs, above water.

The deep freeze that large parts of the US government had been plunged into was anything but accidental. The DOGE project was to create a deliberately manufactured dysfunction that would encroach into pretty much every corner, except those harboring the burgeoning security and anti-immigrant apparatus, of the federal government.

At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had long been loathed by conservative Republicans, workers were bombarded with one extraordinarily demeaning email after another. On February 8th, they were directed to “halt several classes of work unless ‘required by law’ or expressly approved by the Acting Director.” They were ordered by that acting director to “cease any pending investigations” and not to open any new ones, to “cease all supervision and examination activity,” and to “cease all stakeholder engagement.” In short, they were mandated to stop doing everything that their agency had been created to do.

Two days later, the acting director followed up by telling the CFPB staff that the headquarters building they worked in was closed and that “employees should not come into the office. Please do not perform any work tasks… employees should stand down from performing any work task.” But eighteen days after that, having been told that they couldn’t work they were then ordered to fill in the Musk-mandated questionnaire listing “5 bullets describing what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Going forward, please complete the above task each week by Mondays at 11.59pm ET.” It was, quite simply, Orwellian: having been ordered not to carry out their duties, or even to show up to their place of work, they were now being forced to justify their continued employment by saying what work accomplishments they had achieved each week.

The opening act of Trump 2.0 was ruthless and cruel, ultimately destroying the careers and financial stability of hundreds of thousands of civil servants. It was also a prelude to a much farther-reaching breakdown of basic governing norms. In sabotaging large parts of the federal government, DOGE set the stage for a pervasive use of humiliation and of extra-constitutional raw power grabs as tactics to bring perceived enemy institutions and individuals, both at home and overseas, to their knees.

In 2024, Trump had promised to be his supporters’ sword of justice and their retribution. In Trump 2.0 he has sought to make that a reality, to burn to the ground a system he views as having cheated and harassed and attempted to imprison him, and that his supporters view as being hopelessly entangled in a globalist vision they no longer want a part of.

By narrating the story of DOGE’s purges, and of the workers victimized in these attacks, my book ends up telling a much larger tale: the unprecedented saga of the world’s most powerful nation turning in on itself and cannibalizing the very institutions that have undergirded that power – and the reputation that accompanied it – for so many decades.

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and author of several books. American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the US Government is published by OR Books.

Sasha Abramsky will be talking about his book at two events in London next month, firstly at the Boston Room at George IV, 185 Chiswick High Rd W4 3DF on Sunday March 15th at 7pm, tickets here; and secondly at  Burley Fisher bookshop, 400 Kingsland Rd, London E8 4AA on Wednesday March 18th at 6pm, tickets here.