The marble atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building, near the Capitol, felt unusually empty and tense on a recent June morning. A few days earlier, in Minnesota, a man who reportedly compiled a hit list of forty-five Democratic elected officials had killed a state legislator and her husband and shot a state senator and his wife. In Los Angeles, F.B.I. agents tackled and handcuffed the California senator Alex Padilla when he tried to question Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, about the immigration raids that had swept the city. The mood was such that the slightest hint of dissent—implied in my corner of the atrium by a clutch of young bureaucrats huddled around neon poster boards—was enough to draw the suspicion of a police officer. “If you protest, I’m going to have to arrest you,” he told them.

Members of the group were dressed nicely, as if for work, except that they had no work to do. They called themselves “fired Feds,” reclaiming a pejorative that has generally been used to describe F.B.I. agents. Protest wasn’t part of the day’s agenda. On the posters, they wrote messages of appreciation to Republican and Democratic senators who supported their cause. They had spent the past sixteen weeks holding press conferences and urging lawmakers to prevent the razing of federal agencies; they also ran an Instagram account, @fedsworkforyou, with the tagline “Amplifying the work federal employees do and did before Trump/Musk illegally fired them.”

The Feds snacked on a box of what they referred to as “R.F.K. sugar,” otherwise known as doughnut holes. “Next week, we’ll have red dye No. 40,” an organizer said. Mack Schroeder, a regular at the gatherings, had worked for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s Department of Health and Human Services until he was placed on administrative leave in February and later dismissed. On April 1st, when ten thousand of his former colleagues were given termination notices, Schroeder had confronted the Indiana senator Jim Banks to ask how the cuts might affect people with disabilities. Banks responded by opining on Schroeder’s firing. “You probably deserved it,” the senator said. “You seem like a clown.” Other Feds in the group came from the Department of Education and from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., which had been an early casualty in the purge of the federal bureaucracy.

They walked over to Senator Lisa Murkowski’s office. She wasn’t available, but a staffer with a mustache agreed to speak with them in the hallway. Several fired Feds told their stories, emphasizing how their work related to the senator’s constituents in Alaska. Colleen had been with the Food and Drug Administration, “insuring all the food that we get from Mexico and Canada is safe, free of salmonella, cyclosporiasis, all the nasty stuff.” She explained that, without people like her, Alaskans wouldn’t be able to trust the products they bought at the grocery store. Colleen is thirty-five years old and a single mom. She was fired after thirteen years in federal service, and was now scrambling for a new source of income and health insurance. She had already applied for fifty-seven jobs—she kept a spreadsheet—including retail positions at Trader Joe’s and Costco. So far, no luck. (Two weeks after we spoke, she was suddenly reinstated, and requested that her last name be withheld because she’s not authorized to speak to the press.)

Around lunchtime, in the basement hallway that connects Senate offices, the group tried to catch the attention of every passing legislator. Both chambers of Congress were preoccupied with Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a multitrillion-dollar cut to taxes and social services. Murkowski approached, accompanied by a different staffer, but was pulled away by an activist in a “Peace with Iran” shirt. Someone spotted a fast-walking Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and yelled, “Senator Hawley, we are fired Feds!” “Sorry to hear that,” he said, without stopping. Few lawmakers did. Trump’s war on the deep state, under the pretext of eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, was still raging, despite the departure of his wingman and head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk. There had been six months of firings, suspensions of oversight offices, cancelled contracts, nullified unions, polygraph tests, pronoun bans, loyalty oaths. It was difficult to keep up.

In January and February, as the federal government embarked on its destruction of the federal government, or what Musk described as “humble tech support” and a “trillion dollar deficit reduction,” I fielded Signal chats, e-mails, and calls from federal workers all day and night. Often, there were tears. I heard many accounts of outlandish mistreatment and generalized workplace havoc. At the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, independent commissioners were fired, and cases related to transgender discrimination were functionally put on hold. “I don’t even think we can use the word ‘trans’ at work,” an E.E.O.C. lawyer told me. Whole programs were summarily scrapped. Employees were dismissed without notice and locked out of their offices and computers; they struggled to get the paperwork they needed in order to apply for unemployment benefits or extend their health insurance.

An interview with one worker often led to conversations with three or four others. The need to publicize what had happened—and simply to vent—outweighed the fear of retaliation, though many people asked to remain anonymous. I ended up speaking with more than a hundred and sixty current and former federal employees from two dozen agencies. I felt hypnotized by the prismatic breadth of the regulatory state.

Before Trump’s second term, the federal civil service had tended to be stable—with an average job tenure of around twelve years—and, from a journalistic standpoint, rather dull. Government employees are often self-effacing and nonpartisan; they prefer to operate behind the scenes. The U.S. government had endeavored to be a model employer, with clear rules and pay scales, strong labor protections, and targeted hiring of veterans and people with disabilities. No longer. “The members we represent are in a state of unrest,” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told me. “They’re going to do their job every single day, regardless of the threats, but they can only do so much. There’s going to be a breaking point.”

Musk was a hype man for layoffs, overstating various DOGE achievements on X; the DOGE he left behind has assumed a wilier pose. At the helm is Russell Vought, an author of Project 2025 and Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the government’s finances and personnel. Last year, in a speech Vought gave at an event hosted by his think tank, he said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. . . . When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” A few weeks ago, Vought told members of Congress that he intended for DOGE to become “far more institutionalized,” akin to “in-house consultants” at individual agencies.

It’s August now, and the Signal chats have slowed. DOGE has tempered its behavior somewhat in response to court rulings and public protest. Indiscriminate terminations have morphed into superficially businesslike “reductions in force,” and some departments, such as Veterans Affairs, have pulled back on avowed dismissals. But lawsuits continue to play out, as Trump asserts more and more power for the executive branch and Congress relents—despite polls showing that a majority of Americans disapprove of DOGE’s cuts. “We haven’t seen Congress represent the people,” Skye Perryman, the head of Democracy Forward, a nonprofit that has filed dozens of cases against the Administration, told me. “So, the tool the American people have is to go into court.”

The ups and downs of litigation have plunged many federal workers into a kind of purgatory: employed but banned from doing their jobs; rehired into a wasteful rubber room of paid administrative leave. In the first half of 2025, the federal civilian workforce shrank by sixty thousand people. Thousands more have retired, quit, or been dismissed but remain on payroll for the time being. “The loss of expertise is breathtaking,” a fired financial regulator told me. And two Supreme Court decisions from July will allow blanket cuts to move forward at agencies including the Departments of Education, State, and Environmental Protection, meaning that we will likely see another big drop in federal employment—unless recent layoffs at the Office of Personnel Management, the Feds’ human-resources department, make it impossible to process the necessary termination paperwork.

Meanwhile, other parts of the federal government are growing. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill includes funding for Homeland Security to hire some ten thousand Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and three thousand Border Patrol officers throughout the next four years. ICE is offering signing bonuses of up to fifty thousand dollars.

In many areas of the country, masked ICE officers have become the new face of the federal government. I was in Southern California in early June, when Homeland Security accelerated raids on courthouses and street corners. National Guardsmen and marines conducted complementary patrols. A vast, interlocking security apparatus was starting to feel like an instrument of one man’s desires. Policies were set through an endless scroll of executive orders and posts to Truth Social.

On June 14th, Trump staged a military parade—it was the Army’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, and his seventy-ninth—at a cost of thirty million dollars. Democracy groups called for demonstrations to coincide with the event, under the banner of “No Kings,” and several million people were estimated to have shown up; it was one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history. In Rancho Cucamonga, a desert town east of Los Angeles, a thousand people lined a major intersection, waving their signs at passing cars: “No Faux King Way!”; “ICE Out of LA, Trump Out of DC.” The organizers of “No Kings” cited a theory of social movements developed by the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth: “It only takes 3.5% of the population engaging in sustained, strategic protest against authoritarianism to achieve significant political change.” In the U.S., that number would be about twelve million. They weren’t quite there.

A few days after the “No Kings” protests, I flew to Washington, to attend an awards gala hosted by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that trains and supports federal workers. The Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, or Sammies—touted as “the ‘Oscars’ of government service”—have been given to hundreds of Feds since 9/11, with the goal of “highlighting the extraordinary accomplishments of our government and the vital role it plays in our daily lives.” Guests in tuxedos and evening gowns streamed into the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center, the university’s swanky new graduate building in downtown Washington. They sipped sparkling wine and snacked on global-ish appetizers: Vietnamese summer rolls, norimaki, chicken cordon bleu.

Typically, the Partnership honors a couple dozen civil servants and names a Federal Employee of the Year. Each winner receives a trophy and gives a speech. This year, the organization briefly considered skipping the Sammies altogether, so as not to make anyone a target. Max Stier, the president of the Partnership, began his remarks on a sombre note. “Today, I’m worried,” he said, “about the future of the Sammies and the public-servant heroes who make it possible.” Adjustments were made to the usual program. Only one of the twenty-three awardees appeared onstage: David Lebryk, who won Employee of the Year in part for having resigned as fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury rather than give DOGE access to payment systems. The honorees were introduced by Washington dignitaries such as Judy Woodruff, of PBS, and the former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. The teleprompter was placed at an uncomfortable height for Yellen, who is five feet tall; the strain of her outstretched neck seemed to fit the occasion. (In 2018, Trump had told his aides that she was too short to run the Federal Reserve.)