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Federal government workers have been left “shell-shocked” by the upheaval wrought by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency amid signs that he is bent on exacting revenge on a bureaucracy that he considers to be a “deep state” that previously thwarted and persecuted him.
Since being restored to the White House on 20 January, the president has gone on a revenge spree against high-profile figures who previously served him but earned his enmity by slighting or criticising him in public.
He has cancelled Secret Service protection for three senior national security officials in his first presidency – John Bolton, the former national security adviser, Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director and secretary of state, and Brian Hook, a former assistant secretary of state – even though all are assassination targets on an Iranian government hit list.
The same treatment has been meted out to Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases expert who angered Trump after joining the White House task force tackling Covid-19 and who has also faced death threats.
Trump has also fired high-profile figures from government roles on his social media site and stripped 51 former intelligence officials of their security clearances for doubting reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop as possible Russian disinformation.
Yet whereas Trump’s better-known adversaries were possibly expecting a measure of payback – and in some cases, like Fauci’s, were pardoned by Joe Biden to shield them from prosecution – more intense vengeance may have been felt by anonymous civil servants who were less prepared.
Some senior officials saw the writing on the wall and resigned before his return, but others adopted a hope-for-the-best attitude – only to be shocked by what awaited them, according to insiders.
“The most commons refrain I’m hearing from people who have left but are still talking to people on the inside is: ‘I knew it was going to be bad but I didn’t think it was going to be this bad,’” said Mark Bergman, a veteran Democratic lawyer who has been in contact with some of those who fear being targets of the retribution Trump repeatedly vowed on the campaign trail.
“There’s certainly shell shock. My view is that Trump is animated by his revenge and retribution agenda.”
Career officials at Department of Justice have been summarily fired – despite having civil service job protection – after being told they cannot be trusted to implemented the returning president’s agenda.
Among those purged are lawyers who were assigned to the investigation of Trump by the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, over his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his removal of a trove of classified documents from the White House.
Also targeted have been about 30 government watchdogs, knows as inspectors general and responsible for rooting out corruption and wrongdoing. They were dismissed en masse last Friday night without the legally required 30 days notice being given to Congress.
One possible motivation animating Trump’s grievance against the group is that it was an inspector general who initially informed Congress that Trump was improperly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden during his last presidency, leading to his first impeachment.
About 60 senior officials for the United States aid and development agency (USAid) were put on leave after being accused of trying to circumvent the new administration’s order to freeze all aid operations worldwide.
Other senior staff have found themselves switched from their areas of expertise to much less amenable roles after failing to demonstrate an acceptable standard of loyalty to Trump.
Long-serving officials in the criminal and civil rights division of the justice department have been reassigned to newly created units intended to help enforce the administration’s immigration crackdown in so-called sanctuary cities.
“People are being moved reassigned, fired or otherwise [put] under pressure, if they are not able to say that they are mission-aligned, which is the phrase being used by the transition team to mean you will carry out the orders of the president regardless of whether they’re lawful or not,” said Bergman.
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There are ominous signs that the spirit of retribution will continue – or get worse.
Last week, in tactics more redolent of totalitarian regimes the United States has historically been at odds with, federal workers were warned of “adverse consequences” if they failed to report their colleagues who refused to comply with the administration’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, or tried to sustain the programs with coded language.
An executive order, titled Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government, has been described as a “roadmap for retribution”.
It directs the attorney general and director of national intelligence to “review the activities of all departments and agencies exercising civil or criminal enforcement authority” over the past four years, including the justice department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission – all agencies involved in criminal investigations of Trump after 2020 – and report back to the president with recommendations for “remedial action”.
Joel Hirschhorn, a veteran Washington defence lawyer who defended political demonstrators during the Nixon era, called the order “as clear a roadmap to retribution as you’ll ever see”.
“I saw Nixon, with his enemies list, which was a clear attempt to weaponize law enforcement against these detractors. But this one is mind boggling,” he said. “Any rational, reasonably tightly wrapped, intelligent person would come to the conclusion that there is no other reason [than retribution].”
One presumed future target could be Smith, who Trump repeatedly assailed as “deranged” and suggested should be deported from the US.
But Hirschhorn said Smith, who wound up his investigation after Trump’s election victory and resigned as special prosecutor before he took office, was protected by “prosecutorial immunity”.
“Unless they can show that he absolutely acted in bad faith, which is not the situation here, any threat against him is like a fart in a category five hurricane,” said Hirschhorn. “It will go whimpering away.”
