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The Washington Post

Federal employee groups prepare to fend off attacks by Trump and allies

The efforts are aimed at resisting what is expected to be a severe assault on public servants beyond the intimidation many federal employees felt during Trump’s first term.

Federal civil servants and their allies took steps this week to prepare for a coming fight with the incoming Trump administration, launching a new online clearinghouse to help workers and meeting privately to share best practices about how to protect themselves.

One education effort organized by public employee unions and watchdog groups will launch Thursday, with a new online public resource center under the banner “Civil Society Strong” that provides information about employee rights, options for legal representation and news about what the group calls “ongoing attacks on the civil service.”

“It is a one-stop shop site that we are hoping will help enable the American public, including civil servants, to be able to access the services they need,” said Skye Perryman, the chief executive officer of Democracy Forward, one of the organizers of the effort. “We know people are going into the holidays with a lot of anxiety about the future. And there is a broad civil society coalition that is really committed that the government can do work for the American people.”

A separate federal employee group, called the DOJ Gender Equality Network, held an online discussion Monday with more than 250 participants, mostly from the Department of Justice, to share advice about their legal rights and how to prevent their personal information from posted broadly online, an intimidation tactic known as doxing.

The efforts are aimed at resisting what is expected to be a severe assault on public servants that goes beyond the intimidation and sidelining many federal employees felt during Trump's first term. One of the biggest planks of his campaign was a promise to slash the civil service workforce and increase the power of political appointees in the government.

Federal employees from a number of agencies, including Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department, have had their names listed online as targets for firing by the American Accountability Foundation. The organization’s director, Tom Jones, says it researches and identifies nonpartisan appointees. who it suspects will resist the policy goals of President Trump based on their registration as Democrats, social media posts, political donations or online writings.

The group recently posted online the names of 22 attorneys in the Justice Department’s voting section and, with little or no information related to their actual job performance, claimed they “have shown a concerning history of bias and political activity that raise questions about their ability to enforce the law fairly.”

Trump’s top political donor, Elon Musk, who is codirecting an effort to downsize the federal workforce and root out “woke employees,” also recently named four government employees in posts on his X platform, where he has more than 207 million followers. Those employees work at the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, and the International Development Corporation.

Elon Musk speaks before Republican presidential nominee former president Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 27, 2024. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Experts on the call, a recording of which the group provided to The Washington Post, advised staffers on how to reduce their presence online to avoid sharing personal details. Dana Gold, an attorney with the Government Accountability Project, said on the call that her firm and others were prepared to fight the administration’s expected revival of a new job classification known as Schedule F, that would strip tens of thousands of civil servants in policy roles of their job protections. Trump moved to implement Schedule F with an executive order at the end of his first term, but the administration ran out of time to assign employees to the new job category.

“People aren’t just afraid of losing their jobs, they’re afraid of so much more than that at this point,” she said in an interview.

Stacey Young, a Justice Department attorney who is co-founder and president of DOJ GEN, said many staffers are frightened “by the well-known threats to our jobs and workplaces, and even to our safety.”

“We are doing everything we can to help our members and others understand what's going on, and what federal employees can do right now to protect themselves,” she said.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D), whose Northern Virginia district includes tens of thousands of federal employees, said in an interview that Democrats and others sympathetic to civil servants who face being targeted by the new administration “have to get geared up.”

“I wish no one had to face paying for legal representation but the level of rhetoric [coming from Trump and his allies] has been very threatening,” he said. “We can’t roll over and play dead on that.”

He said many of Trump’s potential actions against federal employees were likely to be face legal challenges.

“If the motive is vengeance, revenge and payback, that’s not a legal basis to target civil servants,” said Connolly, who this week became the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee. “We are a nation of laws. People have rights. Due process is built into the law.”

The organized resistance comes as employees across the federal government are scrubbing their social media accounts for negative comments about Trump, weighing retirement, applying for jobs at agencies that are likely to remain under the radar and having job titles changed to hide roles in climate change and other areas the incoming administration opposes.

Trump and his allies have pledged to gut and reshape the nonpartisan workforce of 2.3 million by firing thousands of professionals and replacing them with political loyalists, slashing trillions of dollars from the federal budget and eliminating departments outright. Others would be relocated away from Washington to avoid the “deep state” of bureaucrats in the capitol who might oppose Trump’s agenda.

Republican lawmakers in Congress are also dusting off legislation to force employees back to the office and require mandatory training to ensure that federal employees follow the administration’s agenda.

The agenda for public servants is more severe than in Trump’s first term, when he came to Washington in 2017 pledging some of the same priorities but failed to shrink the size of the workforce. Trump issued his most sweeping assault at the end of his term, an executive order mandating that civil servants in policy roles be reclassified in a new job category that would deny them the protections from firing they have been afforded for decades.

The policy, known as Schedule F, was put in place too late in the term to take effect, and President Joe Biden quickly revoked it. But it is expected to be an early priority of the incoming administration, led by Russell Vought, the first-term budget chief who is set to take the same job in the incoming administration.

Allies of civil service workers have been preparing legal challenges to many of the expected policies of the incoming administration, while also putting together efforts to offer legal support to any targeted civil service workers, said one person involved in the conversations, who requested anonymity because the plans were still in formation.

Civil Society Strong is a project of three major government employee unions — the American Federal of Government Employees, American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees and the National Federation of Federal Employees — along with a group of allied watchdog groups. They include Democracy Forward, the Government Accountability Project, the Project on Government Oversight, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and State Democracy Defenders Action.

The website. set to go live Thursday at http://civilservicestrong.org, plans to provide resources to civil servants facing harassment by private individuals or potential firing, reassignment and retaliation on the job, the group said in advance of the launch.

“Federal employees are the backbone of our society, delivering upon the promises made in the U.S. Constitution,” said American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley in a statement. “On behalf of the 800,000 civil servants we represent, AFGE is proud to be a part of the Civil Service Strong initiative, standing up against attacks on the federal workforce.”