Franklin Foer writes:

The purge began late Friday night, four days after Donald Trump returned to the White House. Seventeen inspectors general—internal watchdogs embedded throughout the federal government—received emails notifying them of their termination. Three weeks later came the Valentine’s Day Massacre: the ousting of tens of thousands of federal employees with little discernible pattern, across agencies and across the country. By April, entire departments—the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—had been gutted.

Workers the administration couldn’t fire were coerced into leaving on their own. Toxicity became HR policy. Employees received an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” It offered eight months’ pay to anyone who resigned, and no assurances of job security to those who stayed. A follow-up email encouraged them “to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” At the end of Trump’s first year back in office, roughly 300,000 fewer Americans worked for the government.

That number understates the destruction. When Trump anointed Elon Musk to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, he did so in the name of clearing out mediocrities and laggards. The bureaucracy does harbor pockets of waste and paper-pushing positions that could easily be culled. But the administration showed little interest in understanding the organizations it was eviscerating. Any sincere attempt to reform the government would have protected its top experts and most skilled practitioners. In fact, such workers account for a disproportionate share of the Trump-era exodus. Many of them accepted the resignation package because they possessed marketable skills that allowed them to confidently walk away. The civil service thus lost the cohort that understands government best: the keepers of its unwritten manual, the custodians of institutional integrity.

Grover Norquist, one of the chief ideologists of modern conservatism, used to fantasize about drowning the government in the bathtub. The Trump administration has realized that macabre dream—not merely by shrinking the state, but by poisoning its culture. It has undone the bargain that once made government careers attractive: lower pay offset by uncommon job security and a sense of professional mission. [Continue reading…]