Less than three months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, the U.S. federal public service is in chaos. Sweeping executive orders, mass layoffs, and aggressive policy shifts have sent shockwaves through government agencies. While Trump did not explicitly campaign on slashing the civil service, his administration has embraced Project 2025—a blueprint for dismantling government bureaucracy, orchestrated by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The result? An unprecedented assault on the workforce that keeps the country running.
Weaponizing public service cuts
At the heart of this strategy is Russell Vought, the newly confirmed head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). As an architect of Project 2025, Vought’s vision for the federal workforce is clear—and disturbing. Speaking at a conservative event, he stated:
“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. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
This isn’t just about trimming “wasteful spending” or “finding inefficiencies”. It’s an ideological purge designed to weaken, demoralize, and ultimately shrink the role of government in American life.
Slashing government services and funding
Within days of his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Its mission? To “maximize efficiency”—a euphemism for politically-motivated deep cuts and privatization.
The consequences have been swift and brutal – and this is just a snapshot:
- Freezing financial assistance: On January 27, Trump paused all federal grants and loans, hitting sectors from healthcare to education.
- Gutting science and research: Billions in funding freezes, drastic cuts and layoffs to critical institutions, including the National Institute of Health, the Centre for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, and National Archives. Heavy restrictions have been placed on research, including bans on studies that mention particular words relating to sex and gender, race, disability and other protected characteristics.
- Slashing foreign aid: 90% of foreign aid contracts were eliminated overnight, gutting humanitarian efforts and diplomatic initiatives.
- Targeting healthcare: The Energy and Commerce Committee must cut $880 million—a figure that almost certainly means slashing Medicaid, which provides care for 72 million low-income Americans.
- Dismantling public education: The Department of Education eliminated $600 million in teacher training grants tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
- Undermining climate science: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) saw a 20% workforce reduction, disrupting critical weather services. Some firings were hastily reversed when officials realized the National Weather Service had been crippled. Trump’s executive orders rolled back 100 environmental protections in what’s being called the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
While some of these freezes have been temporarily blocked by federal judges, the long-term damage is already being felt.
Hostile work conditions and layoffs
The Trump administration is not just cutting jobs—it’s making life miserable for those who remain.
- Mass-resignation incentives: Federal employees were offered full pay and benefits until September if they resigned—but later updates made key details unclear. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) encouraged staff to move into the private sector.
- Forcing employees back to the office: Trump banned remote work, requiring all employees to return by February 6 or get fired, regardless of office capacity or readiness.
- Productivity surveillance: Employees were ordered to submit weekly five-bullet-point reports on their work, with failure to comply considered a resignation. DOGE plans to feed these reports into AI to determine job relevance. Federal workers have already filed lawsuits, arguing this violates labor laws.
- Mass layoffs and relocation plans: On February 26, the administration directed agencies to submit plans for large-scale layoffs by March 13 and employee relocations to cheaper cities by April 14. Legal challenges are already underway.
Crushing federal unions
Trump’s war on the federal workforce also extends to union protections. In March, he issued an executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from up to 1 million federal employees.
By exploiting a national security exemption, the administration is arguing that anyone whose job touches border security, defense, foreign relations, or the economy should not have union protections. This unprecedented move could leave massive swaths of the workforce without a voice in their own working conditions.
Destroying Diversity and Inclusion efforts
The attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs was swift and ruthless.
- January 20: Executive orders fired all DEI-related employees, enforced binary gender recognition, and cut funding for gender-affirming care.
- January 21: Federal departments were banned from contracting with companies that enforce DEI standards.
- January 22: Trump revoked key portions of the Equal Employment Opportunity Order (1965), rolling back decades of anti-discrimination protections.
By dismantling these safeguards, the administration has emboldened discrimination in hiring, promotions, and workplace culture—creating a hostile environment for women, racialized, and LGBTQ+ employees.
The bigger picture: Chaos by design
Trump’s actions have created a federal workforce plagued by uncertainty, dysfunction, and fear. This isn’t about cost-cutting—it’s about rendering government so ineffective that privatization seems like the only solution. These are politically motivated cuts, as former Republican staffer and director of the Senate Budget Committee said, “designed to play to Trump’s base…for ideological reasons. The playbook has not been for the dollar savings, but more for the philosophical and ideological differences conservatives have with the work these agencies do.”
But the damage won’t just affect federal employees. Every American who relies on public services—healthcare, disaster relief, education, and environmental protections—will feel the consequences.
While courts may block some of these changes, the uncertainty forces employees to make decisions before legal battles are resolved—weakening the civil service through attrition. The Trump administration is betting that if enough damage is done, it won’t be reversible.
A warning for Canada: The threat to our public service
The dismantling of the U.S. federal workforce under Trump is not just an American crisis—it’s a cautionary tale for Canada. The rhetoric of “government inefficiency” is gaining traction here too, serving as a convenient excuse for potential deep cuts, mass layoffs, and the erosion of essential public services.
We are already seeing Workforce Adjustment (WFA) notices and service reductions under the banner of “cost containment.” But what does “inefficiency” really mean? It’s a political tool, not an objective measure. For some, it’s a call to improve public services to advance the public good; for others, it’s a justification for gutting them.
Pierre Poilievre, a contender for the next Prime Minister has spent two decades attacking unions and collective bargaining rights, undermining public services, and pushing for a smaller government—not out of necessity or to help Canadians, but as a matter of political ideology.
The Conservatives’ vision for “efficiency” is not about better services but about eliminating them. If elected, this government won’t just trim budgets, make every division a bit more efficient, or make “performance-based layoffs”; it will make deep cuts.
- Research funding? Slashed.
- Vital public programs? Eliminated.
- Services Canadians rely on? Gutted.
This vision includes dismantling your public sector pension. The Conservative Party has pledged to shift pensions to a defined contribution model, aligning employer contributions with the private sector. This change shifts the risk to you, the employee, making retirement savings unpredictable. No more guaranteed pension based on your final years of work—your savings could run out before you do. They want to raise the pensionable age in Canada to 67, even though he qualified for a $120,000 pension at age 31.
Pierre Poilievre has already signaled his intent to monitor and control public servants, questioning whether their jobs matter at all. Conservative MPs say they have had much less freedom to speak publicly since Poilievre became leader. He has press secretaries monitoring the entrance to Parliament to supervise MPs as they pass journalists.
Current Conservative policies are very focused on ideologies around gender and race. If elected, they may try to muzzle researchers and scientists whose work touches on political issues to make sure public servants stay “on message” rather than objective and scientific – just like the Harper Conservatives did with environmental science when Poilievre was a Cabinet Minister. It’s worth noting that Pierre Poilievre has voted against environmental protection 400 times.
Poilievre's rhetoric, record, and policies echo what we’ve seen in the U.S., where “efficiency measures” led to devastating job losses, weaker public institutions, and greater reliance on the private sector. There is a reason why his fellow conservatives say Poilievre is "very much in sync with … the new direction in America."
If we don’t push back now, Canada’s public service could face the same wave of deep austerity, union busting, political interference, and job insecurity. The fight to protect public services isn’t just about jobs—it’s about safeguarding the essential programs that millions of Canadians depend on every day.