The 'deep state' is proving to Trump it’s a worthy foe
The president has federal workers on their heels, but he hasn’t yet brought them to heel.
By Erin Schumaker Politico 09/14/2025 07:00 AM EDT
President Donald Trump and his team are crowing about the downsizing of the federal bureaucracy, which is set to shrink by tens of thousands more on Sept. 30 when workers who took a DOGE buyout hang it up.
But if Trump’s goal was to dismantle the workforce he calls the “deep state” — and blames for the failings of his first term — he’s got a long way to go. Although he’s disrupted swaths of the government, the vast majority of career federal employees who avoided the firings of the past seven months are sticking it out, according to Labor Department statistics and the White House’s own admission.
Many of those who’ve chosen to remain are keeping their heads down. Some aren’t — and their open defiance of Trump administration policies may make it harder for the administration to achieve Trump’s goals — much like Trump complained they did in his first term.
At the end of the day, career staffers still believe that politicians come and go and it’s them who will persevere, the survivors told POLITICO.
“They are staying in their jobs — the vast majority of people, even though they could get a job somewhere else or look for a job somewhere else,” said Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, whose bargaining agreements at at least six agencies Trump has sought to scuttle. “There will be a new administration, with new priorities.”
For many, that’s true, but for others, such as those in highly specialized fields like foreign aid, the job market for former government workers is limited. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Sept. 9 it likely over-estimated past job growth by hundreds of thousands, painting a grimmer picture of the employment market than previously thought. That too could be a factor in federal workers’ apparent resolve to stay.
While 200,000 federal workers have left the government this year, the most in a single year since World War II, Trump still employs about 2.2 million civil servants.
By year’s end, the administration expects to cut loose 100,000 more federal workers, according to the White House Office of Personnel Management. That’s a lot, but it amounts to a cut of about 12 percent.
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But for all of Trump’s broadsides — he’s called civil servants “ crooked” and “dishonest” people who are “destroying this country” — the percentage of federal workers quitting each month hasn’t budged, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The quit rate is holding steady at 0.5 percent as of July, the same percentage as last year before Trump took office and down from 0.7 percent at the height of the pandemic.
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Projection defense mechanism. |
