We’re seeing how partisanship repels high-performing federal workers

With all eyes trained on Iran, it is easy to lose sight of the headway President Trump has made transforming the nonpartisan civil service into a partisan arm of governance.

The last year, however, has shown that a federal workforce made to toe the party line will be unable to attract or retain the talent needed for high performance.

The choice between partisanship and performance is being forced by the pace at which the president is having his way. Civil servants have proved no match for the White House, nor have the courts provided a meaningful check.

The president has kept his campaign promise to shrink the federal headcount quickly and dramatically. Some 300,000 federal workers had left the federal government by the end of 2025. Meanwhile, he has also implemented the MAGA policy agenda, settled personal scores with individual careerists and reset the rules that govern hiring, promotion and job tenure.

But this relentless quest for political advantage has weakened the performance of government. A report published by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit advocate of improving government, marshals evidence that the administration’s push for control has left the federal enterprise in chaos. Examples include the disruption of government-funded clinical trials affecting 74,000 patients, the delay of disaster relief, the slowing of Social Security responsiveness, increased wait times for veterans seeking medical treatment and diminished capacity at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.   

Problems like these each have their own back-stories, but all stem from prioritizing partisanship over performance.  

First, the Trump administration has reduced the work of government to a numbers game in order to show results. The political imperative of cutting the workforce left no room for taking into account qualitative factors. By design, the White House used a chainsaw on federal agencies under the aegis of the Department of Government Efficiency.  The data-driven process was impersonal and faceless. All federal employees were emailed the same short, generic questionnaires to justify their positions. Then they all received a costly, one-time buyout offer.  

The numbers game pushed talent to the exits indiscriminately. More than 90 percent of those who left government did so by choice, taking with them all of their experience and institutional memory. Belatedly, the administration acknowledged the loss of talent earlier this month by giving preference to performance over tenure in future workforce reductions.  

Second, the Trump agenda has charted a course largely outside the margins of bipartisan consensus within which civil servants have operated for decades. Deviations from the norm include the phasing out of the Department of Education, the elimination of all federal DEI or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs, the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the denial of global warming, the reversal of trade policy, the loosening of ties to NATO allies, and a sharp downturn in investment in science.

Federal workers, who are mostly risk-averse institutionalists, found themselves in the direct line of fire. The highly specialized federal science workforce declined by 95,000. The State Department lost about one-sixth of its workforce. The Department of Justice lost over one-third of its senior managers and three-quarters of its Civil Rights Division. More broadly, job stability gave way to uncertainty, work-related stress intensified and morale hit rock bottom.   

Third, Trump’s desire for political revenge has targeted careerists connected to the Biden administration. Most drastically affected were those involved in investigations or prosecutions related to Trump’s first term or the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. The message to all careerists was unmistakable: Doing your job can be a fireable offense.

Fourth, the White House has put its thumb on the scales of hiring, promotion and job tenure. Litmus-test questions have been added to applications, DEI criteria dropped for promotion and a “fidelity” to policy requirement included at the State Department. Above all, civil service protections are on course to be withdrawn for as many as 50,000 careerists in positions that are broadly deemed policy-influencing. All of these moves will sharply reduce the appeal of federal careers to a large cross-section of the population.

The president’s attack on non-partisanship, cloaked as meeting a far-left threat, has a real chance of succeeding. If so, we will find out the hard way that political compliance does not confer the curiosity, determination, expertise, resilience or resourcefulness that it takes to be a top-notch federal employee.

While assembling the stories of high achieving civil servants from an array of agencies, I have learned that the most dedicated and effective federal workers are drawn into government by missions that serve the public good. For them, the value of the public good is not the exclusive preserve of a single political party.

Increasing the competence and effectiveness of the federal workforce is a vital national interest. Partisanship is not the answer.

John Yochelson, the former president of the Council on Competitiveness, is assembling and editing a collection of first-person stories of high-performing federal workers.