Purge the people who say no

The people were gone, the courts said it was illegal, and the people stayed gone. In February 2025, the Office of Personnel Management directed agencies to fire roughly 25,000 probationary employees. Two federal judges ordered reinstatements; the Supreme Court let the firings proceed; and in September a judge found them unlawful but declined to reverse them. The lesson to every civil servant was concrete: act first, lose later, keep what you took.

The administration then turned that purge into a personnel system. OPM's final "Schedule Policy/Career" rule took effect in March 2026, creating a route to replace protected civil servants with presidentially selected employees. A June executive order converted nearly 8,000 jobs to at-will status. New applicants are also asked how they would advance the president's executive orders; OPM says agencies may not score the answer, but the question tells candidates what the employer wants to hear. Career protection is what lets an official refuse an order they believe is illegal without losing the rent money. Remove it, and obedience becomes a condition of paying the bills.

The removals concentrated on the people most likely to say no. DOJ fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases, ousted senior FBI officials and sought the names of thousands of other FBI employees who had touched those investigations. Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth removed top military leaders and moved to replace the Judge Advocates General, the senior lawyers whose job is to test whether military orders are lawful. A list of investigators and a purge of military lawyers make the same point inside different institutions: challenging the president can end a career.

Workers also lost the structures that let them challenge pressure together. A March 2025 order invoked a national-security exclusion to remove collective-bargaining rights at about 20 agencies. With later extensions and an earlier TSA decision, 84.4 percent of the unionized federal workforce lost those rights, including workers at agencies as far from combat as the National Weather Service. During the October shutdown, OMB directed agencies to lay off about 4,200 employees; by August 2026, GAO reported that more than 4,300 employees had left FEMA in fiscal 2025 without an assessment of what the departures meant for disaster response.

The next order an official believes is illegal will meet a workforce already shown what refusal costs. Protected jobs became at-will jobs. Investigators were fired or catalogued. Military lawyers were targeted. Union rights disappeared. The public cost is not abstract "government capacity": it is a disaster office short on experienced staff, a prosecutor deciding whether a case is worth a career, or a public servant choosing between an oath and a paycheck.