One worker joined the FBI and made a career in counterintelligence, sniffing out Chinese spies. Another developed a strong stomach around blood and guts, inspecting slaughterhouses and processing plants to make sure that the food we all eat was safe. A third worked on the Human Genome Project, bringing 'biology's equivalent of the moonshot' into everyday medicine. All were fired or left after Donald Trump's assault on the civil service, along with roughly 300,000 other federal workers. 'We want to put them in trauma,' Trump's Office of Management and Budget director famously said. '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.' When Franklin Foer spoke with dozens of former federal workers for our February issue, he found other layers of feeling. Yes, they were traumatized, but also relieved to talk, in detail, about work they had considered...
learn more
