Virginia is home to more than 170,000 federal employees – a workforce that feels under siege by the new Trump administration. Correspondent Matt Laslo reports from the Capitol on the battle federal workers feel they’re locked in.
One of the first acts Donald Trump took as president was to put a freeze on hiring in federal government agencies. Then his White House staff began redacting and erasing climate science from government websites and past agency tweets. Then an email surfaced where the White House put independent inspector generals on notice that they should look for work elsewhere.
Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly says a chill is running up the spines of many federal employees.
“There’s fear, there’s concern, there’s anxiety, there’s confusion, there’s determination, there’s anger – it’s a lot of different emotions being experienced by a workforce that feels under siege,” says Connolly.
Before Trump took office, his transition team was rebuffed when they requested the names of those who worked on international climate change negotiations. But now many in that transition team are holding the reins of power, which Virginia Democrat Don Beyer says has resulted in a flurry of calls and emails to his office.
“A lot of off-the record, anonymous phone calls to our office, especially from EPA people," Beyer says. "They are very concerned about what they perceive as gag orders and they’re terrified of the politicization. They read these stories where the head of the Transition wants to cut two-thirds of the staff, so every one of them is terrified that they’re suddenly going to be unemployed.”
Republicans, though, see things differently.
“The government does not exist to have the employees all feel like it’s Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood,” says southwest Virginia Republican Morgan Griffith.
At the start of the new Congress he led his party in implementing a rule to make it easier for Congress to fire federal workers and to cut individual departments. Griffith says federal workers aren’t his top priority.
“I’m sorry if they’re stressed," he says. "But we have a duty to make sure we’re moving the country in the right direction, and if that means rearranging priorities then that’s what we have to do.”
As for the potential for firings, Griffith says federal workers shouldn't be coddled.
“It’s part of the nature of being employed is that if your company, in this case the government, has a shift in direction there’s going to be a little bit of a time period for a shake out and sometimes that means fewer employees.”
But Democrats argue the GOP is misguided to take aim at federal workers. Virginia’s senior Democratic Senator Mark Warner says there are many people whose roles help save the government money.
"There are areas, like cutting employees at the IRS, that actually cost the government money because you can’t do the tax enforcement," Warner says. "There’s been estimated that we have about a $300 billion a year tax gap between what is owed and what is paid. If the IRS doesn’t have the employees to do it, we’re not going to collect that and that gap is going to get bigger.”
Warner is going a step further than many in his party. His office is setting up a hotline for disgruntled federal workers to blow the whistle on the new administration.
“I also want to make sure federal workers feel they can contact my office," he says. "And we’ll be rolling out in the coming days both website contacts and phone contacts, so that if they feel they are under assault we can take their cases and stand up for them.”
Federal workers aren’t going to go away over the next four years, but it doesn’t seem like the debate over their usefulness will either.