The Federal Government That Was

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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 something of a mission.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Foer about the surprising things that he, a native Washingtonian, learned about the nuances of the federal bureaucracy. We also hear from some of those civil servants about the jobs they loved, and we take stock of what they—and the rest of the country—lost in the mass purge.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Ryan Hippenstiel: ​I always tell people to kind of picture their cellphone and navigating somewhere you’ve never been.

Hanna Rosin: This is Ryan.

Hippenstiel: My name is Ryan Hippenstiel.

Rosin: And he’s explaining to me how the work that he and his colleagues do helps a person like me, who has no sense of direction, get around—or, I should probably say, he and his former colleagues.

Hippenstiel: First, your cellphone is using GPS technology. Then you have all these layers, right? It might be a layer of restaurants so you can find a new pizza joint.

All of those layers need to be on top of each other in the right place for your car and your iPhone, or whatever it might be, to know what road it’s on.

Rosin: The Earth is not a perfect sphere. It turns out that it’s constantly shifting, in subtle ways.

Hippenstiel: You have subsidence. You have uplift. You have the gravity field underneath the earth changing. You have oscillating poles. So we’re all very blessed with modern technology that can navigate us around an extremely complex environment that’s changing, not realizing that the work’s never done because the Earth truly is changing.

Rosin: Hippenstiel’s work was keeping up with all this complexity so that the maps would remain precise. It’s a field called geodesy.

Hippenstiel: Geodesy is kind of the size and shape of the Earth, right? It’s the sciences behind the size and shape of the Earth, and what changes that the Earth is undergoing at all times.

Rosin: Hippenstiel did this work for the federal government.

Hippenstiel: I was the field operations branch chief for the National Geodetic Survey.

Rosin: Before I talked to Hippenstiel, I was not aware that my getting around depended on the work of the National Geodetic Survey—so do other way more critical things, like precision farming; disaster relief; ships knowing how deep or shallow the shoreline is in real time; even, Hippenstiel says, weapons firing accurately.

The work that he and his colleagues did was invisible, but critical. It kept the ground under my feet stable.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, one year since Donald Trump was re-inaugurated, we’re talking about the federal-government workforce that was.

Manu Raju (on CNN): President Trump is only ramping up his unprecedented push to effectively take a wrecking ball to the federal government, laying off thousands.

Rosin: Last April, Hippenstiel accepted a voluntary-resignation package. He joined a mass exodus of federal workers.

In Trump’s first year back, over 300,000 Americans left the government—

President Donald Trump: We’re removing all of the unnecessary, incompetent, and corrupt bureaucrats from the federal workforce.

Rosin: —many forced out or fired—

Trump: If they don’t report for work, we’re firing them. In other words, you have to go to office. (Cheers and applause.)

Rosin: —pressured to unceremoniously leave—

Kate Bolduan (on CNN): An offer or a threat? This morning, millions of federal workers are faced with a choice: Stay in their jobs with an uncertain future, or leave the government, leave their jobs, with a buyout from the Trump administration.

Rosin: —careers ended in capricious, even cruel ways.

David Muir (on ABC): The new threat from President Trump now suggesting that some of the 750,000 furloughed government workers told to stay home during this shutdown may not get paid for time lost.

The president said today, “Some people really don’t deserve to be taken care of.”

Rosin: Today, we’re looking back at those careers to take stock of who and what we’ve lost.

Frank Foer: I felt like I, personally, let alone people I talked to out there, even in Washington, were struggling to wrap their minds around the enormity of what has happened to our government.

Rosin: This is Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer.

Foer: And I felt like we needed to do something that was both intimate and that humanized the loss to government, but that it also had some sense of scale that captured the way in which there’s no department, agency, national park that really has gone untouched in the process of the Trump administration’s effort to collapse large chunks of the American government.

Rosin: Frank spent months tapping into the network. He called one fired worker, who led him to another worker who felt pressured to resign, and so on, until the bigger picture became clearer.

Foer: When I started to talk to these bureaucrats, I would find people who were doing things that I didn’t even know existed. I’ve studied politics and policy my entire life. I had no idea that the government did so many of these things and that they were kind of essential parts of an ecosystem and that, if you remove one of those things, it has rippling effects through the economy, through our science, through our health, through our national defense.

Rosin: Frank’s interviews are compiled in the February issue of the magazine. You’ll hear some of their voices throughout the episode.

Rosin (in interview): You talked to how many people?

Foer: I lost count, but let’s call it, like, 75, 80.

Rosin: Okay, so you talked to 75, 80 people—I’m sure there are themes that emerged.

Foer: There were so many people who took on government service because they had either been veterans themselves, or they’d grown up in military families, or they’d grown up in families where government service was some sort of a tradition. And we think of the military as totally divorced from the civilian part of government, but I think that there’s a lot of the ethos that’s not quite the same, but the same spirit.

The level of satisfaction that, I think, government workers experience is different than most careers. You think of government bureaucrats as being so gray, but what I experienced as I talked to these people were people who couldn’t wait to go into the office in the morning and people who generally thought that they were doing something transcendently important.

Now, there’s a downside to that, right? If you have all of this power, and you consider yourself on this profound mission, you can become arrogant; you can become abusive. But these were people who love their jobs.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. So that’s not a cliché.

Foer: That’s not a cliché, and I think that that explains a lot of the hurt that they felt when they were kicked to the curb in such an undignified sort of way.

Now, I admit this all sounds kind of gauzy as I’m presenting it, but I think that the gauziness of it was kind of part of the surprise for me in the course of doing this, that I felt like I would be meeting people who were more bitter.

And I was very self-conscious about saying, We’re gonna talk about the end at the end of this conversation, but really, most of the conversation is about what you did. I wanna hear about your job. And I think that there was something almost cathartic for a lot of the people to be able to kind of get past the sad part of the story and to talk about the thing that they were most enthusiastic about.

Elizabeth Poole: I actually think that there’s nothing more patriotic that you can do but to work in public service, whether that’s—truly, I thought I was gonna retire from this job. I thought this was it; I’d found the thing I was gonna do forever.

Rosin: This is Elizabeth Poole, one of the people Frank spoke with.

Poole: I worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Region 5—that’s the Chicago office, the Great Lakes office—and my job was the children’s environmental-health coordinator. I helped people not just at the agency, but our partners across the six states we served, figure out ways to make better decisions on behalf of children.

I’m from Kentucky, grew up in Kentucky, and so I’ve spent a lot of time in coal country. And so seeing the devastation that coal mining can do on Appalachia, that sort of drove me into wanting to work in the environmental field.

The children’s health role was absolutely my dream job. As soon as I found out it even existed at EPA, it was something I knew I wanted to do. We got to help families make better decisions to keep a healthier home. We got to help schools reduce exposures. We got to do really amazing things to help children.

They experience environmental exposures differently, both from a physiological standpoint, but also a behavioral standpoint, and so we need to make sure that we’re being as protective as possible to vulnerable populations.

Rosin: In early 2025, Milwaukee discovered that lead paint had poisoned at least four students in its public schools. Poole was ready to descend with tests and guidance, but the Trump administration forbade her team from working on the crisis, an allegation that the EPA disputes.

In March, she resigned.

Poole: So it truly was my dream job. I had no plans on leaving until the change in administration, when I just knew they weren’t gonna let us do it the right way; they weren’t gonna let us really protect children in a meaningful, scientifically sound way. We could see the writing on the wall coming from miles away.

So my position was not backfilled. I don’t know if it ever will be backfilled. I try not to talk to my former colleagues about what’s going on, because I can’t imagine how stressful it is for them. Russell Vought said he wanted to traumatize the federal workforce. They’re also being traumatized on a daily basis.

Foer: Part of, I think, our cultural inclination as Americans, kind of the innate libertarianism that’s baked into all of us, and the fact that we’ve had kind of distrust of government and the sense of its inefficiency hammered into us for so long, we’re not inclined to think of bureaucrats charitably.

But when you actually think about what they do, and you learn about their jobs, you see that it’s not just an academic exercise. It’s not just a bunch of paper pushers, that there was a reason that Congress decided to create these jobs, that there was some good, some essential service that they were providing.

Rosin: So think back to when you started the project. What did you expect going into it?

Foer: I wanted to get a portrait of the government in its entirety, across hierarchies. But I entered in a way where I was pretty confident—I was like, I am a native Washingtonian. I’ve grown up in the city. I’ve grown up around bureaucrats. I feel like I’ve written about politics for my entire adult career. I felt like I knew what the U.S. government was, and I actually was pretty surprised over the course of doing this that there were parts of the government that I didn’t know existed.

Rosin: So what surprised you going through this?

Foer: I didn’t understand the way in which the government was constantly making investments in human capital. You can’t walk in off the street and know how to do a lot of government jobs, because they’re esoteric or they’re filling a void. And so the government has all of these improvised processes for helping people get better at what they do.

And so, as I was thinking about this, this simple fact kind of dawned on me, that when you’re pushing somebody out of the government, or you’re firing them, or you’re forcing them to retire, you’re not just losing an expert; you’re losing all this investment that the taxpayer had made in the development of that expertise.

Michael Feinberg: The government invested an immense amount of human capital in terms of getting me to the point where I was when I was forced out.

Rosin: This is Michael Feinberg. He worked at the FBI for 16 years.

Feinberg: My job, for the entirety of my career, was to figure out who in the United States was spying on behalf of the People’s Republic of China, and then figure out ways to either stop them from doing it and arresting them and prosecuting them or, more ideally, actually recruiting them to covertly work for the U.S. government while they were still ostensibly in the service of the Chinese.

Rosin:  Feinberg decided to be an FBI agent after he was at his grandfather’s 90th birthday and he overheard him talking to his younger brother.

Feinberg: They were discussing how they enlisted in the military almost immediately after Pearl Harbor, and it caused me to reflect that 9/11 had not really changed my career path at all. And in all candor, I felt a little bit ashamed that I, who had many more advantages than they ever did growing up, did nothing to help the country that made that possible, while they immediately answered a call to service. So shortly after overhearing that conversation, I applied to the FBI.

Rosin: Feinberg joined the FBI, and his career was a perfect example of what Frank discovered about the investment in human capital.

Feinberg:  The mere application process takes 12 to 24 months.

Rosin: Legal training, lessons on how to interrogate people—

Feinberg: —hand-to-hand combat and firearms and tactics.

The bureau sent me to summers of immersion training in Mandarin.

Rosin: He went from speaking not a word of the language to being able to conduct interviews and interrogations.

Feinberg: There is a myth among many people who have not worked for the intelligence community or law-enforcement agencies before that personnel are fungible, that you can easily force somebody out of retirement age and just have them replaced by a new recruit.

In reality, every year that somebody spends in the community, they are providing more value than they did the year beforehand, simply because they have more expertise and better judgment. It’s not just a question of the millions of dollars that the government spends training us. It is, more importantly, a question of what we learn over time that cannot be taught through any manner other than experience.

Rosin: For the government, the investments in Feinberg were paying off. He was on a path to becoming the FBI’s top Chinese-counterintelligence investigator.

He’d already worked on high-profile cases, the biggest one, which you might have heard of, was against the Chinese telecom company Huawei.

Feinberg: One of the real ironies of how my career ended—I was forced out by the second Trump administration when the Huawei indictments were one of their signal accomplishments against the Chinese government during the first Trump administration.

Rosin: The end for Feinberg came on May 31 in a way that’s become a pattern for this administration: a loyalty test.

Feinberg: I received a phone call from my special agent in charge that Dan Bongino had discovered I was friends with Pete Strzok, who was a former FBI official who gained some notoriety for his criticisms of Trump, and it was made clear to me that my career was over. I would not be getting a promotion for which I was being considered. I would, in fact, be getting demoted. And at the very least, I would be investigated over the nature of my friendship.

Not wanting to put my family through the inevitable hell that all that would entail, I made a decision in about 12 hours that the best thing to do was leave of my own accord and walk away with my dignity and not give them the satisfaction of ruining my life.

[Music]

Feinberg: Even now, remembering leaving the FBI has been the defining heartbreak of my life. I loved being of use to my community and country, and I’m forced to re-reconcile myself to the fact that that’s something I’m not allowed to do anymore.

For a public servant who has not just dedicated their life, but often risked that life on behalf of his fellow Americans to have that privilege ripped from him for a petty and political reason is, at times, frankly, too much to bear.

Rosin: After the break, we talk to two more federal workers. One reminds us of why the civil service existed in the first place and the other of the civil service in its heyday.

 John F. Kennedy: (Applause.) We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: After the Civil War, the federal government’s footprint expanded, and the civil service began to change. Some of that was thanks to universities. They were shifting from being more or less finishing schools for aristocrats to places that produced scientists, engineers, and other professionals. And this expertise made its way to D.C.

Foer: We stop hiring friends of the party in power to do the work of government, and we start seeking out people who are actually equipped to do these problems. We get rid of the patronage system.

And the civil service starts to grow, and it starts to hire all these experts, whether they are economists or lawyers or scientists, and they start to do these things that make American life less harmful. They start to make sure that drugs aren’t toxic, that we’re actually measuring things in an accurate sort of way so we can make good predictions about the weather or about the future of the labor market.

And all of these things help America expand as a country and help us become an economic power. We don’t think of the government as a pillar of our national strength, but we were only able to break through in this sort of way that we broke through as a country in the 20th century because we had a government that had capacity and that people trusted. The world likes to deposit its money in the American banking system because they trust the people who regulate that banking system.

Paula Soldner: My name is Paula Soldner. I became a federal employee in 1987 and was that ’til September 30 of 2025.

Rosin: Soldner exemplifies the federal government in its most elemental form. She spent years regulating products that Americans use and consume every day.

Soldner: I was a food inspector and consumer-safety inspector. We inspected the meat and poultry products that you’ll see in the grocery store. I’m also the National Joint Council chairwoman for the union AFGE presently, even though I am retired from the federal sector.

I worked in Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin.

Rosin: When you think of regulations, you think of someone behind a desk, in D.C. But that is the wrong image for Soldner and her work.

Soldner: An inspector has to have a very strong tolerance for blood. You’ve got to be able to have that strong stomach to endure the blood, to endure the guts, all those internal organs that surgeons on a daily basis see.

Whether it is a hot dog, whether it is a bratwurst, whether it’s a summer sausage, the gamut of what happens on a week could go from slaughtering, to deboning the animal, to watching all the processes to get to that final finished product, and that’s where having the knowledge of somebody getting trained that has been around for years, that’s lost. It’s completely lost.

The other experiences of what we, as the veteran inspectors, did is long gone. You can be as book-smart as you want to be until you step into the reality, onto that slaughter floor.

Rosin: In April, Paula accepted the Trump administration’s offer of early retirement. Many of her colleagues did the same.

Soldner: I dread the long-term effects, when there is life that is lost because of food-safety issues that are not getting corrected. I think losing the experience and the training of these inspectors out there is so critical. And now that it is lost, are we ever gonna get it back?

 [Music]

Rosin: Frank, you talked about the early evolution of the federal workforce after the Civil War: turning away from the patronage system, hiring experts, regulating drugs and keeping things safe. So that was the beginning of the modern federal government. What was its heyday? What was the peak of its growth?

Foer: I think that it really starts in the earliest decades of the 20th century, where these concepts are starting to get embedded. And then, of course, it kind of explodes, ultimately, during the wars that we fight, and especially World War II, and then the aftermath of World War II, when we had the Cold War and the extension of a lot of government.

Kennedy: (Applause.) We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.

Rosin: When people think of the federal government at its most ambitious, they often think of the Apollo program.

Eric Green: I remember as a child watching everything unfold on a black-and-white television. It was pretty incredible.

Rosin: This is Eric Green.

Green: I am a physician-scientist who worked at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the U.S. National Institutes of Health for 31 years and even served as the director of the institute for the last 15 years I was there.

Rosin: Green’s work is often referred to as the Human Genome Project.

Green: It’s sort of biology’s equivalent of the moonshot. Instead of putting a person on a moon, what the Human Genome Project did was to read out, for the very first time, the exact order of the building blocks—and there’s 3 billion such building blocks—in all human DNA.

When I get competitive with the moonshot, I sometimes point out that the goal of the Apollo mission and the moonshot was to put a person on the moon. And that’s now been repeated a handful of times—not in the dozens, but a handful of times, we’ve put a person back on the moon. The goal, the signature goal of the Human Genome Project was to read out all the letters in the human genome. That has now been repeated millions and millions of times.

Rosin: The project’s version of the moon landing happened in April 2003, with the first nearly complete sequence declared finished.

Green: When the genome project ended, our institute pivoted to begin to use genomics as part of medicine, basically using genomic information about individual patients to improve their medical management. Genomics has just infused its way into all areas of life sciences, everything from agriculture to ecology to evolutionary studies.

And 22 years ago, there was minimal that we could do in terms of getting insights about a patient’s DNA. And now it’s routine, whether it’s prenatal screening to look for chromosomal and DNA abnormalities in unborn children or in cancer, which is a disease of the genome—the way we deal with cancer now is completely different because of genomics—or with rare genetic diseases. And I just wanna stress that it’s just the earliest days.

The return on investment for the genome project was phenomenal. And I think it continues to be leveraged even up to the present time.

Foer: There was no private-equity, venture-capital firm in the world that was ever gonna put up the $3 billion that was required to do this project that involved cooperation around the world, that was coordinated by the United States but that involved scientists everywhere, in this project that was done “for all mankind,” to use the NASA phrase, and that has all sorts of implications that also require government to open up, to take this $3 billion thing, and then to turn it into something that’s actually—the everyday patient has the ability to access to understand the tumor in their body or to understand the rare disease that their toddler has been afflicted with, and to design therapies that could actually treat these esoteric diseases. That is something only government could do. No private start-up is going to address esoteric diseases. You need the government to unlock that.

Rosin: On March 17, the Trump administration forced Green from his job, the first of five NIH-institute directors it removed.

A Health and Human Services official told The Atlantic that “under a new administration, we have the right to remove individuals who do not align with the agency’s priorities.”

Green: I think of the physicians. I think of the Ph.D. scientists. I think of the technicians, the computer scientists. We did this and my staff who’s still there continue to do this because they really believe in the mission; they believe in public service. But they also, now, have been traumatized by the destructive forces that they’ve witnessed.

[Music]

Green: I worry about, when it comes time to rebuild the NIH or to rebuild the government, will people think twice that it is worth the risk? Because the way people were laid off was not kind and gentle; it was pretty brutal, and it was not done in a fashion where there was any sensitivity associated with it. In fact, I would describe it as cruel. And I worry that the next generation may think twice about wanting to work in the government, for fearful that an administration could come in and be as destructive as this one has been.

[Music]

Rosin: To hear from more federal workers, check out Frank’s article online. It’s called “The Purged.” He talks to civil servants who worked on disaster relief, humanitarian aid, at the IRS, the Centers for Disease Control—so much knowledge and so much experience lost.

 This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and fact-checked by Genevieve Finn. Rob Smierciak engineered and composed original music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.