Federal employees in Washington, DC, experience a job instability for the first time and the entire city is in a “panic”, according to a report.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) are reducing expenses And the termination of government programs left and right, which leads to dismissals, buyouts and a Shell-Shocked Capitol not even 3 weeks in his second term.
“Washington already feels like a transformed place,” wrote polico senior editor Michael Schaeffer in one Friday column. “And it won’t just come back, even if the crusade ends tomorrow. … something essential in culture has shifted.”
In his play, entitled: “Are we Detroit Now?”: Trump’s Cuts Panic Washington, “Schaeffer made the balance of the sudden fear and fear experienced by government workers who live in one of the richest and most expensive parts of the country .
Almost all USAID employees to be fired: report
USAID was on the chopping block in recent weeks because of the doge effort to reduce government waste. (Getty Images)
“It’s a very difficult time in DC,” said Yesim Sayin, the executive director of the DC Policy Center. “The uncertainties are so great. There is a whole industrial contingent for the federal government that spends money.”
“It is difficult to express how unknown uncertainty at the basic level in Washington is,” said Schaeffer. “The city has always felt like a business city where the company will never go bankrupt. Although most of us do not really work for the government, sustainability is our expectations, and not just in steps of four years. Washington’s essence informs decisions about Buying a house or building a life. “
“It is essentially as if a nuclear bomb falls and destroys all your plans for the future,” he said.
Although Trump’s movements have hit contractors, Schaeffer says that employees in the capitol of the nation experience a “new element for a city built on stability of the government: Economic Paranoia” and “A category Beltway that did not really exist until recently: Waiting to be to be to be to be to be to be to be fired. ”
“For generations, the steadfastness of federal salary and government contracts has defined the lives of Washington, even for the many people who don’t work for Uncle Sam,” Schaeffer wrote. “Now there is a sudden consciousness that those payments may not be so predictable. It is a staggering, dizzying feeling: an industrial city when the industry starts to wiggle.”
Federal Court slows down the buyout -theadline of Trump administration for federal employees
AFT CIO president Liz Shuler speaks during a meeting against the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) outside the US Department of Labor (Love on February 5, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Kena Betancur/UitkijkPress)
With Trump’s mandate that federal employees accept a buy-out or return to work personally, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and two other trade unions a complaint filedsay that the buyout offer is “random and fickle” and that it violates the federal law.
More than 40,000 employees have agreed to the buy -out and on Thursday a federal court pushed the deadline of the administration to accept the buy -out or resign from Thursday to Monday.
While the federal bureaucrats of De Witte Collar were worried that the city will be in Detroit during the collapse of the car industry, Schaeffer spoke with Ron Fournier, a former DC journalist who went back to Motor City, who confirmed the comparisons.
The US Capitol building is surrounded by screens in Washington, DC, on Friday, January 17, 2025. (Fox News Digital)
Fournier predicted that the DC personnel base “will not recover.”
“It’s hard to come back from what you thought was a stable industry, and then you wake up one day and you realize it is not,” Fournier said. “It will always change the way people in your city look at their history and how safe they feel and how comfortable they feel and how optimistic they feel. It is a blow to the psyche that will not recover.”
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