How Trump and Musk have shaken the federal workforce

In less than three weeks, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have upended the federal workforce, firing top officials, grinding billion-dollar agencies to a halt and convincing tens of thousands of workers to voluntarily leave their jobs.

In less than three weeks, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have upended the federal workforce, firing top officials, grinding billion-dollar agencies to a halt and convincing tens of thousands of workers to voluntarily leave their jobs. And they say they’re just getting started. The Musk-led hostile takeover of the federal workforce has been applauded by Trump supporters. But it has sparked chaos, fear, anger – and multiple lawsuits – from federal workers targeted by a Trump administration aiming to shrink the federal government and remove any elements Trump and his allies claim are hostile to the president. Some of the most sweeping changes attempted have been stymied by the courts – at least for now. A federal judge paused a Thursday deadline for the so-called buyout offer while more proceedings on the program’s legality played out. That followed earlier federal court rulings halting a sweeping federal spending freeze and limiting Musk allies’ access to a highly sensitive payment system at the Treasury Department. Still, Musk’s moves have come at a dizzying pace, from demanding access to sensitive payment systems and government personal data to the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, where most of the agency’s employees are being placed on leave and ordered to return to the US. The turmoil inside the government through the first 19 days of the Trump presidency has shown how an empowered Musk – who took a sledgehammer to Twitter’s workforce when he bought the social media site – has been able to make unprecedented moves inside the federal bureaucracy. Those who have attempted to resist the hand-picked employees Musk installed at DOGE have been swiftly swept aside.