‘I Am In Fear’: The Assault on Government is Chilling Federal Employees’ Speech

By Dave Levitan | March 19, 2025 | 2:07pm

Photo by SWinxy/Wikimedia Commons

Trump Administration Federal Employees

‘I Am In Fear’: The Assault on Government is Chilling Federal Employees’ Speech

There are — for the moment — more than two million federal employees spread out across agencies and across the country. It should be an obvious, banal statement to say that they too enjoy the same Constitutional protections surrounding their speech that anybody else does. But when the new administration takes an axe to the entire edifice, and looks for any possible excuse to penalize, persecute, and fire as many of those employees as possible — well, the impact on their speech is clear.

“It’s having a chilling effect,” said one employee inside the National Institutes of Health, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Though they acknowledged that government employees have never had the expectation of privacy on their work computers and phones, “we all feel we are being observed.” Employees have had additional remote monitoring software installed on their devices. “We are concerned that any Teams convos are being recorded or transcribed without our consent.”

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In a time when employees randomly receive questionnaires (mistakenly or otherwise) demanding any connection to or support for “any party that espouses anti-American beliefs,” the fear that public statements critical of the new regime could be used against them is obviously a reasonable one. When right-wing factions put up websites like DEIWatchlist, posting names and photographs of federal employees they claim work on forbidden topics or just “criticized Mr. Trump on social media,” one’s speech cannot really be said to be free.

“A lot of people have scrubbed social media and are no longer posting anything public at all,” said another NIH source, adding that they have done so and haven’t posted much of anything publicly since the inauguration.

“My personal rule is ‘never post’ but these stresses are definitely exacerbating tensions” within their scientific field, said another source at NOAA. They added that while older, longer-tenured scientists have long tried to keep politics out of their work, that isn’t necessarily true anymore. “The younger generation sees that everything’s been politicized anyway and how this administration is acting in bad faith in a way that’s different from even the previous Trump administration, so there’s been a lot more talk about going to protests and calling Congress members, and even unionizing,” they said.

There is also the grim knowledge that the coming Reductions in Force will likely use seniority as part of the firing algorithm, meaning those more junior employees are in the crosshairs. “So even though there’s absolutely fear about retaliation it’s less effective for people who know their days are numbered,” said the source at NOAA. “We’re all very aware that we could be illegally retaliated against but everyone is responding to that in very different ways.”

Obviously, there is bound to be a huge range of opinion across the millions of employees. It is not hard to still find many, many examples of people using real names and identifying themselves as federal employees posting on social media about their predicament and openly criticizing the government — though we won’t link to them here, because, well, one can’t be too careful. But a number of sources Splinter spoke to were worried about their own or their colleagues’ online presence.

“I’m afraid to even like posts on Bluesky sometimes,” said a source inside the Environmental Protection Agency. Another, at NIH, said they have tried to “divorce myself from my job” on social media. “I do worry that folks in the office are too vocal,” they said. “I’m not as vocal as I’d like to be on Bluesky.”

Some feds do have union representation to speak for them, and the largest such union, the American Federation of Government Employees, has been very vocal in its opposition to the relentless targeting and purging of its members. Another union, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees across a number of agencies, hosted a protest rally on Wednesday in Chicago in defense of federal workers; an employee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development was there, though they told Splinter they have declined to publicly speak out because of a fear of retaliation. They did not hold any signs at the rally for the same reason, and have deleted their Facebook and X accounts.

And even the union representation has its issues — one employee who is a union steward said “I already have a target on my back so I try to stay quiet publicly and do the organizing work offline.”

Some employees have gone well beyond staying quiet on social media, worrying not just about the overt monitoring of their devices at the office but much more sinister versions as well. “I have bricked my work phone because I am not sure to what extent they can track me or the microphone is being controlled by someone other than me,” said another source at NIH. “In the before times, I rarely shut down my devices when teleworking. Now I turn off everything when not working lest there be ways they can capture what I say. I keep my computer mic and camera turned off when working as much as possible. I think it’s definitely a concern.”

There are some also worried that any organizing or protest-related activities will set off alarm bells. “I have kept a really low profile and [moved] even my private political chat groups to Signal. I fear that platforms like Messenger and WhatsApp could be easily monitored for content,” said another employee inside HHS. “I am in fear.”

Unfortunately , this is unlikely to end any time soon. The RIF plans that were due from all agencies on March 13 will now start to be implemented, and there is a “phase 2” coming that will stretch the purge late into the year. And what survivors there are afterward, gamely trying to keep the government functional with drastically diminished resources, will then still be at the whims of a capricious and retaliatory administration.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m being crazy,” one source said of their new attention to silence and security, “but it certainly feels like anything is now possible.”