Federal Public Service in Peril A Report Card on the Trump Administration’s Management of Our Government The Impact on the Workforce The Impact of Leadership The Impact on Performance A Call to Action Introduction A Workforce Impeded from Serving the Public In 2025, the Trump administration took direct aim at our nation’s professional civil servants through numerous legally contested workforce reductions, haphazard agency restructuring efforts, the unilateral cancellation of government funding without approval from Congress and the weaponization of some federal agencies. This assault on federal civil servants and our national government has resulted in a demoralized and less engaged workforce that has made our country less safe, unhealthier and less prosperous. And when employee engagement suffers, as it has during this past year, our government’s ability to provide essential services to the public declines. Last August, the Office of Personnel Management canceled the administration of its annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, an instrument that has measured organizational performance across four administrations, including the first term of President Donald Trump, and fulfilled a legal requirement that agencies survey their workforces and make the data public. Consequently, government leaders have been lacking an essential tool that ensures they are effectively managing their workforce to meet the needs of the public. As a result of this decision, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service administered its proprietary Public Service Viewpoint Survey to capture the impact of the administration’s actions on government performance and to continue our tradition of holding leaders accountable for improving their workplaces through programming like the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government®. Unfortunately, the data is clear: The Trump administration has received a failing grade on its management of our government from those who serve our country—the federal workforce. Our survey data and accompanying anonymous focus groups with federal employees provide stories and experiences of a workforce that has been systemically harassed as well as impeded from providing essential services to the public during the first year of the second Trump administration. While the results of this survey are not directly comparable with the Office of Personnel Management’s annual FEVS, it contains similar questions and presents the best data source available about the state of federal employee engagement and the impact that it has on essential services for the public. The survey results represent the perspectives of 11,083 employees from across government. To ensure the results are valid and as representative as possible of the opinions of the workforce, we modeled our eligibility requirements and approach to response weighting based on the methodology of the 2024 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. The Impact on the Workforce “I’m a combat veteran and if I had to choose to relive this past year or go back to a combat zone, at this point, I think the combat zone would be a lot easier to deal with…” Government-wide Index Score Government-wide Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Index Score 32.0 out of 100 Employees across government who say their engagement has gotten worse since this time last year 58.2% Employee Engagement and Satisfaction – Large Agency Index Scores Since 2003, we have used our Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Index Score made from three key questions to measure employee engagement across government. Using this index score, the Public Service Viewpoint Survey results reveal deep dissatisfaction and disengagement throughout the federal workforce. While these scores are not directly comparable to the 2024 Index Score, which was generated using the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, together they provide context for the severity of challenges now facing federal workplaces. In keeping with previous FEVS standards, agencies need at least 30 respondents to have scores reported publicly. Through the Public Service Viewpoint Survey, we were able to capture perspectives from a sufficient number of employees at 17 large agencies (at least 15,000 employees) and 13 midsize agencies (1,000 to 14,999 employees). No small agencies (fewer than 1,000 employees) registered enough respondents to have scores reported. Our survey also captured the experiences of employees at agency subcomponents. We have included the unweighted scores in our dashboard for any subcomponents where we have at least 30 respondents. Department of the ArmyAt 48.1 out of 100, the Department of the Army registers the highest score among large government agencies, but nearly half of employees (49.5%) reported having a worse experience compared to 2024. Meanwhile, the workforce registered a score of only 9.1% when asked whether Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s political leadership team generates high levels of motivation in the workforce. The departments of the Air Force, War and Navy also placed higher than in previous Best Places to Work releases in relation to other agencies despite demonstrating relatively low numbers. Department of the TreasuryWith a score of 22.9 out of 100 and with 70.2% of employees saying they are less engaged than last year, the Department of the Treasury represents an agency with heightened challenges. Only 6.6% of the Treasury workforce felt that Secretary Scott Bessent’s political leadership team generates high levels of motivation. These scores likely reflect major reductions in the IRS workforce and cuts to major initiatives to improve customer service and efficiency that may result in the workforce being unprepared to meet the public’s needs during the current tax season. As of February 2025, 31,644 Treasury employees—27.8% of their September 2024 workforce—had been removed or left the agency since President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Department of Homeland SecurityWith a score of 26.1 out of 100, DHS drew low marks from its workforce, despite being central to the Trump administration’s policy goals. Only 8.9% of the DHS workforce felt that former Secretary Kristi Noem’s political leadership team generated high levels of motivation. These scores were collected before the 2026 escalation of DHS immigration forces in Minnesota and elsewhere, which led to a congressional funding impasse and the recent shutdown of the department. As of February 2025, 3,313 DHS employees—1.5% of the department’s September 2024 workforce—were removed or left the agency since Trump’s inauguration. Department of Health and Human ServicesAt a score of 20.4 out of 100, HHS is among the lowest-scoring large agencies, despite having been in the top five agencies in our program since 2016. This comes amid significant upheaval stemming from cuts in funding, programming, mission shifts and reorganizations implemented by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Only 2.6% of HHS employees reported that Kennedy’s political team generated high levels of motivation. It is also one of several science-focused agencies impacted by workforce reductions and reorganizations. As of February 2025, 14,417 HHS employees—15.6% of the department’s September 2024 workforce—had been removed or left the agency since the beginning of Trump’s term. Employee Engagement and Satisfaction – Midsize Agency Index Scores Our survey also demonstrated the experience of employees at midsize agencies (1,000 to 14,999 employees), with focus group participants experiencing the stress and challenges felt across these workplaces. Department of Housing and Urban DevelopmentIndex Score: 18.2 out of 10070.2% say employee engagement is worse. “This whole situation has been so anxiety-inducing. Just going to work every day and not knowing or just feeling like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop or some other executive order to come out that’s gonna affect you.” Department of EducationIndex Score: 17.2 out of 10065.9% say engagement is worse. “There were 247 people [from the Office of Civil Rights] who were illegally riffed…The estimated cost of that decision was between $28 and $38 million. A political appointee was quoted as saying, ‘It’s moot because they’re allowed to work now.’… I’m sure the parents of those students who were impacted don’t feel that the nine-month delay is moot.” Consumer Financial Protection BureauIndex Score: 8.1 out of 10085.1% say engagement is worse. “Right around a year ago, all of our work was ordered to be stopped…We’ve done virtually no work helping consumers.” “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.” Russel Vought, Office of Management and Budget director The Impact of Leadership Over the years the Best Places to Work program has identified leadership as one of the biggest drivers of engagement and performance. When employees view their leadership favorably, their ability to carry out the work of government follows. Yet our findings demonstrated a political leadership cadre across departments that is actively creating chaos and fear in a way that impedes essential services from reaching the public. Political leaders generate high levels of motivation in the workforce 7.5% agreed Retaliation and Political Coercion When government leaders seek retribution and manipulate civil servants to meet political ends, the result is a government that no longer works for the American public. In 2025, the Trump administration repeatedly sought to weaponize some federal agencies to attack political opponents, to stifle internal dissent or disagreements and to support the president’s personal interests. These brazen actions erode trust in government leaders among employees and the public at large. Our survey demonstrates that federal employees have noticed the potential for this type of manipulation at their agency and do not feel they can report illegal behavior to their leadership without retaliation. When employees were asked if they were concerned about coercion and retribution in the 2024 FEVS, agency leaders scored significantly higher, and these scores have remained mostly consistent across administrations. While the surveys are not directly comparable, together they provide context for these perceptions. During focus groups, employees shared anecdotes about the failures of the reporting process at their agencies. Our analysis of the survey shows that scores for the two questions regarding coercion and retaliation were among the biggest drivers of overall employee engagement and satisfaction. Consequently, if agency leadership can successfully overcome these deficits, it is reasonable to expect increased workplace morale and performance will follow. “I can tell you actively nothing happens [when incidents are reported]. The management above is too scared to do anything. And I mean raise it up, say anything about the incident, have a conference to air out the issue. It’s truly a dead silence, full stop. No one’s going to do anything. And that’s on low-level stuff. On high-level stuff, you might as well be talking to a brick wall for all the answer or response you’re going to get.” – Customs and Border Protection employee “I’m in a union where our union president went and gave an interview the day after the shutdown started and was immediately served termination paperwork. So, I have no confidence in the legal reporting and the mechanisms at [the agency] to act in the best interests of the law.” – U.S. Department Agriculture employee “A lot of people are scared to push back because they’re afraid that if they push back now, they’re going to be retaliated against and possibly lose their job.” – U.S. Patent and Trademark Office employee Political Leaders Over the last year, Trump administration officials have demonstrated how poor leadership impacts organizational health and outcomes for the public. To better understand how directly their choices are impacting the workforce in carrying out its responsibilities, our survey asked similar questions about perceptions of political leaders that have been appointed by the president as well as members of the career Senior Executive Service, whose tenures span across administrations. Explore the chart below to compare perceptions between the leadership types. While similar questions related to perceptions of “senior leaders” were included in the 2024 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, those results are not directly comparable to the 2025 PSVS. We have included them solely to provide historical context from the last time leadership perceptions were collected through the FEVS. Department of Health and Human ServicesOf all large agencies we obtained a representative sample for, perceptions of political leaders were lowest at the Department of Health and Human Services. Only 2.6% of employees felt that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team motivated the workforce, 2.8% said they were trusted, and 4.2% felt they maintain high standards of integrity. Political appointees set the strategic vision for the agency, steer employees to accomplish the mission and are crucial for leading their departments through emergencies. However, our discussions with federal employees demonstrated a common theme in which politically appointed leadership teams created expectations that they must approve of all decisions but then made themselves unavailable to do so. This issue is compounded by findings that the pace of nominations is declining as withdrawal rates reach unprecedented levels and key positions remain vacant without pending nominees, leaving a leadership vacuum. During our discussions with federal employees, they also shared multiple examples of how decisions made publicly and privately by their political leaders impacted trust in their judgment to serve the American public. “This administration talks about how they revere our military… Navy Federal Credit Union had agreed to pay $95 million to service members that they serviced with illegal surprise overdraft fees. That [lawsuit] was dropped, so none of those servicemen will see any of that $95 million.” – Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employee “I’m wholeheartedly not in agreement with some of the things that have happened in Minneapolis. When you are in an agency where people have a public-facing job that doesn’t go well, it affects everyone. So the whole world is talking about how these horrible things that ICE and CBP are doing, but they forget some of us have nothing to do with that.” – Customs and Border Protection employee “I understand that there is policy and there’s a strategic vision. But, if you’re making us go through [thousands of] applications to look for the bad words you don’t like, it is taking lots of time away from us doing other work. It’s taking my program staff away from monitoring their grantees… This amount of micromanaging, I don’t believe it’s helping the public. I think what it’s doing is making us public health professionals who are working in the government second-guess everything we do, wasting time, money, energy and leading to burnout. And really, we cannot innovate. We have to figure out, you know, what word we can write instead of “cultural,” so that they’re not mad at us.” – Department of Health and Human Services employee “When our first shutdown happened, we were putting an out-of-office message on our [agency] emails. A couple of days after, our out-of-office messages got changed to provide some political rhetoric that was not in our own words…It really impacted my feelings towards our political leaders. [They were] violating our First Amendment right of our speech… and so now I don’t trust them. I don’t trust any of them.” – Department of Education employee Career Leaders While career leaders obtained higher scores than political appointees, the workforce’s perception of their performance remains low. The data demonstrates a Senior Executive Service that is struggling to connect with the workforce, provide clarity during this period of change and adequately gain the trust needed to lead. During focus groups, some federal employees cited examples of career leaders making strategic decisions to support and protect their employees, while others shared that their career SES were often detached and either unable or unwilling to communicate to staff about changes in the workplace. Career leaders can fill a major gap in management expertise across federal agencies. While employees shared examples of some who are meeting the moment, all too frequently that deficit remains. Department of Homeland SecurityOf all agencies we obtained a representative sample for, perceptions of career leaders were among the lowest at the Department of Homeland Security. Only 20.3% of employees felt that the career leadership team motivated the workforce, 30.9% said they were trusted and just 29.0% felt they maintained high standards of integrity. “I had a [career leader] who was having a town hall with staff. While [the leader] was giving us as much information as [they] possibly could, [they were] crying. It was emotional, but we at least felt like somebody was trying to tell us something.” – State Department employee “[Career leaders] serve as a buffer between the turbulence and where you’re at. They’re not siding with the political realm, they’re just okay… [They] try to support us and mitigate out some of the garbage. I think if managers can do that at the lower levels and bring some stability to the workforce, I think that can go a long way.” – Internal Revenue Service employee “I feel like career leadership’s hit or miss. Some of them are making do with what they can do and are doing okay. Some of them are just throwing their head in the sand and thinking that they can just ride it out. Some are joining into the punishment.” – Internal Revenue Service employee “I’d credit our career leadership with being very creative and flexible in recognizing performance. Over the past couple years, we’ve had no budget for financial performance awards or merit pay increases, so they have used [mechanisms like] division-wide emails giving shout-outs for accomplishments of employees and liberal use of time-off awards. So, I feel like they’re trying to find ways of still recognizing people despite a very bad budget situation.” – Securities and Exchange Commission employee “The avoidance of responsibility [by career leaders], or to raise your head, is leading to them losing people. And we’ve now hit the point after a year where they’ve lost so many people, where suddenly performance metrics look really bad. You just needed to support people before they left.” – Customs and Border Protection employee The Impact on Performance Over the course of the year, Trump administration officials have justified the sweeping changes and disruption at federal agencies as necessary for the government to become more efficient. Government services have fallen short of their intended outcomes across administrations in many cases due to ineffective policies, poor management practices and antiquated human capital systems. There is no doubt that reforms are needed for the federal government to better service the public. To measure the impact of the Trump administration’s intended reform goals, our survey asked employees how their work unit’s performance has changed during the last year. What we found is that efforts by the Trump administration to create a more efficient government have in fact yielded federal agencies that are notably worse at serving the public, according to the very people employed by them. When respondents were asked, “Compared to this time last year, how would you describe your work unit’s current performance,” 39.6% said they were worse at fulfilling stakeholder needs, 36.5% said that they were worse as delivering quality services and 36% said they were worse as meeting deadlines. These negative perceptions of performance captured by employees strongly suggest that the administration’s chaotic management choices are not only impacting workforce morale, but are also frequently making federal agencies less capable of providing essential services for the public. The American public is right to expect more from their government but the administration’s scores on these data points suggest a year that has been wasted in pursuing improvement. RELATED RESOURCE THE COST TO YOUR COMMUNITY The Cost to Your Community tracker is an interactive storytelling tool showing the impact of the Trump administration’s federal cuts nationwide, demonstrating why the government and public servants matter. View the map An Assault on Science Delivery Among the agencies we collected data for, employees in STEMM-related agencies consistently demonstrated the biggest disruptions in agency performance despite being involved in some of the most drastic restructuring efforts across agencies. This represents a troubling trend due to their essential roles in public health, the environment, agriculture, technological growth and public land management. Such examples include agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services, in which 57.8% of the workforce felt their work units were worse at meeting stakeholder demands. This should be of little surprise due to the significant disruptions the department has experienced including at the National Institutes of Health, where cuts have led to hundreds of clinical trials being terminated, impacting research on cancer, infectious diseases, mental health and many other public health challenges. The Department of the Interior experienced some of the largest drops in performance last year among any large agency. In addition to over 60% of the staff reporting that they felt their work units were worse at meeting stakeholder needs, just 53.3% felt that their units were better at meeting important deadlines and 52.7% said their units had improved at delivering quality services. As much as 16.8% of the workforce at the Interior Department was impacted by job reductions and voluntary resignations during the last year, as indicated by our Federal Harms Tracker. Some of the departments’ public-facing bureaus include the National Park Service, which had parks report staffing shortages that required scaling back visitor and emergency services as well as a decrease in revenue due to uncollected fees, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had half of its regional leadership positions vacant or filled by acting directors as of June of 2025 along with other critical program staff. Finally, the data also demonstrates a federal government that is less capable of predicting and responding to extreme weather events. This is evidenced by over 50% of employees at the Department of Commerce feeling they are now worse at providing quality services. This is likely in part due to the reductions in force among mission-critical staff at the Department of Commerce’s National Weather Service, which experienced vacancies of meteorologists and other technical staff in late 2025 well above levels seen in previous years. These results again indicate that the upheavals, reductions in staffing, and reorganizations felt across departments have had very little, if any, benefit to the public. Agency Performance Profiles Federal employees play an essential role in the safety, well-being and livelihoods of Americans. When political leaders attack their employees, create unnecessary burdens to their service and disregard their expertise, service delivery to the public inevitably suffers. To further demonstrate how this has occurred, we held specific focus groups with key departments whose services have been increasingly in the public eye during the last year. See how agency leadership has impact organizational performance in the expandable menus below: The Internal Revenue ServiceThe IRS has long struggled with employee morale due to staffing shortages, high attrition and a complicated tax code. However, decisions over the past year that further reduced the workforce by over 20,000 employees without creating clear strategies for better supporting taxpayers have exacerbated these challenges. Employees in our focus groups highlighted the themes to the left. Expand each one to read quotes. Political leaders have not demonstrated a commitment to improving IRS operations. “The issue is that there doesn’t seem to be an effort among the political leadership to even understand what we do… We saw that with the way the deferred resignation was done. It was kind of just whoever takes it, takes it, we don’t care. You see critical functions getting undermined by that because you lose people, you lose the experience… You lose regional coverages in some cases.” “[Leadership] has not done anything to improve performance. They are too busy dealing with all the unnecessary changes imposed on the component. They’ve moved the goal post as far as what is expected though.” “I mostly work on some of the largest cases. They’re pretty enormous dollar amounts involved and the way that things get triaged is that they get sent to appeals as a way to try to resolve them quickly which often involves the government receiving less revenue than it might have had the case been worked on for longer.” A lack of communication and direction create chaos and poor outcomes for taxpayers. “[The executives of the organization] generally don’t even communicate with employees, so… basically the employees are winging it.” “The workload has quadrupled because you now have more taxpayers calling me because they’re not getting the answers that they normally will get within that reasonable timeframe…We’re winging it because we get no communication.” “Most of the stuff that has caused staff to be lost is coming from people who really have no sense of what anybody does or why it’s useful to them and their priorities.” Political leaders create a culture of fear that motivates high performing staff to resign. “[Working at the IRS is] like the axiom, ‘The beatings will continue until morale improves.’” “From political leadership, their methodology of encouragement, right now, seems to be, we abuse people to get what we want. The net effect ultimately leads to a workforce that’s anxious, depressed, deflated and just mailing it in.” “I’ll be honest, [at the] political level, I have minimal confidence that if we reported anything, any misbehavior, that it would be taken care of. In fact, quite honestly, I would fear retribution if we reported an ethical violation of a political level person in the IRS. I would do it anonymously. I’d probably do it through the union. I would not do it through the normal channels.” Department of Health and Human ServicesBefore 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services had a culture of engaging and developing employees across multiple administrations. Now, focus group participants described a culture that has shifted away from incentivizing innovative thinking in the workplace to one in which political leaders make decisions unilaterally without first seeking internal subject matter expertise. Employees in our focus groups highlighted the themes to the left. Expand each one to read quotes. Micromanagement by political leadership is impacting performance for the public. “Persons that want little government intervention are micromanaging us and it’s not really doing much else to make things better. If anything, it feels like a torture test and it’s extremely frustrating.” “This amount of micromanaging is not helping the public. It’s making us second guess everything we do, wasting time, money and energy and leading to burn out. We can’t innovate. We cannot think about any other things… [other than] figure out what word we can write so [the administration] is not mad at us.” Recent staff reductions have led to a loss of institutional and subject matter knowledge. “It’s important for us to continue with the historical knowledge and the documentation of what is done. The biggest fear we have is that over the next three years, all of this will be lost by attrition or retribution, and it will take decades to recover. It’s our jobs to keep supporting the mission and trying to root out the problems inhibiting the mission and get around them to continue making it work.” “We are doing this job because we believe in protecting people around us and people we don’t know. We believe in the mission. And historical knowledge is really important. With the atmosphere that we’ve experienced over the last year, we’ve lost some of that. So, any continuity in information is crucial for supporting the mission. [So we] stick it out as long as we can so that we can hopefully get into a more stable position and we can move forward on the mission instead of thinking about who’s leaving, who’s coming, and the change of plans every couple of weeks.” Leadership has demonstrated a complete disregard for understanding and carrying out HHS’s mission to keep the country healthy. “Culling communications expertise from our office has hamstrung us from working closely and transparently with the industry. It’s a management decision that has really harmed our ability to improve health outcomes.” “We are all here because we are mission-minded and want to achieve the goal of what we do in respect to our positions. The senior leadership installed is not of that mindset. They don’t have the knowledge of the mission. They are not vested in the goals, they’re more vested in the politics of what’s going on.” “I mean, it’s just after seeing how this has played out for over a year that, you know… DOGE came in and broke everything. Nobody knew what they were doing, what they were breaking, if it worked or didn’t work. They just broke stuff, and then…you know, these [political leaders] are just standing around and I honestly don’t think that they know or care. This is just a job to them and they have zero respect for what any of us do.” Customs and Border Protection At Customs and Border Protection at the Department of Homeland Security, employees have played a major role this year in implementing the president’s immigration and tariff agendas. Yet our focus group participants described a dysfunctional workplace where management decisions are directly impacting their ability to achieve their roles in that mission. Employees in our focus groups highlighted the themes to the left. Expand each one to read quotes. The fear imposed by senior leadership trickles down to everyday decisions. “I think no one asks for anything because everyone’s afraid of getting on some list that has you done away with, so I think that there’s a lot of trauma and a lot of stress, and I think a lot of people are just not doing anything extra.” “We work for the government where we’ve put our hearts and souls and where many of us used to work 50, 60 hours a week. And now we’re seeing that across the board, there is a lot of fear everywhere that we won’t be able to continue these jobs… You don’t take a job in the government because you just want a government job, you take it because public service is in your soul.” “They just pile on this work… with never a thanks. And then there’s this constant worry in the back of your head, like are we getting fired tomorrow? Are the RIFs coming? What’s this next trauma they’re gonna throw on us? It’s just never-ending and I don’t think it’s good for anyone’s health.” Management policies have directly impacted the workforce’s ability to provide discretionary effort needed to achieve the mission. “We lost so many people that… I mean, there are plenty of people who were actually going the extra mile, the extra work to assist. But there’s a point where once you lose over one-third of your office, the work’s just not getting done no matter how much extra you put in.” “I usually love to volunteer and I did volunteer. So, I was bogged down doing the work of two… with no assistance from other team members. And I’ve worked at the Southern border. I’m in trade collecting the tariff duties, making sure the goods are classified properly, protecting goods and making sure the country is safe and I took pride in that. But right now, it’s almost like my hands are tied and I’m not able to really do my job thoroughly like I would like to because it’s been so much.” “It was so insanely short-sighted to get rid of alternative work schedules that gave the offices, agencies and port offices flexibility when we’ve had a staffing problem since, quite literally, 2003. And it’s not getting better… That was such a clearly infantile and dumb decision.” Political leadership withholds information which impedes career leaders from successfully directing employees. “There used to be a lot more communication. Now everybody seems to think that there’s some kind of hidden thing going on, that there’s secret stuff going on and management knows and isn’t going to tell us.” “It’s just deafening silence because [career leaders] don’t know. They’re terrified of getting ahead of what political leaders will say. But you can actually tell people you don’t know, you don’t have answers. And you can repeat it over and over and over again. That doesn’t actually make you look dumb. I would argue it presents that you are trying to be forthright and answer people’s questions.” Trump Administration Management Priorities Our survey asked employees about two Trump administration management priorities to measure their progress on their own internal goals. In 2025, the Trump administration instructed agency leaders to prioritize internal use of artificial intelligence tools. Despite this focus, employees said that they are mostly unprepared to adopt AI in their workplaces. Separately, the administration stated a goal to update the performance management system to address poor performance. Focus group participants shared with us that recent reductions in force and confusing new performance standards have only made it more complicated for managers to hold low performers accountable while simultaneously impeding them from recognizing high performance. As the chart below shows, employees have not seen notable improvements in federal performance management. Meaningful reforms are needed to create management and oversight systems that hold leaders and employees accountable and create incentives for innovation and results. In terms of knowledge, how prepared is your work unit to use artificial intelligence tools in your work? 32.8% “We are also experiencing significant issues with morale and poor performers. [The agency lost] the track record [of poor performers] because all of that documentation basically… disappeared when individuals retired or took the DRP the last year. So, all the documentation is gone and they’re starting on a fresh slate.” – Army Contracting Command employee “One [Performance Management Appraisal Program element is] very specifically about following President Trump’s orders… We don’t serve at the pleasure of the president. Yes, we need to follow what our leadership sets out and that is indicated by the president, but to have this direct connection to our performance plans and the president’s mandates is not something I have ever seen before. My manager has zero guidance and is trying to figure out with my upper management who also as far as I know has zero guidance from these political leaders as to how to translate this into something that works.” – Department of Health and Human Services employee The sentiments captured by the last quote reflect concerns about ongoing efforts to politicize the federal workforce with emphasis placed on loyalty to the president through the new performance management system. Additional efforts to do so include the newly announced Schedule Policy/Career, a policy that represents an emerging threat to the nonpartisan civil service and our democracy. In February 2026, the Office of Personnel Management issued its final rule on Schedule P/C, a new employment classification that allows the administration to remove job protections and appeal rights for career employees in certain “policy-influencing” positions. This will effectively allow the administration to convert these civil servants into at-will employees and to discipline or fire them for not adhering to the political whims of the administration. Additionally, it would eliminate independent oversight of personnel complaints and whistleblowing, including reviews and appeals by the Office of the Special Counsel and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Conclusion A Call to Action Our findings underscore the urgent need for Congress to require OPM to restore the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and provide the public with transparent data that holds federal leaders accountable for creating workplaces that deliver results. Furthermore, due to the harms inflicted during the last year, new survey instruments must include enhanced processes that ensure the workforce can complete it without fear of retaliation. The American public relies on the federal workforce to serve the country through international conflicts, pandemics, major technology revolutions, recessions and countless other national challenges and emergencies. For over 20 years, our findings have used FEVS data to show that, despite these upheavals, the federal workforce has always remained undeterred in its commitment to serve the country. Yet, their service is perhaps in greater peril today than ever before. Never has a president shown such hostility toward the employees who carry out his agenda and provide for the public that elected him. During focus groups, our participants frequently expressed feeling isolated, disrespected by their leadership and at times disregarded by the public that they serve. Our civil servants are collectively the backbone of a thriving democracy and an effective government. They keep us safe, healthy, improve our infrastructure, maintain public lands, assist veterans and the elderly, and serve in countless other ways. When they are empowered and supported in carrying out their responsibilities, the public directly benefits from this service. It is important to me that my work contributes to the public good 95.4% 2025 PSVS 2024 FEVS: 91.9% My job inspires me 39.6% 2025 PSVS 2024 FEVS: 63.4% Congressional Action Needed Our Public Service Viewpoint Survey reveals a federal workforce that is demoralized, has been impeded from fulfilling its public service mission and undermined by the administration’s political leaders. The American public deserves a federal workforce that can be responsive to the challenges of the day. Unfortunately, over the last year the Trump administration has taken aggressive tactics to demoralize that workforce and impede its service. It is incumbent on Congress to take affirmative steps to advocate for our civil servants and to improve organizational performance for the good of the country. The warning lights are flashing and it’s time for Congress to pursue the following actions to provide greater oversight, worker protections and improve employee engagement: Require OPM to restore the FEVS and make the data publicly available. Encourage agencies to gain a better understanding of staff perceptions through pulse surveys and to take meaningful action to address their feedback. Conduct rigorous congressional oversight of agencies to ensure that workplace challenges are being addressed. Ensure whistleblower protections are adequately implemented that allow staff to confidently report violations of the law they may encounter in their agency without a fear of retribution. Require political leaders to have performance plans that hold them accountable for the outcomes of the agencies they lead. “I really feel like there’s this extra burden on all of us, not only to feed our families, to pay our bills, to drive the mission and to serve the American public, but also it feels like there’s an extra weight on us to hold the line, essentially. Keep things going for as long as we can, hold on and try to have some semblance of a democratic American government that works for the public.” – Department of Health and Human Services employee