Federal Workers Haunted by Oklahoma City Bombing Fear Trump’s Barbs

The Washington Post

14:08 JST, March 1, 2025

OKLAHOMA CITY – He’d served 24 years in the Army, completing combat tours in Iraq and Syria. Now he solved military tech problems from a civilian Defense Department cubicle in Oklahoma.

“He firmly believes in the mission,” his last performance review noted, “to serve the warfighter.”

Still, Alan refreshed his email inbox, wondering: Am I about to get sacked?

As the U.S. DOGE Service purged thousands of federal workers nationwide, the cybersecurity specialist at Tinker Air Force Base hurried to save copies of his government employment records. It seemed darkly absurd that he’d risked his life for this country, he thought, only to worry that some teenage Elon Musk surrogate might delete his training certificates while dumping him. Colleagues who’d been let go, he’d heard, were locked out of documents they needed for a job search.

“They’re treating us,” he said, “like the bad guys.”

He’d felt villainized enough when President Donald Trump derided those slated for firing as “the deep state,” “corrupt, incompetent or unnecessary” and “deliberately undermining democracy.”

None of his co-workers, he said, deserved those labels. Roughly 42,000 federal workers are employed across this deeply conservative state, mainly here in Oklahoma City. They guide the form-weary at the IRS. They track tornadoes at the National Weather Service. They run air traffic schools for the FAA. They repair KC-135 Stratotankers for the Pentagon.

Many are veterans. Many understand they could earn more in the private sector. Many take pride in serving a community that suffered the deadliest homegrown terrorist attack in American history – one spawned by animosity to government – but managed to rebuild.

Timothy McVeigh had slammed “federal agents” as “the enemy” in a prison letter explaining why he detonated a truck full of explosives outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 Oklahomans and wounding hundreds more. The White House’s tone has registered as alarming to some who remember the 1995 bombing.

“We have a scar in our downtown,” said the city’s Republican mayor, David Holt, “that should serve as a reminder of what occurs when you go down this path of dehumanization.”

Much of today’s anti-government ire is aimed at “DC swamp creatures,” as some DOGE fans have disparaged them, but most of the federal workforce is scattered around the United States. Defense and FAA employees are “highly valued” pillars of Oklahoma City’s economy, Holt said. They frequent restaurants, go shopping and buy homes. They’ve helped stanch the brain drain plaguing other midsize cities – which makes it all the more concerning, the mayor said, that Trump and Musk don’t seem to grasp their value.

“They’re focused on what should be seen as unquestionable priorities,” Holt said of the city’s federal workers, “the nation’s defense and flight safety.”

Thus far, DOGE has slashed Oklahoma-based jobs at the FAA, IRS and Agriculture Department, union leaders said, though the tally isn’t yet clear. As reports spread this week that civilian Defense Department roles could vanish next, Gov. Kevin Stitt pledged to help those laid off, adding, “That’s part of life.”

Alan, an Oklahoma native in his 40s who describes himself as “politically middle of the road,” spoke on the condition that he be identified by his middle name because he is not authorized to speak to the press and fears retaliation. The Post has reviewed his government and military records to confirm his identity.

“Most of us are on board with trimming the bloat – or getting rid of fraud or waste,” Alan said. “It’s the lack of basic decency that infuriates me. The demonizing.”

Across the street from where the Murrah Building imploded, the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum pairs portraits of the dead with some of their belongings.

There’s Mickey B. Maroney, a 50-year-old Secret Service agent, and his decorative rock that asks, “What Would Jesus Do?”

There’s Norma “Jean” Johnson, the 62-year-old executive secretary for the Defense Investigative Services, and her toy pony. (She’d loved attending her grandson’s horse shows.)

There’s 4-year-old Ashley Megan Eckles, immortalized by her pink dress-up heels, who’d trailed her grandparents into the Social Security office when the bomb exploded.

“These were people just going about their day,” said Kari Watkins, the museum’s executive director – not avatars for the “big bad government.”

Reflecting on the tragedy feels urgent, she said, as fed-bashing has gotten heated. “Time for it to die,” Musk posted on X as his acolytes began shuttering a foreign aid department employing thousands.

A registered Republican, Watkins agrees with pushing to zap fraud and waste. But anti-government sentiments have only spread since the massacre, extremism analysts warn. Gentler dialogue, she felt, could prevent more pain. The carefully nonpartisan Memorial Museum urges guests to remember we’re all human.

Trump and Musk – and anyone else, Watkins stressed – are invited to come take a tour. They might pause at Eckles’s pink heels. They might see a displayed copy of a 1978 novel that imagines self-described patriots, opposed to “corruption,” setting off a bomb in the U.S. Capitol. Excerpts were found in the back of McVeigh’s getaway car. (“They can hide behind the concrete walls and alarm systems of their country estates,” the author wrote of bureaucrats, “but we can still find them and kill them.”)

“We all have a responsibility to be respectful,” Watkins said.

Across town, at a union office neighboring Tinker Air Force Base, Brenda Williams didn’t feel the respect. There she sat behind her wooden desk, sweating the fate of some 18,000 civilian staffers. Her union represented many at Oklahoma’s largest single-site employer.

Lucky for her, she’d retired from the federal government in September after four decades, managing employee payments in her last role for the Defense Department.

Unlucky for her, as a part-time union steward for the American Federation of Government Employees, she was now coaching confused masses bracing for layoffs. The union had heard hundreds were vulnerable at Tinker.

“All this uncertainty,” she said, “is driving people crazy.”

Williams had been home on bed rest, about to give birth to her youngest daughter, when McVeigh’s bomb exploded, shaking her house and cutting her power. These days, she said, even driving by the memorial makes her choke up. Oklahoma City had pulled together after the attack, publicly honoring the victims and their roles in the federal workforce. Nearly 30 years later, she cherishes the memory of that solidarity.

Now clips were everywhere of Musk onstage at a conservative conference, raising a chain saw he declared was “for bureaucracy.”

Down the beige hall at Local 916, past a sign that said, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living,” Rick Stuart’s phone was ringing and ringing.

As union vice president, he was responsible for helping Tinker employees apply for retirement. Some, he observed, were maybe about to “get screwed.”

A Trump voter, Stuart agreed with most of the president’s agenda, especially his calls to secure the southern border. “To me, it came down to ‘bad for the union,’” he explained, “or ‘will we still have a freakin’ country?’”

Shrinking bureaucratic flab was a noble goal, he thought, but the way Trump was going about it?

“Like a bull in a china shop,” he said.

A Tinker civilian staffer himself for 33 years, Stuart had labored as a welder and on plane engines until his body could no longer handle it.

He’d advised folks not to accept Trump’s “fork in the road” resignation deal. Unknowingly, they might have disqualified themselves from retirement benefits, Stuart said, including health insurance coverage.

“I just wish they would …” he said of Trump and Musk, trailing off. “They’ve got some good ideas. But do some research. Follow the law.”

Alan was in high school near Oklahoma City when McVeigh ignited the explosives. The blast killed his guidance counselor’s sister. She’d worked on the third floor of the Murrah building for the Federal Employees Credit Union. More than half its 33 employees died.

“It touched everyone,” he said.

He’d been disturbed then to learn the terrorist was an ex-soldier who’d sent hate mail to the government (“Feel good as you grow fat and rich at my expense”). Military veterans were supposed to be heroes, Alan said. Both of his grandfathers fought in World War II. He wanted to be like them.

During a tour in Syria, his team lost contact with a drone providing surveillance footage. No one could figure out how to fix it – until a federal worker in Maryland remotely stepped in. That was when Alan knew what he wanted to do after departing the armed forces.

Maybe Trump didn’t understand the intricacies of their roles, he said. But taunting government employees in a way that encouraged others to pile on seemed risky. On one hand, he thought, the administration’s conduct could be stoking anti-fed hostility. On the other, a laid-off staffer could go nuts and strike back.

“Are they trying to create the next McVeigh?” Alan wondered aloud.

At Tinker, he was still on probation, a status that has been targeted for firings elsewhere. Leadership advised him to prepare for any outcome, despite a 2024 performance review that praised him as “outstanding.” A court ruling blocking some mass firings didn’t give him much relief. “I’m not confident in the least they’ll comply,” he said of Trump and Musk.

So he kept checking his phone. He got an email from Washington asking, “What did you do last week?” He saw Musk’s warning that “failure to respond will be taken as resignation.” He saw the Defense Department’s conflicting order not to respond. He saw that Trump had posted a mocking meme:

Got done last week:

-Cried about Trump

-Cried about Elon

-Made it into the office for once

Then Alan clocked in for a graveyard shift, ready to serve the warfighter.