Trump’s Actions Are Pushing Thousands of Experts to Flee Government

The Washington Post

11:46 JST, May 18, 2025

At the National Institutes of Health, six directors – from institutes focused on infectious disease, child health, nursing research and the human genome – are leaving or being forced out.

At the Federal Aviation Administration, nearly a dozen top leaders, including the chief air traffic officer, are retiring early.

And at the Treasury Department, more than 200 experienced managers and highly skilled technical experts who help run the government’s financial systems chose to accept the Trump administration’s resignation offer earlier this year, according to a staffer and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Across the federal government, a push for early retirement and voluntary separation is fueling a voluntary exodus of experienced, knowledgeable staffers unlike anything in living memory, according to interviews with 18 employees across 10 agencies and records reviewed by The Post. Other leaders with decades of service are being dismissed as the administration eliminates full offices or divisions at a time.

The first resignation offer, sent in January, saw 75,000 workers across government agree to quit and keep drawing pay through September, the administration has said. But a second round, rolling out agency by agency through the spring, is seeing a sustained, swelling uptick that will dwarf the first, potentially climbing into the hundreds of thousands, the employees and the records show.

The Post could not determine the exact number of second-round resignations, which is tightly held within each agency. But the employees and the records suggest that disproportionately older, more senior and experienced employees are heading for the exit – in part because they fear being fired or having their positions reclassified as political, at-will jobs under a new Trump program, federal workers said in interviews. Others are leaving simply because they are tired of the chaos, mismanagement and poor treatment they say they have faced under the new administration.

Jeffrey Grant, a senior official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, left federal service after 42 years in February because he saw the “writing on the wall,” he said in an interview, as he watched the new administration prepare to fire civil servants. Now, he is noticing many talented colleagues follow in his footsteps, he said, including senior CMS staffers who ran core components of the agency’s strategy and operations. CMS administers more than $1 trillion a year in health insurance, covering over 130 million Americans.

“We’re losing some really smart people and really senior people,” Grant said. “Those will be the people that can easily get jobs outside the government … they will disappear, and they may never come back. Maybe they’ll come back under a different administration, but it’s a huge loss for the government.”

The scores of departures will have immediate consequences, government employees said, slowing or halting work such as the Food and Drug Administration’s issuance of food safety warnings and the Treasury Department’s disbursement of payments. Other effects will be felt over coming months and years, employees predicted, as agencies lose people representing decades of institutional knowledge – imperiling the quality of work done and services provided.

Asked for comment, a White House spokesperson referred questions to the Office of Personnel Management. OPM did not respond to emails.

Proponents of downsizing the government say it’s a long overdue chance to thin the ranks of aging, ossified senior management. Some have argued for years that the government is due for a spike in retirements, as waves of baby boomers age out and leave. Avik Roy, a former adviser to leading GOP policymakers and chairman of the right-leaning Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, said he sees both sides of the argument.

Losing people with highly specific knowledge about how agencies work could make government more inefficient, Roy said, counter to the stated goal of billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has been spearheading efforts to reduce spending and staff. The federal government is more complex than Twitter, where Musk slashed staff after buying the company in 2022, Roy said: Federal employees with years of specialized experience may not be as easily replaced as software engineers.

At the same time, he said, the departures could lead to much-needed reforms.

“I’m sure there are some cobwebs being cleared out,” Roy said. “People who are, let’s say, status-quo-biased.”

‘We’re going to lose some knowledge’

High-profile officials are fleeing in bunches across agencies.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, part of the Transportation Department which coordinates responses to gas leaks and chemical spills, lost more than half of its senior executives to the first resignation offer, according to an email obtained by The Post. Departures include the executive director, the deputy chief counsel, the head of the Office of Pipeline Safety, two associate administrators and two top advisers, the email says.

Multiple employees described deep brain drain throughout the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Nearly all of the executive leadership for the chief information officer retired or resigned. The Office of Public and Indian Housing – which oversees public housing and rental assistance programs nationwide – lost its highest-ranking civil servant, two deputy assistant secretaries, a chief strategy officer and multiple directors.

At the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, a small, specialized team focused on autonomous vehicles has lost most of its staff, according to two former agency employees. Comprised mostly of staffers with engineering and technical experience from the private sector, the Office of Automation Safety was dedicated to developing new safety and regulatory standards for self-driving cars – something the new administration has labeled a priority.

In the second-round resignation offer, the FAA is losing not only its chief air traffic officer but its associate administrator for commercial space, his deputy, the director of the audit and evaluation office, the assistant administrator for civil rights and the assistant administrator for finance and management, The Post reported. The Air Traffic Organization, which is responsible for the safety of U.S. airspace as the operational arm of the FAA, is losing the vice presidents and deputy vice presidents of five major programs including mission support, and safety and technical training. The agency is already confronting a series of crises including a fatal January crash at Reagan National Airport, which left 67 dead, and communications outages in recent weeks at Newark Liberty International Airport.

The Internal Revenue Service, meanwhile, has lost senior staff representing hundreds of years of government experience. The agency has gone through four commissioners since the start of the year as well as two chief counsels. The agency’s chief of staff, chief procurement officer, acting chief procurement officer, chief human capital officer, chief transformation and strategy officer and numerous senior advisers have departed.

Contacted for comment, a range of agencies vowed that reductions in staff will not affect their missions or operation.

A Treasury spokeswoman said in a statement that the departures from the IRS will leave the agency with about the same level of staffing it had before President Joe Biden expanded its ranks from 79,431 to 102,309 employees. The infusion of new staff was meant to help cut into the agency’s backlog of tens of millions of unprocessed paper returns, which taxpayer advocates and lawmakers had complained about for years, and collect more tax revenue. The spokeswoman said the vast majority of departures are voluntary and predicted the staff losses will “improve both efficiency and quality of service.”

The FAA said in a statement that it has “a large, professional and resilient workforce” with “a deep reserve of experienced talent.” HUD said “service to the American people will not be impacted,” and that the department is looking at how recent resignations are shaping personnel. NHTSA said it is planning to grow its automation safety office, not shrink it. “Our teams are built to ensure efficiency initiatives will not compromise safety,” the vehicle agency said in a statement.

Still, during a recent town hall, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy acknowledged significant losses, according to a recording obtained by The Post. After an official said about 2,500 employees were taking the second resignation offer, Duffy added that the departures had not fallen evenly across the department.

“We’re going to lose some knowledge, right? We’re going to lose some expertise as we go through this process,” Duffy said. “Hopefully you all will do the best you can, those who are staying, to try to get the best points from those who are leaving.”

The list of vacated jobs can be mind-numbing, federal workers said. It is hard for the public to understand what many government employees did, or why they were crucial, especially if they do not number among the highest-ranking leaders with easy-to-grasp titles like “director” or “administrator.”

Those exiting government, employees said, are people who entered public service right after college and never left. Who spent decades becoming experts in their small slices of America’s sprawling federal bureaucracy. Whose names were never known to more than a handful of colleagues, but who made the government run.

“These are the people who know why things have been done a certain way for years and years and years,” said an employee with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “Not all of this is written down, or able to find. With them gone, we won’t know what the history is, so we’re liable to make mistakes or to do things in an inefficient way.”

One tiny corner of the General Services Administration is losing about a dozen staffers who’ve been there for 20 or 30 years each, in unglamorous roles oiling the gears of the U.S. bureaucracy, said an employee there. Their job titles include a sea of acronyms impenetrable to most people – such as “COOP,” for “Continuity of Operations” – but it all adds up to getting things done, the employee said.

“We’re losing people who know how to navigate bureaucracies and red tape, to make things happen somewhat effectively and efficiently,” the GSA employee said. “They were the doers.”

At the Justice Department, an attorney who joined government in the 1980s is ending her career earlier than planned, said an employee there, depriving the office of an indispensable source of institutional knowledge. Whenever staff encountered an unfamiliar case, she’d say something like: “Oh, I did that 18 years ago,” the employee said. “And then a task that would have taken us three days of work to reinvent the wheel, we’d be able to get done in half the day, because she had seen it before.”

And Treasury is losing a senior staffer who worked for decades on one program centered on one particular country, said an employee there, who spoke on the condition that neither he nor his workplace be named for fear of retaliation. Usually the staffer toiled quietly – but whenever there was some incident or flare-up related to the country this person studied, the employee said, everyone in the office would make a beeline for them.

“We’d be all sitting there, trying to figure this out, and this person would say, ‘Oh, I remember in 2003 we had a similar problem, I’ll find the [records],’” the employee said. “That’s what we’re losing. It will be the difference between reading through legal briefs from a trial and just being able to go straight to the judge.”