“What do you do,” asked Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, if<br />you work at a place where the leader “avowedly renounces the work of that agency?”<br />“All of a sudden, you are faced with a real moral dilemma,” continued Mr. Connolly,<br />whose district just outside Washington is home to thousands of federal workers.<br />WASHINGTON — Across the vast federal bureaucracy, Donald J. Trump’s arrival in the White House has spread anxiety, frustration, fear<br />and resistance among many of the two million nonpolitical civil servants who say they work for the public, not a particular president.<br />“People are just wary — is the shark going to come up out of the water?”<br />This article is based on interviews around the country with more than three dozen current<br />and recently departed federal employees from the Internal Revenue Service; the Pentagon; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Justice and Treasury Departments; the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development; and other parts of the government.<br />“There was a group of people who were planning some public display of protest with the purpose of leaving,” a federal employee in Washington said.<br />“It’s almost a sense of dread, as in, what will happen to us,” said Gabrielle Martin, a trial lawyer<br />and 30-year veteran at the Denver office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where colleagues now share daily, grim predictions about the fate of their jobs under Mr. Trump’s leadership.<br />“It’s like the movie music when the shark is coming,” Ms. Martin said, referring to “Jaws,” the 1975 thriller.<br />At the Environmental Protection Agency, a group of scientists strategized this past week<br />about how to slow-walk President Trump’s environmental orders without being fired.
