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Deborah Fleischaker worked for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE under President Biden. Fleischaker witnessed the Trump administration make changes to immigration guidelines she worked on. She said she's feels that federal workers are being vilified and finds it sad to watch. This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 52-year-old Deborah Fleischaker, from Washington, D.C. The following has been edited for length and clarity. On election night, I knew I was out of a job. I'd been working for the Department of Homeland Security as a political appointee under the Biden administration. I was hopeful about...

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) claimed Sunday on MSNBC’s “Inside” that “nobody in the civil service can be fired because of political reasons.” Raskin said, “The attack on the FBI is extraordinary because for decades it really has been an apolitical operation. There are Republicans who work there, Independents, Democrats. They’ve served all administrations. and now, just because they were assigned to work on the most massive attack on the U.S. Capitol in American history and to prosecute cop assaulters they’re being fired or they’re being investigated. So there’s this mass purge taking place, obviously, coming from the top. What their...

EPA employees are shuffling to “safer” agencies. An Interior Department worker is putting off buying a new car and poring over Project 2025. And civil servants across the government are worried they might soon get fired. Federal employees throughout the executive branch are panicking at the thought of another Trump administration. Former President Donald Trump has pledged to “demolish the deep state.” His running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, has said Trump ought to fire “every civil servant in the administrative state.” It’s not just campaign-trail bluster. In the waning days of his first administration, Trump sought to make...

A Spanish public servant who skipped work for a decade without anyone noticing spent his free time running a male brothel and drawing erotic comics. Carles Recio, who was paid a €50,000 ($58,000) salary as an archives director in Valencia’s provincial government, would show up to the office every morning at 7:30 a.m. to clock in using the fingerprint scanner before heading home, only returning to the office at 3:30 p.m. to clock out. He kept up the routine for 10 years before colleagues began to raise suspicions. After Spanish newspaper El Mundo broke the story 18 months ago, Recio...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A man with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull, French researchers reported on Thursday. Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue. "He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr. Lionel Feuillet and colleagues at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille wrote in a letter to...

Paul Wolfowitz, Washington's controversial pick to head the World Bank (news - web sites), has pledged to be an "international civil servant" if confirmed in the job and said he would not to use it as a platform to preach democracy. The former ambassador to Indonesia and a key figure in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) said in an interview published in the Jakarta Post newspaper on Monday he would concentrate on poverty reduction with a special focus on Africa. "If I am confirmed I will be an international civil servant. I will be president of...

More than one-third of federal employees say they are thinking about leaving their jobs as the Bush administration considers allowing private industry to bid for more government work, a survey shows. While most federal workers like their jobs and say pay and benefits are OK, 35 percent of respondents said they might leave anyway. Critics of the administration's policy said the workers fear that their jobs won't be around. "Basically, you might like your job but you might not have your job for another year," said Paul Light, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of public service...