Trump’s Government Is Built on Secrecy
The ‘flood the zone’ strategy is designed to grab attention. The real work is being done far from public view.
THE PREVAILING WISDOM about Donald Trump’s first two weeks in office is that he is, to borrow a cliché, flooding the zone—releasing a torrent of information that overwhelms even the most seasoned political observer.
The real story of Trump 2.0 is exactly the opposite.
White House operations have so far been defined not by the spotlight they’ve commanded but by the secrecy they’ve imposed. People inside and outside of government are confused about who is staffing—or even leading—agencies. Federal employees have been thrust into a state of paranoia about the status of their jobs. Even lawmakers say they are utterly in the dark, unable to reach contacts at federal agencies to get key information about which parts of the government are functioning and which aren’t.
“There’s no clarity about which federal funds are frozen and which are left untouched,” Rep. Ritchie Torres told The Bulwark in an interview. “I’m not aware of any member of Congress who has been—any Democratic member of Congress—who’s been kept in the loop about the scope of the executive order.”
The crypticity is a stark difference between Trump 1.0—an often unruly, directionless, and very public mess—and Trump 2.0., which presidential aides are determined to make more efficient and consequential. And it has thrown much of Washington, D.C. into chaos, as lawmakers, civil servants, state and local governments, nonprofits, companies, and even foreign governments scramble to figure out just how dramatically our governing institutions are being altered or altogether undone.
Trump’s team entered the White House on January 20 looking to swiftly enact its agenda in two ways: abruptly halting major swaths of government operations and pushing to get federal workers (whom they view as hindrances) to resign. To do both, they centralized operations, often by forcing out preexisting leadership, and kept external communications confined and vague.
The first indication of this approach came in the opening days, when groups that rely on government grants suddenly discovered they could not access portals or contact officials who served as points of contact. Days later, the Office of Management and Budget issued a two-page memo saying that all federal grant funding would be frozen. That memo was subsequently rescinded. But the original executive order putting a pause on various areas of federal spending remains in place. So too has the freeze on external communications.
One official with the group Meals on Wheels, which works to alleviate hunger among seniors, said they were “not hearing anything from our typical contacts within” the Department of Health and Human Services. Asked where they were turning to for guidance, the official replied: “Just the news and the leaked memos.” Another official, who works with the Social Security Administration in an office outside the capital, said their field official “has no idea what is going on” and has received no direct guidance about return-to-work policies despite the White House insistence that every employee head back to the office. A top congressional aide said offices on Capitol Hill were trying to decipher tweets from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt as if they were Indus script.
IT’S NOT UNUSUAL for incoming administrations to terminate certain government functions and replace personnel. But the sheer scope and lack of transparency around the current transition is unprecedented.
Angst, rumor, and innuendo have filled the vacuum left by the absence of government communication. In conversations throughout the week, officials at NGOs and various government agencies shared fears that government websites would be taken offline and critical work would be lost. On Friday afternoon, some of those fears came true: The Department of Agriculture began scrubbing references to climate change from its website. Aides to Elon Musk were reportedly locking employees out of their computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management. The homepage for the Census Bureau went dark for about an hour. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began removing published studies from its website. Each of these happened without public explanation, adding to the sense of opacity around the administration’s operations.
“The question I’ve asked is, are these pages coming down temporarily?” said one advocate in the scientific research community. “Is this a temporary bring-it-down so that you can scrub out DEI [references] and then put it back? Or is this, ‘It’s down and tough shit, deal with it’?”
Inside the civil service, the search for reliable information was no less frantic. Federal employees have congregated on Reddit forums to share guidance they had received and to discuss how individual offices were responding.
One memo sent within the Environmental Protection Agency—and obtained by The Bulwark—identified recipients as newer employees who were likely on a “probationary/trial period” and therefore enjoyed fewer protections. The note appeared designed to strong-arm recipients into taking a “deferred resignation.” And it sparked fear among those recipients that they would be targeted. An official with the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents federal workers, signaled that they, too, were looking for information about the memo and others like it. All they would say is that they had seen the memo “from one agency at least.”
Elsewhere, communications sent to employees were so vague and ominous that employees began to anticipate their arrival (late in the afternoon from an email address they didn’t recognize). There had been two “Fork in the Road” memos from the reportedly Musk-dominated Office of Personnel Management. And on Friday, departments began sending a follow-up note from OPM insisting that the original offer to receive paid leave was “valid, lawful, and will be honored.” The Bulwark was forwarded two such emails—one from the Department of Commerce, the other from the Department of Justice.
The follow-ups have left the impression among some workers that Trump and Musk (who appears to be in charge of much of the purge effort) are not getting the results they want. And, indeed, a number of workers told The Bulwark that the attempt to get them to leave had made them more determined to remain in their jobs.
“Those I have spoken with don’t believe it’s a legit offer,” said one federal government employee, who declined to reveal their name or place of work for fear of retaliation.
But what if the intended result wasn’t just to spark a mass exodus but to create a culture of uncertainty, unrest, and secrecy—not to hollow out the government, but to hamstring it? On that front, some workers said, the new administration was clearly succeeding.
“You don’t trust anyone at work right now. I don’t trust any coworkers and coworkers don’t trust each other. People are deleting files,” said one federal employee. “They are very secretive. It literally feels like they’re finding their allies internally with the career folks and using them to make this new police internally. It’s scary. It’s psychologically torture.”
