'Intention to dismantle': Federal workers fear 'massacre' as Trump plays 'game of chicken' with gov

President Donald Trump is poised to use a government shutdown to conduct mass firings in a push to reshape the government and federal workers are bracing for a massacre, according to The Atlantic.

Far-right Christian nationalist White House Budget Director Russell Vought will do “what DOGE couldn’t do,” one anonymous senior White House official told The Atlantic. “He’s wanted to hurt the bureaucracy; he’s wanted to shrink the bureaucracy. This might be his chance.”

And though "about 275,000 federal workers — more than a tenth of the workforce — will have voluntarily left the civil service by the end of December," a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management told The Atlantic, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) estimates that this "waste, chaos, confusion, and recklessness" of the downsizing has set American taxpayers back an estimated $21 billion.

And those are just out of pocket costs, according to Blumenthal.

"The impact is wide-ranging and pervasive, and it can’t be measured just in dollar terms immediately,” he said.

But more important than dollars and cents, The Atlantic writes, is that "the wave of voluntary departures has acclimatized the public to the idea of dramatically downsizing the civil service."

Following Trump's tapping of on-again, off-again supporter and billionaire Elon Musk to fire thousands of federal employees with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the number of civilian workers went from an estimated 2.4 million to 2.1 million.

Vought, the architect of Project 2025 — the Christian nationalist playbook published by far-right Heritage Foundation — however, wants more federal workers fired, and, in a memo sent out last week, he "instructed federal agencies to prepare for significant “reduction-in-force” notices, or RIFs, to eliminate employees and projects that are not in line with Trump’s priorities," writes The Atlantic.

Some federal workers who were prescient enough to foresee mass firings resigned with full pay and benefits expiring on October 1.

“I read Project 2025 from front to back far more times than I would like to admit to anybody,” one former nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs anonymously told The Atlantic. “I tried to find slivers of silver linings; I tried to find them. And I didn’t. I did not think that this was going to be a regular 12-round fight. I saw this as a massacre.”

Vought’s threat of mass firings, write The Atlantic, "could transform the stakes of a shutdown from a forced paid vacation — Congress has always approved retroactive pay for furloughed employees — to a life-altering event."

Federal workers, according to Abby André, the executive director of the Impact Project, have become an afterthought in the second Trump administration.

“Games of chicken are really common in the lead-up to shutdowns,” she told The Atlantic. “But this administration has demonstrated a willingness to follow through on threats that previous administrations would have thought ill-advised for any number of reasons — chief among them having a functioning federal government.”