Delay, Leak, Disobey: How to Counter Trump 2.0 from Within

Bureaucrats will guard the frontlines in the fight against American authoritarianism.

Fascism doesn’t come for every generation, but it has come for ours. 

This is not a fight on the beaches of Normandy, but in our own country. This article begins a series on what opposing Donald Trump and his movement can look like. I hope you will join me as these progress.

For this article, I want to focus on how everyday Americans in the federal government can stand up to Donald Trump and his riotous misrule. When they entered public service, these patriotic men and women raised their right hand and made the following noble vow: 

“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…” 

A domestic enemy of the Constitution is poised to take the reins of the executive branch, and civil servants will soon be on the front lines opposing Donald Trump’s quest for dictatorial power. In his first term, senior officials – “the adults in the room” – often restrained Trump’s most regressive, undemocratic impulses. Judging from his recently unveiled “most obedient dipshit” personnel strategy, Trump thinks he has learned from his past mistakes. Tom Nichols summarized Trump’s nominees in The Atlantic yesterday: “If you want to assemble the infrastructure of an authoritarian government, this is how you do it.”

Yet his power over the executive branch and its employees is not absolute. Even a would-be American autocrat faces limits – not just constitutional or legal ones, but the practical realities of managing a sprawling government bureaucracy. To foil Trump a second time will take a more subversive and decentralized approach, and it depends in part on the bravery of our nation’s civil servants. 

Well, if you or someone close to you is a federal employee who wants to slow down or prevent the worst of Trump 2.0, this is one way we’ll do it: 

Do not leave. Faced with the might of the United States government aligned against you, you might consider resigning preemptively to avoid the humiliation of inevitable termination. This is counterproductive for at least two reasons: If you leave, you save Trump Administration officials the time and effort of identifying you, which otherwise could have taken months or years. Second, your principled stand would likely only result in your replacement by an unprincipled Trump loyalist. By staying on, you may find yourself helping to implement policies you find hateful, but by refusing to leave, you can ensure that you have some influence on those policies, because then you can...

Delay. Delay. Delay. Waiting out the enemy until he moves on, gives up, or forgets is a time-honored strategy not just among civil servants but also history’s best generals. That email about a proposed rule change to healthcare protections? Bury it in everyone’s inbox by sending it late. A meeting on reviewing the U.S. government’s foreign aid commitments to a region you oversee? Oops, you’ll be out that day! That agency conference your political-appointee boss requested you arrange? Next month didn’t fit everyone’s schedule, so you had to push it to after the new year! Slow-walking is the classic tool in any bureaucrat’s toolbox, and in the next Trump Administration, you can use it in defense of the Constitution.

Be intentionally incompetent. As a career employee, you likely have always had the advantage of knowing your workplace better than your politically appointed overlords. This is perhaps your most potent weapon against Trump. Draft rules unlikely to survive judicial review. Favor lengthy rulemaking or review processes over expedited ones. Complete tasks sequentially rather than in parallel to draw out timelines. Add complexity, stakeholders, and process wherever possible. In short, exploit the knowledge gap you hold over your bosses to diminish, defuse, and defeat their plans.

Leak. Federal employees have the right to report what they believe to be illegal or abusive of authority to their agency’s inspector general (IG) without fear of retaliation. Trump however has singled out IGs for replacement after one played a pivotal role in his first impeachment, so the availability of this option may depend on how politically prominent your agency is. Fortunately, you can anonymously tip prominent news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post, which boast extensive investigative units and employ rigorous safeguards to protect sources’ identities. You can also seek out sympathetic elected officials, such as Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee, whose main function is investigation of the federal government. (If you choose disclosure, be sure that the information is not classified, the unauthorized disclosure of which carries stiff federal penalties.)

Disregard and refuse. When you have exhausted all other options, you may want selectively to resort to riskier behaviors. These include going behind political appointees’ backs to subvert their activities, say by picking up the phone and countermanding their directions. In extreme cases, you may have outright to refuse direct orders to the appointee’s face. Though such actions seem like a fasttrack to termination, you may still be protected by the fact that overwhelmed political appointees might hesitate to go through the onerous process of finding a politically reliable replacement. Remember, the longer you stay in, the harder you make it for Trump to do what he wants.

Know your rights. If the worst happens and your agency moves to terminate you, you can still fight back. There are multiple avenues an employee designated for dismissal can pursue to delay, reduce, or reverse agency penalties against them.¹ The beauty of these options is that they can take months or even years to resolve and may be appealed to higher bodies, further extending the process. All the while, you are collecting a salary and occupying a full-time equivalent (FTE) position that your agency can’t fill until you finally depart. (This is not legal advice. If you find yourself in this situation, please seek a lawyer.)

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As I’ve said before, this is the beginning of the beginning. The struggle against homegrown American fascism – the greatest threat to our constitutional system since the Civil War – will be a generational one. Yet Trump and MAGA can be defeated. By bogging him down in the executive branch, federal workers can help slow his attacks on our rights, our laws, and the Constitution itself. 

This is just one battle in a long fight, and every pro-democracy American must be ready to embrace discomfort.

I look forward to fighting alongside you.

🇺🇸

1. I kind of went down a rabbit hole researching this part, but for the benefit of the curious, it seems your primary options for redress are threefold: An appeal to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), a grievance filing with a federal employees’ union like the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The MSPB is the federal government agency that receives appeals of and reviews terminations of most federal employees. If you are part of the approximately 60% of federal employees who are members of a union, union-driven grievance proceedings have the advantage of being less deferential to termination decisions than the MSPB, with penalties often reduced to suspension. Lastly, if you believe you were discriminated against for whatever reason, you can also file an EEOC complaint.