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At the U.S. Department of Transportation, the policy statements on harassment prevention, whistleblowing, and the advancement of people with disabilities were taken off the wall. A Pride chat in the office Teams software was deleted at the Federal Emergency Management Agency for fear the membership list might fall into the wrong hands and the admin could be targeted. “Everyone’s scared,” said an employee at a Commerce Department agency who, like many government workers, has filled out annual statements attesting to how her work advances diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, or DEIA. Now it feels like those statements could be evidence against her.

On Wednesday, just about everyone who works for the federal government, from NASA to the Department of Justice, got a boilerplate email laying out the changes necessary to comply with the president’s “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” executive order. All DEIA program staff have been ordered onto paid administrative leave, and agencies must submit plans to fire people by the end of the month. Not only was the Trump administration taking steps to end all federal jobs and contracts related to DEIA, but the Office of Personnel Management—a kind of HR department to the U.S. government—had also established a tip line for reporting cases where “coded or imprecise language” had been used to hide those initiatives from Trump’s investigators: DEIAtruth@opm.org.

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“There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information,” the email read. “However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”

So concludes Week 1 of the second Trump term at the federal government, which was plunged into chaos that went far beyond the DEIA witch hunt. Job offers were rescinded; the grant process for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, ground to a halt. The Centers for Disease Control did not update its bird flu tracker, or issue its weekly report, and the Department of Defense social media went dark.

Those were the immediate effects of a blitz of confusing executive orders signed by the president on Monday, which left federal workers wondering how (and where) to do their jobs. One order appeared to direct staffers not to distribute funds that Congress had already allocated in the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Law. Another asked for a list of “probational” employees—recent hires who can be more easily dismissed than more senior staff. A third froze hiring, leaving thousands of would-be workers in limbo. A fourth directs employees to return to the office. A fifth attempted to reclassify hundreds of thousands of civil servants as at-will employees. A sixth attempts to establish a squad of “DOGE” employees under Elon Musk’s control at the top of every agency, with access to all unclassified records. A seventh established the government’s recognition of only male and female gender identity.

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To get a sense of how all these changes are ripping through the nation’s largest workplace, you can visit the r/fednews subreddit, where one of the top posts on Thursday was an image of the band playing at the end of the movie Titanic (spoiler alert), with the caption “Just trying to do an honest day’s work rn like…”

The American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents about 750,000 federal workers, has issued guidance and promised to fight back. “Make no mistake—this action is not about making the federal government run more efficiently but rather is about sowing chaos and targeting a group of patriotic Americans that President Trump openly calls crooked and dishonest,” Everett Kelley, the group’s president, said in a statement. He pointed to Trump Office of Management and Budget nominee Russell Vought’s earlier pledge to put federal employees “in trauma.”

In typical Trump fashion, the orders were at once vague and threatening, with a side of goofery. Was one email address really going to handle the complaints of 2.4 million federal employees reporting on their colleagues, not to mention an equal or greater number of fake reports?

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But the call to rat out colleagues or face consequences was also chilling. “Like something from 1984 ,” one staffer said. Several federal workers told me they had seen people crying at work. Email directives arrived without signatures.

Because the people who work on DEIA jobs and contracts often hail from underrepresented groups themselves, the actions seemed to target some employees more than others—as if Donald Trump had come to drain the swamp not of corruption and self-dealing but of staff members who happen to also be Black, gay, trans, and disabled people.

“Some people took that as, ‘Are people going to be reporting a token hire?’ ” said one Department of Defense staffer, a veteran who works on equal-opportunity employment. “I think it’s meant to make us turn against each other, and create a pathway for folks who are racist, sexist, whatever, to go around reporting employees.”

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Henry Grabar • The DEI Ban Is Working Exactly as Trump Intended