As the United States Agency for International Development remains paralyzed after the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s attempts to murder it, employees cannot access the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington D.C., where the agency was located until earlier this month. The building, a USAID employee tells Mother Jones, is also the only place where they could receive and read classified cables. With their offices now inaccessible, they say, so too are whatever urgent communications that may be piling up behind locked doors and building security.
DOGE’s plans have reportedly been designed to “depress workforce morale and increase attrition.”
“We literally can’t get that info now,” the worker says—let alone get into the building. So, as court battles play out in the wake of a temporary injunction pausing USAID’s dismantling, the agency’s remaining employees have almost nothing they’re physically able to do.
It’s a example of how, in the grander process of trying to reshape the federal government to their liking, Trump, Elon Musk, and his Department of Government Efficiency team have quickly reached a far more achievable goal: making the working lives of federal employees infinitely worse, and thereby suspending crucial functions at their agencies.
At the General Services Administration, where very young DOGE employees installed by Musk have moved in bed pods and taken up long-term residence, an employee dryly tells Mother Jones that “Musk takes on such a new meaning.” (Interestingly, office “sleep pods” are explicitly prohibited under GSA regulations.)
At the same time, GSA employees can no longer access its headquarters by simply presenting their badges, as they have for years. Instead, the employee reports, they are to go through a magnetometer and send possessions through X-rays; with only one lane available, entry will likely be slowed to a crawl, deterring GSA employees from coming in. The GSA employee speculates the change serves two functions: limiting DOGE employees’ direct interactions with staff whose jobs they could help eliminate, while at the same time making it easier to eventually bar workers from the building entirely. “If I were to guess, it’s also to limit access to the building when they lock us out,” the GSA employee says.
At USAID, the worker there said, functions that should have resumed in light of a judicial injunction pausing the agency’s dismantling have not. “The staff are supposed to be reinstated, but some still can’t get into their email,” the worker says. “The rest of us can’t use most of the systems we work in and frankly have no work to do because of the Stop Work Orders. We’re getting paid but just sitting here. Our institutional support contractors are still furloughed. I don’t know if they are getting paid.”
The whole thing, they add, is “incredibly stupid. Every aspect of it.”
Long lines and shut do0rs are’t the only physical change taking place in federal buildings. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, pride flags were removed along with signs that notified employees they could use whatever bathroom fit their gender identity. The bureau’s email system also removed the ability to display pronouns.
In some places, the transformation of office spaces to fit the Trump administration’s new anti-DEIA directives took on an element of farce. At an IRS office outside of D.C., “all the EEOC posters have been removed,” a worker there says, barring one display locked behind glass. “Apparently no one could find the key,” the worker says, “so the entire case was covered in white butcher paper with a sign saying not to tear or remove.”
While the whirlwind of changes have resulted in immaculately bleak visual metaphors, since sending out their first “Fork in the Road” email encouraging federal workers to quit their jobs Musk and DOGE have made it clear that their ultimate goal has been to inflict pain on federal workers. The Washington Post recently reported that officials familiar with DOGE’s plans say that office closures and bans on telework are meant to make workplaces unpleasant to reach and overcrowded so as “to depress workforce morale and increase attrition.”
While government workers and their unions have been fighting back, many federal employees, who are often motivated by a deep belief in their agencies’ missions, say they’re struggling.
“We’re all here for the impact,” the USAID worker said. “And being paid to sit at a laptop knowing I can’t do anything is worse than being fired.”
