It used to be that a government job was the very definition of bland security. Land a role with the feds, and you knew you’d be safe. Your duties wouldn’t be subject to the whims of some capricious new CEO; your benefits were unlikely to suddenly double in price; you wouldn’t get axed when your company was sold to a multinational corporation. Sure, the bureaucratic machine might occasionally lag, you might find yourself tangled in the proverbial red tape, but the private sector’s blithe, cold surprises were nothing you had to fear.

In the space of months, Donald Trump changed all that, destroying the symbolic associations of the civil service along with thousands upon thousands of actual jobs. Trump decimated the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Agency for Global Media, the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Education, among other agencies. In July alone, the government dropped 12,000 employees. As of early August, the Trump administration was paying no fewer than 154,000 people to do nothing, at least until September 30 or December 31, depending on the contract, when the........

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