Asian American Civil Servants: The Impacts of Federal Work Force Cuts

The day that Anna was put on administrative leave, she woke up at 5am to be ready for an early morning call for her job at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Before she left the house, messages from colleagues informing her that they had been RIF’d started flooding her phone. Soon, Anna learned that she too had been RIF’d. While there had been rumors swirling around of layoffs at the FDA the week before, Anna did not expect her job to be among the initial cuts; her role involved statutorily required work. Some offices were advising their employees to take their computers home, anticipating the RIFs. Hers was not one of them.

The news came as a surprise to Anna, and amid much confusion. The way the RIFs were happening were not in accordance with normal procedures. There was no notification to Health and Human Services (the agency that houses the FDA), and leadership wasn’t informed of who was being let go. In her own words, it’s still “chaos all around.” Since she is technically still a federal government employee, she is bound by ethics rules that require her to disclose any job applications or interviews to an ethics office, complicating her ability to find a new position outside the federal government. Nobody at the ethics office is responding to inquiries — she says they too have been let go. “You get no responses and you don’t know what to do.”

Since graduate school, Anna’s entire career has been with the civil service. When Anna explored career opportunities as a graduate student, she began asking about employment at the FDA. She was drawn to the civil service because of the impact she could have as a federal employee there. She reflected that her job was “so interesting,” and that “week to week it’s something new.”

For the past ten years, she’s gotten to work with experts, “really smart people,” to protect and promote the health of the country. But the RIFs have disrupted the agency’s ability to do its work. She estimates that if employees are not reinstated and the cuts are made permanent, it will end up hurting patients and costing the US health care system a lot more money. As a public health expert, she finds it especially distressing. “You see the disasters coming and you can’t do anything about it. Us collectively in the scientific community and government…the powers that be have taken over and there’s very little we can do to stop it. We really need Congress to step in.” She now feels lost and rudderless. For the past four months when the second Trump administration took office, she described a “prolonged trauma that will not end.”

Anna, who asked not to be identified by her real name, is not alone among Asian American civil servants who have been impacted by the RIFs, layoffs, and firings. Phyllis Fong, the inspector general and 22-year veteran of U.S. Department of Agriculture, was fired in late January. We are still in the midst of the Trump administration’s federal work force cuts, which have already effected thousands of federal employees across the United States. Trump is fulfilling the threats laid out in Project 2025 to gut the independent civil service and instead hire political appointees. Lawsuits challenging the legality of these mass firings can help secure wins for federal workers, but they can’t address the ongoing fear and uncertainty. Recent polling suggests that Asian Americans are not on board with mass layoffs.

Federal employees across the country are being impacted, including Asian Americans who make up more than 8% of the federal workforce nationally. No matter how you cut the numbers, Asian Americans are essential to the federal workforce and hold diverse positions within it. From farming, fishing, and forestry to education, from arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media to extraction, Asian Americans are making an impact. The top five occupations among Asian American civil servants at the federal level are:

1) Office and administrative support

2) Military

3) Healthcare practitioners

4) Computer and mathematics

5) Managerial

The federal government cannot afford to lose this talent. This is not limited to the DC metro region. Across the country, Asian Americans are reliant on these jobs. More than 1 in every 10 Asian American workers hold federal jobs in Alaska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Moreover, Asian American civil service employees have worked hard to get to where they are today, and they continue to be relatively underrepresented in leadership roles (compared to their representation in the federal workforce). These problems are not new. A 2008 report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission noted that AAPIs faced challenges in reaching the ranks of senior management and offered recommendations to address issues of discrimination in the federal workforce. For a community that has already faced and overcome inequality in the federal workforce, these mass firings may further erode trust.

One of the many reasons these cuts are deeply problematic is because the federal government has provided a historic and reliable pathway to the middle class for millions of Americans. This is especially true for the Black middle class. Mass firings will harm communities of color, including Asian Americans, threatening the hard-earned gains they’ve won.

And it is already weakening the civil service. Anna, who is applying for jobs in industry but worries about a saturated job market and how tariffs will impact compensation packages, said that her trust in her employer had been broken. “People don’t go into government service to make the big bucks or make a big name. People join the government to make a meaningful contribution in service to the country…the loss in trust and feeling betrayed [by] this administration and the work that we’ve done — it’s offensive.” Despite everything that she’s been through though, she would still go back because “the work is so essential to protecting public health that it warrants withstanding the chaos and surviving until this administration is over.”

For Anna, “everyone who works for the government are very dedicated people and they want to help people. [With government service], it’s common to hear that people work for 40 or 50 years. It’s a testament to the type of people who work there and the value they see in their roles working in government.”

Asian Americans Advancing Justice — AAJC has a mission to advance the civil and human rights of Asian Americans and to build and promote a fair and equitable society for all.