Alan Gerard from Balanced Weather – “Over the weekend, there was a lot of talk on social media about the results from the 2025 version of the annual survey of federal employees done by the Partnership for Public Service about their workplace and the quality of services they feel their agency is providing to the public. For the last couple of decades — including during the first Trump Administration — this survey was done in partnership with Office of Management and Budget as part of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS). As a federal employee, I participated in this annual survey, and as a federal supervisor and leader, I utilized the results of this survey with other members of our facility and agency leadership team to try to improve our workplace and services. Last year, the Trump Administration decided to discontinue FEVS — so the Partnership for Public Service was left to conduct the survey on their own, which they did.

I am not going to get into the full details of the survey and its results, but strongly encourage you to read this Substack article from Don Moynihan in which he dives into the findings and implications. The table above gives the high level summary of the results, comparing the average employee “engagement and satisfaction score” (i.e., how employees feel about their job and their efficacy in the role) for major federal agencies. Obviously, the scores are much lower in 2025. I am going to take this a step further as someone who actually had to utilize the results of this survey every year and say that I find these results appalling and, frankly, scary (more on that below). I would not have envisioned it was possible for these scores to dip so low — and to be clear, this survey was conducted after most of the departures due to DOGE cuts, so these are the results from the employees that chose to stay. The results above are essentially from the cabinet level department perspective. NOAA — the agency I obviously focus most on — is a part of the Department of Commerce. Commerce has historically been one of the better scoring entities within the federal government, and indeed you can see its 2024 score was 72.7, in the upper half of scores. NOAA typically has been one of the best entities within Commerce, and its score in 2024 was 77.6. I would say that the drop in the employee index score of Commerce from 72.7 to 24.8 is unbelievable to me — but really, what I mean is that prior to March 2025 it would have been unbelievable to me. Given the stories I hear on an almost daily basis from colleagues still in NOAA about the state of affairs and the trials of being a federal employee, and how the morale of the employees has cratered in the last 12 months, ultimately I am not that surprised. As a reminder, the current leader of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was famously quoted as saying, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.” Clearly, the results of this year’s federal employee survey show that he is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams….”