Purge the Public Servants

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Kathleen Walters was only 23 days away from qualifying for early retirement at the IRS when she decided to quit, rather than acquiesce to a Trump-administration request that she break the law and compromise millions of people’s privacy. She’s one of hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have left or been fired from their federal-government jobs in the past year. In this episode, host Anne Applebaum speaks with Don Moynihan, an expert in the history of public policy from the University of Michigan. He explains how the destruction of America’s civil service is part of the administration’s greater effort to create a government that derives its power through unprecedented means and fundamentally disrupts democracy as we know it.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Kathleen Walters: I thought I would be at the IRS for six months when I joined, and those six months turned into almost two decades. My name is Kathleen Walters, and I was an executive at the IRS for nearly 20 years, most recently serving as the agency’s chief privacy officer. I’ve kind of worked with every administration all the way back to the early ’90s. No other administration has personally ever asked me to do anything that was illegal, no. No.

Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum. In this new season, I’m asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today’s episode examines the destruction of the civil service: the removal of professionals, and their replacement with loyalists. I’ve seen this kind of transformation before, in other failing democracies. Everyone suffers from the degradation of public services. Government institutions run by lackeys are also more easily manipulated by autocratic leaders, and no longer serve the public interest. Kathleen Walters found herself in the center of this story in 2025.

Walters: So on day one of the second Trump administration, it was clear things were going to be different because of the flurry of executive orders that were issued. I got word that some of our leaders might be negotiating with DHS over a memorandum of understanding—an agreement to share tax data. I was contacted by our acting commissioner, and they wanted to have an agreement signed with DHS to share data on immigrants. Certainly name, address, contact information was high on their list and, really, whatever we could give them. And they wanted to compile it and mix it with the data they received from all the other agencies, and—they didn’t use this term, but it was very clear—create the most updated profile on each of the immigrants. I asked DHS for a sense of volume, and the individual representing DHS stated that he believed it would be about up to 7 million immigrants’ data that they were requesting. That is very, very sensitive data, and we have one of the most complex privacy laws in the federal government. The lawyers determined that we could not give it to them legally. I had decided that I was not going to be able to facilitate something that, based on our attorney’s input, was not lawful. So that weekend, I sent a resignation email to the acting commissioner. The decision to leave the IRS was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and yet the easiest decision. We all have boundaries in life. I had a clear one, and I was committed to it. So that made it easy. On the other hand, I also am the mom to a 9-year-old, who I’m responsible for caring for and paying for. I was 23 days shy of qualifying for early retirement, which would’ve given us some payments monthly and health insurance for life. So I had to tell my daughter what was going on, and I said, you know, We are gonna have to not spend as much money.