For more than twenty years, the Office of Personnel Management has fielded an annual, legally mandated survey of federal workers. Its results are used to measure organizational performance across government departments and agencies via questions about morale, merit, training, sense of mission, etc.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Trump administration canceled the 2025 survey. But a version of it ran anyway, fielded by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit focused on improving the civil service. The results, collected from 11,000 workers across the government, are pretty abysmal. The numbers reveal a “layer cake of trauma,” as Max Stier, the nonprofit’s CEO, put it.