LGBTQ Federal Workers Brace for a McCarthyist Purge

When ​​Michael first started working in the Department of the Interior over a decade ago, he hid the fact that he was gay from his coworkers. “It can be an old boy’s club,” explains Michael, who still works in the department and requested to use a pseudonym to protect himself from retaliation. “People who were queer kept it to themselves so as not to rock the boat.” But his agency grew more diverse over the years, and eventually he came out to a small group of coworkers after learning that one was a lesbian. It was important to know he would be accepted and safe, he says, and “to have a few people that I could be myself with.”

Then, during Donald Trump’s first term, Michael remembers a meeting when a seasonal worker came out as transgender and asked the staff to use he/him pronouns. “His voice was cracking, his hands were shaking,” Michael still recalls. It reminded him of his own early days on the job. “I thought, There needs to be a group for community and support. I need to do this.”

So Michael started working with other queer people in his agency to form a monthly group for LGBTQ employees and anyone else who wanted to join. They organized Pride Month events, surveyed members on barriers they were facing in their jobs, and problem-solved with management, like helping get an employee’s official nametag changed when they came out as transgender.

Hundreds of organizations like Michael’s exist throughout the federal government—not just for LGBTQ workers, but also for veterans, Black and Hispanic workers, people with disabilities, and others who share a connection around a fundamental part of their identity. Known as “employee resource groups,” they’ve long been officially recognized and approved by federal agencies; the first federal Pride employee resource group, at the Smithsonian, was founded in 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. During Trump’s first term, leadership urged employees to join them. “Employee Organizations can serve as sounding boards around strategic diversity and inclusion matters,” reads an April 2017 Interior Department bulletin, “and provide a support system that offers employees a sense of community, camaraderie, and connection to the organization.” 

But since returning to power, Trump and his allies have cast these same groups as subversive and even illegal, an example of “radical” and “discriminatory” programs promoting diversity, equality and inclusiveness. On February 5, the Office of Personnel Management—essentially the executive branch’s HR department—issued a memorandum telling agencies to “prohibit” employee resource groups that promote “unlawful DEIA initiatives” or “employee retention agendas based on protected characteristics.” 

The OPM memo is just one of many Trump actions generating fear of a new “Lavender Scare”—a purge that could roll back decades of LGBTQ gains and send those who remain in the government back into the closet. While Trump has appointed a couple of token gay officials—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and special missions envoy Ric Grenell—he’s simultaneously declared war on transgender people, issuing edicts against so-called “gender ideology” and an onslaught of executive orders attempting to impose widespread discrimination against trans people in schools, hospitals, sports, homeless shelters, and prisons.

The new administration’s anti-LGBTQ hostility doesn’t stop at the transgender community. On his second day in office, Trump rescinded a nearly 60-year-old order prohibiting discrimination by federal contractors. His appointees at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have halted that agency’s investigations of anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said it will now allow its agents to conduct surveillance based solely on a target’s gender identity or sexual orientation. And OPM opened a tipline for federal workers to report colleagues who have worked on DEI—a callback to an earlier era when employees were encouraged to report and out their gay coworkers.

In the US Department of Agriculture, multiple people have been asked to report the names of LGBTQ employee resource group leaders to higher-ranking officials, according to interviews with workers and a document reviewed by Mother Jones. In the Interior Department, too, Michael says that an official has informed him that they’ve been asked to produce the names of at least some participants in employee resource groups.

“I never thought my involvement in an after-work group would land me here,” a board member of a USDA queer employee resource group says.

“They’re not coming out and saying, ‘We want to fire the queers,’” Michael says. “They’re not asking people, ‘Are you gay? Are you lesbian?’ They’re asking, ‘Who is participating in DEI?’ But in the end it’s going to have the same effect.”

In interviews with Mother Jones, queer and trans workers who hold wide-ranging roles in the federal government, some with over a decade of public service, say they have been living and working in fear since Trump regained office—afraid of being targeted or even fired for their gender identity, sexual orientation, or past efforts to support other LGBTQ employees. All eight federal workers interviewed for this story requested anonymity to protect themselves or their colleagues from workplace retaliation. 

Transgender workers, in particular, tell Mother Jones they’re afraid of being fired every day simply for being who they are.  “I don’t feel safe in my job,” says a trans woman who has spent over a decade working as a civilian in the Department of Defense. Trump has already issued an executive order declaring her trans counterparts in the military unfit to serve, claiming that being trans “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” Another new Trump order proclaims that the government will no longer recognize people’s gender identity, only their sex, as defined as their reproductive biology.

“It’s a persecution,” the DOD employee says. “The government no longer recognizes my medical condition or acknowledges my existence as a transgender woman.”

Seventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy era—when federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communists—a related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing “sexual perversion” as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the country’s enemies. In what became known as the “Lavender Scare,” at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.

“More people were targeted during that period for being gay or for engaging in same-sex intimacy than were targeted for being communist,” says San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein. The firings rippled out to state and local governments and the private sector, he adds, “accompanied by notions that the gay people were weak, were divisive in workplaces, were not strong representatives of a moral United States.” It’s taken decades since then for LGBTQ people to gain acceptance in public life, including in the federal workforce. Not until the Obama administration was Eisenhower’s executive order formally rescinded. Today, an estimated 314,000 federal employees, USPS workers, and federal contractors are LGBTQ, according to the Williams Institute. Meanwhile, the number Americans who identify as LGBTQ is growing. A new Gallup report found that 9.3 percent of U.S. adults identified as LGBTQ+ in 2024, up from 7.6 percent the previous year.  

Now, the very programs and support groups that have helped queer folks integrate could create risks for their participants. Employee resource groups like Michael’s have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration. 

“We’ve gone dark,” a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. “We have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.”

“I’m scared for the people I’ve been trying to help,” says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. “People came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, we’re all just this big target.”

The requests for names of LGBTQ resource group leaders are taking place against a backdrop of mass firings across the government. Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration, with help from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, have set about terminating vast swathes of the federal workforce—some, because their jobs were centered on DEI, and others simply because they were were new on the job and on probationary status, with fewer protections from being fired.

These efforts have swept up queer and trans employees like Anna, a military veteran working at a national security agency who had recently changed from being a contractor to a full-time employee. When Trump won reelection in November, Anna decided it was time to accelerate her gender transition. She’d started medically transitioning in 2023, but hadn’t yet legally changed her name or the gender marker on her identity and personnel documents.  “When the results of the election came in, I realized I had to step on the gas, make a lot of those changes,” Anna says, “before the chance to be myself was taken away.”

She applied to a court to change her name in her home state and worked with her agency’s HR department to eliminate references to her as male from her personnel records. But she was too late. Her legal name change—a prerequisite for other document changes—wasn’t granted until shortly before Trump’s inauguration. As a result, her HR documents were only partially updated before Trump declared, on his first day in office, that the federal government would only recognize sex based on reproductive biology.

Anna continued reporting to the office, sure she would be fired any day. “It feels, for lack of a better term, like the sword of Damocles is over the top of me,” Anna told me in early February.

But ultimately, Anna—who was still on probationary status, despite her years as a contractor—was caught up in a different purge. One recent afternoon, a director pulled her into a conference room with other workers and informed her she and other probationary employees were being terminated. She returned to her office, shell shocked, to pack a cardboard box and share a final goodbye with stunned colleagues. “It feels like I just got punched in the back of the head,” she told me that evening.

Despite the name change, when she received her termination notice late that night, it addressed her by her dead name. 

When the new administration terminated federal DEI positions and programs on Inauguration Day, employees on DEI teams, or who had previously held those jobs, were swiftly placed on administrative leave and their access cut off to federal computers and systems. Some of those workers have since received notices that they have been officially fired. “They got disappeared,” says a nonbinary USDA worker I’ll call Ryan, who regularly worked with the agency’s DEI team as part of their job responsibilities. “I can’t look up their name in the system. All chats with them have been deleted.”

Late last week, a federal judge in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction blocking the parts of Trumps anti-DEI orders that threatened to cut off “equity-related” federal grants and funding for contractors. Yet the federal employees remain vulnerable—and it has become clear that the Trump administration’s DEI purge is far from over. Documents uncovered by the Washington Post show that DOGE plans to identify and fire workers who do not hold DEI-related jobs but could be “tied to diversity initiatives through unspecified other means,” as the Post put it. Dozens of employees in the Education Department have already been put on administrative leave for attending a DEI training during the first Trump administration, even though participation had, back then, been encouraged. 

“Someone like me? I’m just waiting for them to find me,” says a queer civil engineer, who was previously assigned to work part-time on a program to mitigate anti-LGBTQ discrimination. “It’s only a matter of time. Those of us like me who have done trainings and are out, we’re afraid. It makes it incredibly hard to concentrate and focus at work.”

“The Lavender Scare was done under the guise of loyalty to the government, to protect the government from security breaches,” the engineer adds. “Now, it’s about loyalty to the president.”

Even those who never worked on DEI, or participated in employee resource groups, worry about other ways they could be targeted—for example, through new rules like the January 29 OPM directive requiring that “intimate spaces” be “designated by biological sex and not gender identity.” The trans woman working in the Department of Defense, for instance, says she is determined to continue using the women’s restroom after going through the painstaking process of medical transition—including diagnosis, therapy, testing, and surgery. “I have been dehumanized so much,” she says. “I’m not going to stop using women’s facilities.” But she knows she could be reported and subject to discipline as a result. “That that exposes me to anyone who has a grudge against me or doesn’t support me,” she worries.

Even amid this terror campaign, support continues to exist for queer and trans federal workers—much of it quiet and behind the scenes. Several employees say their managers have privately expressed a desire to protect them; coworkers have been sending sympathetic messages.

And just because employee resource groups are taking down their websites and cancelling meetings doesn’t mean their networks have disappeared. Some groups are organized as nonprofits funded by member dues, which means they exist as separate entities from the government. In private messages and non-work email groups, queer federal employees are continuing to offer solidarity and advice on how to protect themselves. One former resource group leader says she’s been urging employees to download their entire electronic personnel files, track down copies of their degrees and professional licenses, and gather information about the complaint process at their agencies, before their access to computer systems is cut off.

“The other advice is to find people that you can be safe with and build community,” she adds. “As scared as I am to lose my job, I also have a network around me that is feeding me information, and that is helping me be prepared.” 

Thankfully, there is no easy way for the federal government to identify gay and trans workers, according to a federally employed scientist with knowledge of the matter. A few agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—have, in the past, piloted small surveys with questions about LGBTQ status. But by and large, the scientist says, agencies do not keep data on the sexual orientation or transgender status of civil service employees.

Designing systems to collect such data was once the goal of a project, initiated in 2021 under the Biden administration, to analyze barriers faced by LGBTQ workers. But the Office of Personnel Management never finalized guidelines on how agencies should collect the data. To the scientist, that failure, once a source of frustration, is now reason for relief. “Had we been able to successfully have self-disclosed sexual orientation and gender identity in personnel documents,” she adds, “it [still] would take years before LGBTQ populations would willingly self-identify.”

That was the case for Ryan, the nonbinary employee in the USDA. Though they’d been sure of their identity for over a decade, they didn’t share it at work until two years ago, when they moved into a new role with new coworkers and finally decided to add “they/them” to the bottom of their emails. “That was my big ‘ripping the band-aid off,’” they say. “It was scary, but exhilarating.”

Then, at a recent staff meeting, employees were instructed to use a standard email signature that required them to remove their pronouns. Ryan broke down crying in front of their team. “I don’t know how to stop being who I am anymore,” they tell Mother Jones. “I am devastated and barely holding it together most of the time.”

But, Ryan adds, “I’m not quitting. I’m going to make them fire me if they want me to go away.”

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