Survey of 11,000 feds underscores ‘layer cake of trauma’

A new survey of more than 10,000 current federal workers documents the drastic downturn in employees’ engagement and morale in 2025,

Each year, the Partnership for Public Service publishes its Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings, based upon the results of the annual Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey. But last year, the Office of Personnel Management announced it would not conduct the statutorily mandated survey, citing the need to make changes to comply with President Trump’s anti-diversity executive orders.

So last fall the Partnership developed and deployed its own survey, closely modeled after FEVS, called the Public Service Viewpoint Survey. Due to some methodological constraints, including OPM’s removal of data about the demographic makeup of the federal workforce—again due to Trump’s anti-diversity initiatives—and a sample size that is an order of magnitude smaller than the hundreds of thousands who usually answer the FEVS, 2025’s results are not directly comparable to prior years, though CEO Max Stier said 2024’s FEVS data provides “useful context” for how bad things have gotten.

“We have every red light blinking across the federal government,” Stier said. “Morale is as low as imaginable.”

According to the partnership’s data, which was collected last November and December, governmentwide employee engagement sat at 32 out of 100, and 58% of respondents said their engagement had gotten worse since 2024. Just 7.5% of respondents agreed with the notion that political leaders at their agencies generated high levels of motivation for employees. And only 22.5% said they felt confident that they could report a suspected violation of law or regulation without retaliation.

“This workforce has been fundamentally traumatized in the way that this leadership team said that they intended to do at the outset,” Stier said. “That’s not good for anyone. It’s bad for the workforce, it’s fundamentally bad for the American people, and it will lead to us to be less safe, healthy and prosperous as a society. The things that we want and need from government are not what we’ll get.”

While all agencies represented in the survey—17 agencies with at least 15,000 employees and 13 agencies with between 1,000 and 14,999 workers—saw sizeable decreases from their 2024 FEVS scores, some workforces saw even sharper erosion.

The Health and Human Services Department, routinely in the top three large agencies by employee engagement in FEVS, fell to third-last in engagement under the PSVS, at 20.4 out of 100, ahead only of the State Department and Social Security Administration. At HHS, just 2.6% of respondents reported that political leaders there, who have led a broad crackdown on science and vaccines, engendered high motivation in employees.

Stier told reporters Thursday that he has invited OPM officials to meet and go over the data, though the agency has not responded. While he acknowledges the limited sample size of the partnership’s survey compared to FEVS, any limits are OPM’s fault, not the Partnership’s.

“The idea that this is the most disgruntled set of workers can’t be right, because the survey took place after the vast bulk of those who left the federal workforce last year already left,” he said. “The truth of the matter is that we know from focus groups and other things we’ve done that this is consistent with all of the anecdotal information we have gotten. We have talked to thousands of employees through various programming, and the message consistently has been that they are fearful, that they are being mistreated, and all of the facts on the ground suggest that they have been traumatized.”