Gerald Krygier is cheering from the sidelines as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency takes a chainsaw to government bloat. A secondary teacher from Fort Collins, Colorado, Krygier says the government moves too slowly, employs too many people and squanders his tax dollars. Despite some early missteps, he says, he’s confident Musk can root out wasteful spending and make government more efficient, just like Musk says he did after taking over Twitter, now X. As for the tens of thousands of government employees fired or in limbo, Krygier doesn’t have much sympathy for them. Most jobs come with few protections or guarantees, he says. No one knows that better than Krygier, who was laid off three times in his high-tech career, the first time after 30 years with Hewlett-Packard. So why should federal jobs be any different? “It’s nothing personal,” he said. “It’s just business.” President Donald Trump has spent the first weeks of his second term rallying public support for slashing the federal government and defunding Democrat-backed initiatives, including deep cuts to the United States Agency for International Development and the Department of Education. He and Musk have pitched the mass firings as necessary steps in their battle against an “administrative state” staffed by “unelected bureaucrats” disloyal to Trump and to the American people. Trump told NBC news he feels “very badly” for laid-off workers but “many of them don’t work at all.” “We are trying to make the government do better for the American people and rightsize it,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week. “The government can do a better job for the American people at a better price.” 'People think we’re eating bonbons' Federal workers are bristling at comments from the White House disparaging their contributions. They say they took pay cuts to serve the American people and performed vital functions. Some note they didn’t write policies, they just carried them out. Charlee Chinn, who was laid off as an industrial relations specialist at the Department of Energy, said she made sure taxpayers’ money did not go to waste. “Public service was at the top of my list for why I wanted to work there,” said Chinn, who has been offered reinstatement but has not yet decided if she will take it. “I thought I did that best in the government.” Ben Vizzachero lost the job he loved as a wildlife biologist at the Los Padres National Forest in California to Trump's cuts. As he sat in the gallery this month at the president’s joint address to Congress three rows in front of Musk as a guest of Rep. Jimmy Panetta, a Democrat, he said he felt "a mounting sense of duty" to speak up. Afterward, he confronted Musk: “Mr. Musk, am I waste?” “Who are you?” Musk replied, according to Vizzachero. After explaining what he did for the U.S. Forest Service – helping protect the city of Monterey from wildfires, preserving national treasures like Big Sur and ensuring that everyone had access to public lands – Musk assured him he was not needed, Vizzachero said in an interview with USA TODAY. The American people overwhelmingly support the administration's government cuts, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. "There should be no secret about the fact that this administration is committed to cutting waste, fraud and abuse," Leavitt said in a White House briefing last month. “People think we’re eating bonbons and looking up used cars on the internet,” said Craig McLean, who served during Trump’s first term as acting chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Weather Service and monitors the oceans and atmospheric conditions, and retired in 2021. “I worked for 40 years in the federal government,” McLean said. If he found people who weren’t working like they should have been, “I dealt with them,” McClean said. Stoking resentment of federal workers How did federal workers become the nation’s favorite punching bag? From the conservative grassroots Tea Party to the MAGA movement, Americans have long expressed deep resentment about the power the government has over their daily lives. Anger over federal overreach swelled during the COVID-19 pandemic as mask requirements and vaccine mandates clashed with individual liberties, said Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Trump is stoking that populist stance to root out ideological opposition to his agenda and undercut public employee unions, a key base of political support for Democrats, Kettl said. Support for federal employees has slipped in recent years. A Pew survey in 2022 found confidence in career civil servants has declined; 52% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in these workers, down from 61% in 2018. “Americans have never much liked the idea of being told what they had to do, and Americans have famously never liked the idea of big, centralized power,” Kettl said. Trump isn’t the first president to suspect federal employees of carrying out their own political agenda. Richard Nixon is among the presidents who accused federal employees of sabotaging their initiatives. Though opponents have described Musk’s DOGE as “an unelected shadow government operating beyond the limits of the Constitution and the separation of powers, and doing so with no accountability,” in reality, government staffers engineered a “hostile takeover of the federal government,” said Mitchell Scacchi, the strategic research manager for the separation of powers at the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation. America's war on 'unelected bureaucrats' America has a long history of tackling bureaucracy and vilifying federal employees, according to Landon R. Y. Storrs, a University of Iowa history professor and author of “The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left.” The federal civil service was staffed by supporters of the president and his political party until the patronage system was reformed in the 1880s to reward positions based on merit and skills. Decades later during the wave of "Red Scare" anti-communism that swept the nation after the Second World War, civil servants suspected of being communist spies who had infiltrated the government were subjected to “loyalty check” reviews. "And that is what is very similar with the 1950s and now: There is just this sort of disgust with the public sector − that it's uncompetitive, it's losers, it's parasites, it's people living off of the taxpayers, people who wouldn't have made it in the real world," Storrs said. Disapproval of this workforce only grew with the size and influence of the government. In his inaugural address in 1981, Republican President Ronald Reagan blamed the nation’s economic decline on the “unnecessary and excessive growth of government” and declared that “government is not a solution to our problem.” One of the most popular lines of his presidency was: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” After winning the presidency in 1992, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, proclaimed the “era of big government is over” to mute support for Reform Party candidate Ross Perot, who campaigned on eliminating the federal budget deficit and won almost 19% of the vote. Clinton’s front man in reinventing government was Vice President Al Gore, who demonstrated the need to slash government waste in September 1993 by reading page after page of safety requirements for ashtrays purchased by the federal government – they could not shatter into more than 35 pieces – on "Late Night with David Letterman." Then he and Letterman donned safety goggles and took turns smashing ashtrays with a hammer on a maple plank (per government instructions). Over time, federal employees and their civil service perks have come to personify taxpayer frustration with government waste and excess. “Federal workers have nearly guaranteed employment, higher salaries, student loan relief, better insurance and a pension,” one person wrote on Reddit. “They also treat the rest of us like peasants.” “This is why (Trump) won the popular mandate and we are all thrilled,” wrote another. 'The reality of these cuts hasn’t sunk in' Administrations from Theodore Roosevelt to Trump have worked to tame the federal government without much success. The government has employed between 1.8 and 2.4 million people over the past 60 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and its share of the civilian workforce has remained largely steady. It’s unclear how much public support the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts have. Thirty percent of U.S. adults said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favored eliminating a large swath of federal jobs, compared with 40% who were “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed, according to a poll in January from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Another 30% had a neutral view. Fifty-five percent of Americans say they fear Trump’s cuts to federal programs will hurt the economy, and just over half say the reductions will hurt their families or local communities, according to a new CNN poll by SSRS. If angry town halls in Republican districts are any indication, mass layoffs could backfire on the Trump administration if Americans have to wait longer at airport security or for IRS refund checks, according to Kettl. “The reality of these cuts hasn’t sunk in for most Americans yet,” he said. Jacob Malcom, who resigned in protest over the Trump firings, says laid-off federal employees kept the nation’s roads and skies safe for travelers, made sure people had clean water to drink and protected threatened or endangered species, and without them, the public will suffer the consequences. “You are not cutting costs. You are cutting investments,” said Malcom, former director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the Department of the Interior. “These are investments in the nation to make everything work better, and that means that everybody who benefits from those investments is going to be losing out.” Itir Cole resigned from her position at the United States Digital Service after the majority of her team was fired and locked out of their computers. For Cole, that meant walking away from her work on a Centers for Disease Control system to track dangerous illnesses and pathogens and prevent their spread. Americans need the talented technologists in the USDS who work on these kinds of hard problems for two-year terms, she said. “Instead we’re telling federal workers: ‘We’re good. We don’t need you anymore.'” “I think it’s a huge miss, and there will be ripple effects of losing these kinds of services and the people who work on them,” she said. “It’s really scary.” So far that has not resonated with her own family, most of whom voted for Trump. Cole says none of them have reached out to check on her since her resignation. This story has been updated to change a headline. Contributing: Dinah Voyles Pulver