The Censorship Machine: Silencing the National Security Workforce

The math doesn’t lie.

Since January 2025, the Trump administration has driven thousands of national security professionals out of their jobs. Some cuts were targeted: 160 detailees sidelined from the National Security Council in its first week; all six FBI executive assistant directors removed; at least 20 Justice Department prosecutors and staff fired for working for Special Counsel Jack Smith; 100 intelligence officers fired over messages in a National Security Agency group chat. Others gutted entire agencies: more than 1,300 State Department employees cut, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) shut down entirely, its workforce of more than 10,000 reduced to a handful charged with turning off the lights.

Now count the other column—those who spoke on the record, in their own names. A former CIA analyst. A veteran FBI counterintelligence agent. A former deputy assistant secretary of defense. A Justice Department appellate lawyer from the special counsel’s team. A federal prosecutor who quit the day his father-in-law was indicted, and a handful of others.

There is a massive gap between those two numbers. Despite the nonstop news cycle of abuses and scandal, there is precious little dissent, even from the people directly targeted. The silence is not cowardice, but the rational response to a labor market rigged to make speech professionally fatal, financially ruinous, and—in the age of online mobs—physically dangerous.

I can describe this machine because it has taken most of what I had to lose, and I have found one of the few safe harbors built for targeted national security experts—the Lawfare Public Service Fellowship. What follows is a breakdown of the administration’s censorship machine—and how to fight it.

CIA HEADQUARTERS — APRIL 2025

Forty-eight hours after I was purged by the White House, I saw it.

The walls and halls hadn’t changed, but the CIA was unrecognizable. Texts buzzed from National Security Council friends left behind. More firings—another loyalty purge, sweeping up conservative Republicans with decades of service. No one was safe.

Months of attacks and reflexive overcompliance had left scars. You heard the anger in the Starbucks line more than in any staff meeting. Ahead of me, a woman whispered:

“You hear about REDACTED?”

“Suspended,” her friend laughed, bitter. “Recruiting minorities.”

“But he speaks fluent REDACTED. Do those grow on trees?” Then one asked: “What are you going to do?”

“Keep my mouth shut,” came the answer. “I hear Anduril is hiring.”

Three Doors, All Sealed

A civil service officer who opposes a policy or activity they judge illegal, unethical, or against the interest of the U.S. normally has three options: (a) stay and work the problem from within, (b) leave for the private sector, or (c) find a perch in civil society and speak out under an institution’s protection. The administration’s censorship machine works by blocking all three.

To be clear, the First Amendment remains intact. Every word you read in this essay cleared prepublication review by the CIA review board, which redacts only classified information. The censorship described here happens because the author never writes the essay in the first place.

Stay in Government

Public firings of those who resist—and the stripping away of protections that made dissent survivable—have closed the option public servants were once encouraged to take: raising concerns through inspectors general and other internal channels.

From its first days, the administration treated the national security workforce as an enemy within—a “deep state” that needed to be put “in trauma.” It publicly fired senior analysts over inconvenient assessments and stripped the clearance of one of the CIA’s top Russia experts. In its first two months, it fired roughly 25,000 probationary employees. In September 2025, a federal judge found the firings unlawful, called the stated rationale “a sham”—but declined to order anyone rehired. Junior officers learned they can be fired for no reason.

The administration has also punished officers for mere association. Michael Feinberg resigned from the FBI after the deputy director threatened him with demotion and a polygraph over a friendship with a man on an enemies list. Nothing in Feinberg’s own record was ever at issue.

The administration gutted the venues for recourse. The Merit Systems Protection Board took in more than 20,000 appeals in fiscal 2025—four times its normal volume, overwhelming its capacity to adjudicate. The Office of Special Counsel—the agency built to protect whistleblowers—lost its leader to a firing he stopped contesting, and dropped the cases of more than 2,000 fired probationary employees.

For senior officers, the Office of Personnel Management in February finalized “Schedule Policy/Career”—the revived “Schedule F”—stripping adverse-action and appeal rights from positions the president designates as policy-influencing, an estimated 50,000 positions. In June the president placed the first tranche into the new schedule—about 8,000, 97 percent at or above GS-15—in other words, officers senior enough to model acceptable conduct for the workforce.

The silence is now being put in writing. National security employees have always signed nondisclosure agreements covering classified information; in May, the administration proposed the first governmentwide agreement, covering nearly everything any federal employee learns on the job—down to “pre-decisional or deliberative material”—with obligations that do not end with federal service. Under a companion suitability rule, refusing to sign is grounds for removal—and debarment from federal employment for up to three years.

The arithmetic is not hard. The protections are gone, appeal forums are clogged, and the first to speak out will be the first fired.

Exit to the Private Sector

The second exit runs through a labor market the government controls. The Washington region employs about a fifth of the federal workforce and takes in roughly a quarter of federal contracting dollars; when that spigot closes, the job market shuts off with it. Job postings in D.C. fell 17 percent in the administration’s first months, and those competing for what remains are the same civil servants who just left government—more than 148,000 by mid-2025.

The security clearance is a chokepoint—a condition of employment for most national security work outside government—and the administration has established that it can withdraw that access by name and at will. A day-one executive order stripped the clearances of 50 named individuals; a March 2025 memorandum named 15 more, among them a lawyer whose offense was representing whistleblowers. A federal judge ordered that lawyer’s clearance be restored in December 2025, finding that the revocation had “concretely and dramatically” impeded his chosen career. The government’s position on appeal is that courts cannot review a clearance decision at all, whatever the motive. While this lawyer regained his clearance, the appeals could take years, and other lawyers will almost certainly be deterred from risking their livelihoods.

A federal judge ordered that lawyer’s clearance restored in December 2025, finding that the revocation had “concretely and dramatically” impeded his chosen career, and the government complied in January 2026—10 months after the memorandum issued, and only because he was represented by counsel with the means to litigate. Even then the relief is provisional. It rests on a preliminary injunction the government is appealing, on the theory that courts cannot review a clearance decision at all, whatever the motive; the administration has reserved the right to revoke the clearance again on other grounds; and an appeal can take years. This is the case that went well.

Contracting firms that live on federal business have learned to treat those who have been purged as a hiring risk. The CEO of SAIC, a Fortune 500 federal contractor, acknowledged that she feared the White House would hold it against the company if it hired former senior officials. A USAID contractor reportedly posted a job for an attorney to investigate the agency’s former employees for “unauthorized communications with the media.”

In my own case, I spent nine months applying for work without receiving an interview. Those who knew I had been fired from the White House feared the association; those who didn’t know me had no reason to pull my résumé from the pile.

Law firms also learned the lesson. By February 2025, attorneys reported that their firms’ leadership would not represent ousted Justice Department employees, citing corporate clients who might walk. Then came the executive orders threatening law firms, and in response, nine firms, eight of them never named in an order, pledged a combined $940 million in pro bono services to causes the president supports. The bargain proved only a temporary reprieve, and in July the Justice Department subpoenaed the firms anyway, demanding their communications about the deals themselves. The leaders of firms that thought they had settled are again facing coercion by the administration.

Private “investments,” meanwhile, flowed openly in the other direction. Investors poured money into the memecoin the president launched days before his inauguration—the top 220 holders were rewarded with a black-tie dinner with him—while the Trump family’s crypto firm approached startups with “partnerships” requiring them to buy $10 million to $30 million of the family’s coins, and an investment firm helped broker a $750 million deal that enriched the family while its investors lost money. The price of access is obvious.

Join Civil Society

The third exit is closing. National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, issued Sept. 25, 2025, directs the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to ensure that no tax-exempt entity “directly or indirectly” finances “political violence or domestic terrorism,” and to refer any implicated organization and its employees to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. The motives it instructs the government to watch for include “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” labels loose enough to sweep in much of American civil society. The 2026 counterterrorism strategy names “Violent Left-Wing Extremists” as one of three principal terrorist threats and promises to identify their membership.

Almost none of this has been enforced, and no organization’s tax exemption has been revoked. The House Ways and Means Committee asked the IRS to examine eight named groups in October 2025, but no examination has been reported. In June, the Charity and Security Network published a guide to surviving revocation, but the document could cite no actual cutoffs.

The threat alone has chilled the sector, and the institutions that might absorb the displaced are shrinking. An executive order reduced the Wilson Center to its minimum statutory functions. RAND filed notice of 73 layoffs at its Santa Monica headquarters, part of 192 cuts worldwide. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s revenue fell 34 percent in a single year, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies ran a $5.3 million deficit. In February, the Pentagon barred service members from graduate programs at seven think tanks and 15 universities for promoting what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called “wicked ideologies.”

The president himself has joined the effort, threatening the Center for American Progress, a prominent left-leaning think tank, with a $5 billion defamation suit over a report about National Guard deployments. The think tank refused to retract, and any such suit would almost certainly fail—but failure in court is beside the point: The president has underlined the potential cost of critical speech in legal fees and lost donors.

No further order is required. No one has to tell an officer with a mortgage to keep his head down, or instruct a contractor not to hire the woman whose firing trended online, or a foundation not to fund a program that might draw a referral to the Justice Department. Each is behaving rationally. That is the design: Most of them, separately, conclude that this is not the time to say what they know.

Historical Parallels

The obvious comparison to the current situation is the McCarthy era—specifically, two overlapping purges between 1947 and 1957 that ran on the same apparatus. The Red Scare cost roughly 10,000 Americans their jobs, by the historian Ellen Schrecker’s count, while the Lavender Scare took an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 more gay and lesbian federal employees. Each sealed the same three doors now closing again.

Inside government, the mechanism included Truman’s loyalty boards and executive orders that lowered the bar for dismissing employees suspected of communist sympathies. An Eisenhower order added “sexual perversion” (that is, homosexuality) as a threat to national security and grounds for dismissal.

The private exit was sealed the same way: deny security clearances to contractor employees suspected of the same offenses. Frank Kameny, an astronomer fired from the Army Map Service in 1957, was barred from federal service and from the defense industry that employed his profession. Beyond the clearance system, a blacklist—compiled by three former FBI agents—named 151 people in broadcasting, who found themselves unable to work.

Some purged federal workers found safe harbors beyond the clearance system’s reach—at universities, by leaving the country, or by building their own civil society groups, but most vanished quietly rather than name the reason for their firing.

The bill to the country came later. James Thomson, in his 1968 autopsy of the Vietnam War, wrote that the Red Scare had left the State Department’s Far East bureau purged of its best expertise just as the U.S. sank into Vietnam. Vindication took a generation: The Foreign Service honored its purged officers 20 years later, and the government’s apology to Kameny took 52 years.

A government that censors its experts does not stop needing them. It stops hearing them and pays for their silence.

Breaking the Machine

If censorship works by making truth-telling ruinous, lawsuits are not enough. The machine was built to drag litigation past the point where a middle-class civil servant can fight and still support a family. Whistleblowers and the purged need institutions that make truth-telling survivable: an income, health insurance, and a platform for documenting both the injustice and the collateral damage to national security.

One such harbor is the Lawfare Public Service Fellowship, which exists for officers the market will not touch: professionals targeted by name, whose testimony makes them valuable to the public and radioactive to a nervous employer. The formula is simple—give a fired official a paycheck and an editorial home, and the testimony follows. But one fellowship is not a system, and only a few comparable efforts exist. Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Defense and Innovation Fellowship pays former officials to document what the cuts destroyed and to design the rebuilding, and its first cohort spans national security, health, science, and education. The Public Service Alliance provides free resources, discounts to vetted services, and subsidized access to security and data privacy experts for current and former federal employees.

Justice Connection, the network of Justice Department alumni, now runs a support network for the FBI’s exiles. The Foreign Service has the American Foreign Service Association and a USAID alumni association, and the intelligence community has Culper Connect, a network for officers leaving the government. But none of these shelters an officer walked out last month who wants to hold the administration to account. The $940 million that nine law firms pledged to the president’s causes would fund every harbor this essay proposes for a century.

Public service fellowships serve two functions. Today, they keep witnesses on the record: purged public servants who can hold power to account and document the damage to their institutions. For the future, they preserve what the country will need to recover—experts to rebuild, lawyers to reestablish the rule of law, intelligence officers willing to return to service. Those people will be available only if, in the meantime, they can pay their mortgages.

That is the work: to build safe harbors and alter the math that sustains the conspiracy of silence.