William Braniff said that with his appointment to the director’s job ending soon, he decided the best thing he could do for the staffers and for the center was to “resign alongside of them, as some agencies and departments have rehired people in mission critical offices once they were made aware of the implications of those terminations.”

“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” he said, adding that the center’s approach “is as effective for preventing school shootings as it is for terrorism prevention.”

In a post on LinkedIn before he resigned, Braniff said grant applications last year increased 82% and 27 states were lined up to work with the center to create plans to address targeted violence and prevent terrorism; 16 states already had plans in place or were creating them.

The employees terminated included former social workers, mental health professionals and state public health officials.

Before the layoffs there had been more than 40 staff members at the center, with most based in Washington, D.C.

The court majority decided "that the application of these factors in this case warrants granting the requested stay." The preliminary injunction is now stayed while litigation continues at the 4th Circuit. The underlying case could make its way back to the Supreme Court

"We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work," the Supreme Court order said. The court also sided with the Trump administration in a different DOGE case, finding that a lower court's discovery order requiring DOGE to provide information about its government cost-cutting operations was too broad (more on that ruling later in this article

data-access ruling was in a case filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Alliance for Retired Americans; and American Federation of Teachers. US District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander previously issued a preliminary injunction, writing that DOGE "is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion." The District of Maryland judge found that plaintiffs are likely to win their case alleging that the government violated the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Today the Court grants "emergency" relief that allows the Social Security Administration (SSA) to hand DOGE staffers the highly sensitive data of millions of Americans. The Government wants to give DOGE unfettered access to this personal, non-anonymized information right now—before the courts have time to assess whether DOGE's access is lawful. So it asks this Court to stay a lower court's decision to place temporary and qualified limits on DOGE's data access while litigation challenging DOGE's authority to access the data is pending. But the Government fails to substantiate its stay request by showing that it or the public will suffer irreparable harm absent this Court's intervention. In essence, the "urgency" underlying the Government's stay application is the mere fact that it cannot be bothered to wait for the litigation process to play out before proceeding as it wishes.

Jackson said the court's emergency-docket practices have become "decoupl[ed] from the traditional harm-reduction justification for equitable stays." In the DOGE case, lower courts are "expeditiously assessing whether federal law permits the SSA to give DOGE staffers unfettered access to Americans' sensitive information," Jackson wrote. The only question before the Supreme Court "is what should happen to all of that data in the meantime," and the government "has not shown that it will suffer any concrete or irreparable harm" if the injunction is enforced while litigation continues, she wrote.

Taylor published a book under the pseudonym “Anonymous,” full of falsehoods and fabricated stories. Taylor disclosed sensitive information obtained through unauthorized methods and betrayed the confidence of those with whom he served. Taylor relied upon various colleagues to facilitate his unethical laundering and release of sensitive government data to advance his false narratives.

Furthermore, the Order calls for a review of Taylor’s activities as a government employee to identify any instances where his conduct appears to have been contrary to suitability standards for federal employees or involved the unauthorized dissemination of classified information.

Somewhere in the world last month, a State Department employee began the routine process of hiring a vendor for an upcoming embassy event — but quickly ran into a problem.

The vendor was refusing to sign paperwork certifying that it did not promote diversity, equity and inclusion, or “DEI,” a new requirement under President Donald Trump’s executive order eradicating DEI from the government. The State employee — who spoke on the condition that neither he nor the location of his embassy be named, for fear of retaliation — sighed.

Then he got busy: The work-around, he knew, would take time. First, he got his ambassador’s signed approval to hire the vendor anyway. Next, he filled out an Office 365 form justifying the expense in 250 words before selecting which “pillar” of necessary spending it fell under, choosing from options including “Safer, Stronger, More Prosperous.” After submitting that to higher-ups and getting their sign-off, he filled out yet another form — this one destined for political appointees back in Washington.

A week later, the vendor was secured. Under any previous administration, it would have taken one day, the employee said.

Similar layers of new red tape are plaguing federal staffers throughout the government under the second Trump administration, stymieing work and delaying simple transactions, according to interviews with more than three dozen federal workers across 19 agencies and records obtained by The Washington Post. Many of the new hurdles, federal workers said, stem from changes imposed by the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, which burst into government promising to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse and trim staff and spending.

The team’s overarching goal was in its name: DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, although it is not part of the Cabinet. But as Musk departed government on Friday, many federal workers said DOGE has in many ways had the opposite effect.

DOGE’s intense scrutiny of federal spending is forcing employees to spend hours justifying even the most basic purchases. New rules mandating review and approval by political appointees are leaving thousands of contracts and projects on ice for months. Large-scale firings spearheaded by DOGE have cut support offices — especially IT shops — that assisted federal workers with issues ranging from glitching computers to broken desk chairs. And the piecemeal reassignment of staff is causing significant lags in work in some agencies, notably Social Security, as inexperienced workers adjust to new roles

Meanwhile, most everyone, across every agency, is dealing with fallout from new policies or executive orders — even as colleagues continue to resign or retire, increasing the workload for those who remain.

“Leadership is overcome with meetings and questions from people on how this will all work. The Human Resource teams have conflicting information, and confusion reigns,” said one Defense Department employee who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. Every day, he said, it feels like “each person still standing is battling a dozen fires.”

Many presidents try to reshape the sprawling federal bureaucracy to achieve their specific policy goals, said George Krause, a University of Georgia professor who studies public administration. Such efforts span Democratic and Republican administrations back to Richard M. Nixon, whose political appointees were known for clashing with career federal executives, Krause said.

But the DOGE-driven efforts appear to be backfiring in ways that other initiatives did not.

“What Musk showed is that you cannot do this without a plan, and if you do it without a plan that respects some of the functions of government that everybody wants, then what’s going to happen is you’ll end up making the government less efficient, and not more efficient,” said Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton administration official.

White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement that, through DOGE, “President Trump is curbing government waste and reforming a system that has long burdened American taxpayers.” He added: “Anyone resistant to these critical reforms has had ample opportunity to step aside, but the work of DOGE will press forward unobstructed.”

The State Department on Saturday shared an emailed statement from a “senior official” it declined to name: “The State Department will never apologize for putting processes in place to ensure taxpayer dollars are used correctly. It’s what the American people expect and deserve.” But on Friday, almost exactly 24 hours after a Post reporter asked about the requirement that international vendors certify they do not promote DEI, State had issued guidance rescinding that mandate for staff overseas, according to a directive obtained by The Post.

‘Holding up everything’ At NASA, employees recently wrote several detailed paragraphs, across multiple rounds of emails, to win approval to buy simple fastening bolts, according to a staffer and records obtained by The Post.

Within the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate arm, more than 1,500 project requests — included fully executed leases and notices saying construction can begin — backed up in an internal tracker awaiting political appointees’ attention, records show. Some items waited for months, and almost 200 are still on hold, while about 300 were never approved, an employee said.

And at the Food and Drug Administration, once-routine tests on food — monitoring for accuracy in labeling, coloring and exposure to heavy metals — were delayed significantly, a former employee said. That’s because the agency began requiring department-level approval for expenses at every step: Purchasing samples to test. Paying to ship samples between labs. Buying lab supplies.

This hands-on approach reflects the Trump administration’s drive to rein in what officials see as decades of unsupervised, wasteful federal spending. Speaking in the Oval Office in early February, Trump said, without providing evidence, that there are “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse … That’s one of the reasons I got elected.”

Citing the example of the Treasury Department, Musk claimed the government is missing “basic controls that should be in place that are in place in any company,” such as categorizing payments by code and providing justifications for each expense. (Systems to do both already existed across agencies.)

And so shortly after Trump’s inauguration, DOGE imposed a $1 federal credit card freeze and limited purchasing power to only a handful of people in many departments, decisions that have incapacitated parts of agencies as varied as the National Park Service and the Pentagon. Soon, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Commerce Department required that political appointees green-light many funds before disbursement. In April, DOGE wrested control of a federal grants website used to dole out billions each year.

Many federal employees said they supported closer inspections of how the government spends money. But in practice, they said, the Trump administration’s chokehold is tangling up basic, everyday tasks.

The results seem to run counter to the goal of efficiency.

At air traffic control towers at two dozen West Coast airports, officials are unable to easily pay to have the windows washed and shades cleaned, said a Federal Aviation Administration employee. A DOGE-ordered overhaul of the payments system means FAA staffers must write statements justifying all expenditures, the employee said — not just for window-washing, but also elevator maintenance and even pens and pencils, the employee said. Purchase orders that used to take 15 or 20 minutes to fill out now consume 1 or 2 hours for each tower.

“These are things that people don’t think about, but clean windows are crucial for controllers,” the employee said. Because he is so often busy with purchase justifications, he has fallen behind on landscaping, fire alarm safety and pest control, all of which are “staples in the air traffic towers,” he said.

The added reviews extend beyond financial issues to questions of policy and political speech, including press releases.

At some parts of the National Institutes of Health, per an employee there, every grant must now be fed through an AI tool to screen for references to concepts deemed unpalatable by the Trump administration, such as “DEI, transgender, China, or vaccine hesitancy,” the employee said. Further delaying grants is another new requirement: NIH staff must check to ensure the recipient isn’t on the list of colleges and universities that have drawn Trump’s wrath, including Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, Brown and Cornell.

At the State Department, employees are spending hours combing through official documents to remove the words “diverse,” equitable” and “inclusive,” said a staffer there, months after Trump issued his executive order ending diversity efforts.

NASA, the NIH, GSA, the FDA and the FAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

‘Nobody is working at top efficiency’ The administration’s ongoing shake-ups of the workforce, from buyout offers to firings to sweeping reorganizations, are also undermining efficiency.

At the Social Security Administration, for example, Trump officials and DOGE pushed thousands of central-office workers to take lower-level positions answering phones in field offices, threatening to fire whoever did not make the jump, according to emails reviewed by The Post and interviews with a half dozen agency employees.

Chaos has ensued across field offices in the weeks since the reassignments took effect, staffers said. Claims processing has bogged down as regular field office staff — already overburdened because of widespread resignations and retir