After a year of upheaval and uncertainty, federal employees are reporting diminished engagement in their jobs and declining views of political leadership.
New survey results from the Partnership for Public Service show that during 2025, federal employee engagement scored 32 out of 100. Nearly 60% of survey respondents reported that their engagement at work has decreased since 2024.
Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, blamed the decline on the Trump administration’s management of the federal workforce over the last year. He called the new survey results “deeply distressing.”
“We have every red light blinking across the entire federal government — morale is as low as imaginable,” Stier said Thursday. “This is true across the entire federal government. There is no corner that has emerged unscathed.”
The workforce assessment, conducted in late 2025, came after the Office of Personnel Management’s decision to cancel the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey last year. It was the first time OPM chose not to run FEVS since the annual survey began more than 20 years ago.
The Partnership, a non-profit organization that advocates for nonpartisan improvements to government, said its survey attempted to fill what would otherwise have been a major gap in federal workforce data.
“OPM did a survey of its own workforce,” Stier said. “Why couldn’t they have done it for the entire government?”
An OPM spokesperson said the 2025 FEVS was canceled “to refresh the questions and to avoid prohibitive costs.” The spokesperson also confirmed to Federal News Network that FEVS will resume later this year, but did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Partnership’s survey results.
More than 11,000 employees responded to the Partnership’s survey, representing 17 large agencies and 13 midsize agencies. By comparison, the FEVS typically receives hundreds of thousands of responses each year from virtually all agencies and components.
Where possible, the Partnership said it attempted to replicate or approximate OPM’s survey content and methodology. But because the survey does not have the same depth or breadth as FEVS, the scores cannot be directly compared year-to-year.
Despite the smaller scale, Stier said the results still speak volumes, and are largely consistent with many other research projects the Partnership has conducted over the last year about federal employees.
“Federal employees have suffered a layer cake of trauma,” Stier said. “The ultimate impact has been crushing on their morale, as these numbers suggest.”
Notably, no agency’s engagement score increased in the Partnership’s survey. But some scores were far lower than others. The State Department, for instance, saw engagement levels at 20 out of 100, while the Department of Health and Human Services — previously a higher-scoring agency in recent years — was near the bottom of the list with a score of 20.4 out of 100. The Social Security Administration had an engagement score of 15.2 out of 100, the lowest of any large agency.
NASA, considered the “best place to work” in the federal government for more than a decade, earned an employee engagement score of 46.4 out of 100 in the Partnership’s analysis. The Department of the Army had the highest score of any agency in the survey, at 48.1 out of 100.
The Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had the lowest engagement scores of employees at any agency taking the survey, at 17.2 and 8.1, respectively. The Partnership credited that trend to those two agencies experiencing “some of the most drastic restructuring and staff cuts among midsize agencies.”
Employees’ perceptions of agency leadership were also significantly lower. About 7.5% of survey respondents agreed that political leaders generate high levels of motivation in the workforce. Less than a quarter of respondents said they felt confident that they could report a suspected violation of a law, rule or regulation without experiencing retribution.
“The messaging has consistently been that they are fearful, that they are being mistreated,” Stier said. “You have a leadership group that wanted to traumatize them, and they, in fact, did so.”
Federal employees also reported impacts on their day-to-day work. About 36.5% of survey respondents said they were worse at delivering quality services, while 36% said they were worse at meeting deadlines, compared with their performance in 2024.
Even with the upheavals in engagement and satisfaction, more than 95% of federal employees who took the survey still said it was important to them that their work contributes to the public good.
“That is absolutely vital, and it’s one of the things that has always distinguished the federal workforce from any other workforce — this deep and powerful commitment to the public good,” Stier said. “But there is nothing good that one could say about the changes that have taken place.”
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email drew.friedman@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at drewfriedman.11
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