Federal workers are on edge after the Trump administration spent its first days dismantling long-held protections for career staffers. There’s another safeguard that government employees worry the Trump administration will kneecap before it even gets off the ground: protecting them from online harassment. Hostile online posts, podcasts and videos, which can lead to real-life threats and intimidation, have been a rising concern for government employees over the last four years. FBI agents involved in the August 2022 search on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort had their personal information posted online, leading to threats against their family members, too. Four in ten election officials said they had concerns about being doxed in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, according to a letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee sent last September. And Justice Department attorneys handling Jan. 6 prosecution and immigration cases have also been targeted for harassment online and doxing, according to a letter sent from staffers last October. Doxing, which the Justice Department defined in a Jan. 10 memo sent to department leaders as “the malicious act of publicly sharing personal information with the intent to intimidate, harass, or threaten,” has become more common in public-service jobs because of an accessible market for people’s information online, combined with divisive partisanship. The memo, sent out in the waning days of the Biden administration, implemented a new set of guidelines for DOJ employees affected by online threats. It came after a group of staffers pushed for more protections against online harassment. The vulnerability extends across the entire federal government, Steve Lenkart, the executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees union, told POLITICO in December. “No agency has come out and said if you’re doxed, this is what we can do for you, this is what you should do. That doesn’t exist and needs to exist federal-wide,” he said. Lenkart told POLITICO at the time he hoped the outgoing Biden administration and federal agencies would start to establish guidelines for workers responding to online harassment, Now, however, he's more pessimistic: He said the first actions of the Trump administration — such as executive orders cutting back job protections — made him feel that these protections would not be a priority. The DOJ and Office of Personnel Management declined to comment, and a representative for Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi did not respond to a request for comment on improving protections against online harassment for government workers. The White House also did not respond to a request for comment on whether they would uphold the goals laid out in the memo. Employees, however, are paying attention. Dana Gold, the director of the Democracy Protection Initiative at the Government Accountability Project, has seen growing interest in government training on employee safety. She said more than 270 federal employees showed up for a December session she held on whistleblower rights and how to protect themselves from being doxed. Rob Shavell, the CEO of the data deletion request company DeleteMe, said his company has seen a 250% increase in public sector organizations signing up across federal and state agencies from 2023 to 2024, correlating with the rise in threats and harassment against government workers. The DOJ Gender Equality Network — a group representing nearly 2,000 employees whose October letter spurred the department's policy — specifically asked the agency to provide access to identity protection services. The letter detailed the story of a Jan. 6 prosecutor who called the services a "lifesaver" after she was doxed and threatened online. Without a resource that automatically sends data deletion requests to companies that sell people’s information, federal workers are left to send individual requests to each business, many of which do not have to comply if the request comes from one of the 31 states without a data privacy law. In a demonstration of the problem faced by government employees, one DOJ staffer, who saw a right-wing influencer use their name, job title and photo in a post calling for their firing, moved to scrub all of their sensitive personal information online. The staffer, who POLITICO is granting anonymity to prevent further online harassment, faced several obstacles sending requests to data brokers to delete information, which included their address and phone number. “It took me an hour to request the removal of my information from just two websites,” the staffer told POLITICO. “Six days later, my information was still up on one of them. There’s no way this would’ve worked in time had it been an emergency.” Federal workers concerned about this threat do not expect the Trump administration to help with these risks, and have started paying for their own subscriptions out-of-pocket. The NFFE’s Lenkart, who represents about 110,000 federal workers, said these resources will eventually become a necessity if federal workers continue to be targeted for online harassment. He’s paid for a data deletion service himself, and recommends that federal workers who feel at risk of being doxed do the same. “They’ve given no indication that they care at all about the safety of federal employees,” Lenkart said about the Trump administration.
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