Trump’s Government Is a Den of Snitches, ‘Freaks,’ and Paranoid Tyrants
President Donald Trump’s administration simply will not stop setting up snitch lines, urging federal staff to rat on each other for the crime of being anti-Trump or in favor of the virtues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The latest example came on Monday, when the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., blasted out an email, titled “DEI Whistle-blower Questionnaire,” to its personnel. The HHS email encourages the workforce to tattle on one another, and others, in the service of Trump’s wide-ranging crackdowns on diversity programs.
“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is committed to serving all Americans with equal dignity and respect, while ensuring that taxpayer resources are used only to improve the health, safety, and well-being of the public,” the email, which was obtained by Rolling Stone, claims. It proceeds to say that “in accordance” with Trump’s executive order focused on “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing,” the department is “asking for your feedback on the following questions,” covering “the past five years.”
The email did not go over well among the HHS rank and file who have worked there for years.
“These people are such freaks,” one recipient of the email bluntly notes.
According to two recipients, as well as another source briefed on the matter, reactions within HHS were overwhelmingly negative, and staffers immediately began chatting among themselves about ways to bombard the new snitch line with bogus information, misdirection, and believable-sounding “tips” that would lead Trump officials down a rabbit hole to nowhere.
The email’s questions include:
- “Have you witnessed any grants, contracts, or training materials with discriminatory language?”
- “Do you know of anyone who was passed over for promotion/hiring due to race, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, or genetic information?”
- “Do you know of any former career employees who quit or faced discipline during the previous administration instead of carrying out DEI orders?”
- “Can you identify any DEI policies that caused discrimination against employees, contractors, or members of the general public (for example via discrimination in employment, in services provided, or in public messaging)? Please give details about where such discrimination may have occurred.”
The message also attempts to solicit “anything else relevant you would like to share,” and states that if “you would like to disclose information about specific individuals, please do not provide names. Rather, please describe the circumstances surrounding the allegation, your contact information (if you would like), and we will follow up on further details.”
HHS then asks its employees to “please submit your answers via this link,” which is just a public Microsoft Forms URL.
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The administration has launched a series of ideological snitch hotlines since Trump took office. Several government agencies — from the Department of Homeland Security, to the Department of Education, to NASA — have told their employees to report DEI activity, in accordance with Trump’s push to root out any nods to diversity. The DHS is also calling on Americans to rat on their neighbors, including by promoting a hotline number last month in a social media post featuring a cartoon of Uncle Sam calling for Americans to “report all foreign invaders.”
The administration’s public solicitations haven’t always gone as planned. The FBI opened a tip line asking for information on doctors providing youth trans care last month, but it was soon flooded with spam. One audio file shared with Rolling Stone featured a gay former federal employee, who requested anonymity, screaming into the federal tip line: “Fuck off, Nazi dickheads!”
The new HHS snitch line is particularly susceptible to spam from pranksters and subversives.
“Because these [HHS survey] links are public, there’s no verification of who is responding to the survey. Anyone with a computer and internet access, so long as they have this link, could submit a response,” the person briefed on the situation says. They add that at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “if we had internal surveys, they were through an internal platform tied to your official email. If it was meant to be anonymous then the survey would still check if you were a CDC or HHS.gov email before giving you access.”
This source adds that “current and former employees, as well as outside groups, are aware” that officials in the Department of Government Efficiency and throughout the Trump administration “are incredibly sloppy with data privacy and security, and there’s been many opportunities and a lot of interest in flooding snitch lines and similar surveys with bogus responses.”
Multiple sources say that the responses to this email within HHS were so comically negative that some staffers and career officials couldn’t even believe the shoddiness of the product, and started to aggressively trash the survey design as, for instance, “infuriating and terrible.”
“They don’t know how to do anything right, except tell people that vaccines are dangerous,” says another email recipient, referring to the incredibly reckless lies RFK Jr. and his people spread about routine vaccination. “Even the little things are done so poorly.”
The voluntary snitch line probably ranks low on the laundry list of abuses, scandals, and authoritarian decay that has powered the second Trump presidency since late January — including at RFK Jr.’s HHS. However, the HHS email underscores how snitching has become a core feature of Trump’s new government, in ways that eclipse the heavy paranoia of the first Trump era.
The administration has only grown nervier since last month’s leak to the media of classified Pentagon intelligence, which suggested that Trump’s bombing of Iran wasn’t as successful as the administration boldly claims.
Two sources with knowledge of the matter say that the ensuing leak hunts and FBI-aided investigation have only further amped up the Trump team’s already raging clampdowns and searches for all of the supposedly anti-Trump leakers in their midst, at the Defense Department and beyond. “They really, really want somebody locked up for this and they want to make a big thing of it … [if or] when an arrest is made,” says one of the two sources.
Since January, the president and his lieutenants have made it resoundingly clear: In this administration, you are either a snitch or a tyrant. There’s no middle ground.