Over the past month, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have framed their senseless, openly corrupt crackdown on federal employees as a war on faceless, unpopular bureaucrats and the dreaded “deep state.” Meanwhile, the workers they are terrorizing if not firing include health care workers, working-class nurses at Veterans Affairs facilities, and other civil servants performing crucial roles across the federal government.

The latest broadside came this past weekend, when the Tesla billionaire and head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) announced that federal workers needed to submit a...