He has promised a blanket hiring freeze, even though the size of the civilian federal work force has been declining over the last 50 years. Mr. Trump has said that having 10 percent fewer workers would make it easier to police them for corruption, as if they were the housekeeping staff in one of his hotels instead of a labor force of 2.5 million.

Mr. Trump’s transition team sent a questionnaire to the Department of Energy — which safeguards the nation’s nuclear arsenal and underwrites clean energy projects — asking for the names of workers who’d been involved in climate change initiatives. No less ominously, he then named former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who once said he’d like to kill off the entire department, as his pick for its secretary.

Almost two weeks ago, diplomats at the State Department were rattled by another transition team request, this one seeking information on the costs and staffing of “existing programs and activities to promote gender equality,” a favored initiative of Hillary Clinton’s when she was secretary of state. Was the request meant to gauge the programs’ cost-effectiveness, or was it a prelude to abolishing them? The transition team wasn’t saying.

The reputation of the federal work force is not helped by revelations of mismanagement at the Department of Veterans Affairs, self-dealing among regulators overseeing the oil industry, swanky “conferences” for General Services Administration employees and scandals at the Secret Service. Even before Mr. Trump won, Newt Gingrich was advising him to abolish Civil Service protections to make it easier to fire incompetent or unethical performers. But just as Mr. Gingrich’s own ethical lapses unfairly tar honest politicians, a relatively tiny number of corrupt workers tarnish the vast majority of civil servants who are, as the Trump team has said, “great and committed people,” often forgoing higher private-sector salaries for public service.

Further, as Mr. Gingrich must know from hard experience, it costs taxpayers plenty when political grandstanders wage broad attacks on the federal government: Mr. Gingrich did that twice in the 1996 fiscal year, when, as House speaker, he shut down the government, and the resulting lost revenue and disruption of government services and contracts cost jobs and about $2 billion in today’s dollars. Even though government employees can be prosecuted for working during a shutdown, many did so anyway, laboring without pay to keep vital projects running.