Employee recalcitrance and employer reprisal are ever-present conditions in public service. Yet, we have limited in knowledge that discloses the forces of what moves administrators away from acquiescence and toward antagonism. Thus, to better understand the determinants of guerrilla government, we present the results of a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey of federal bureaucrats. We find that decisions to pursue guerrilla activities are conditional on a multitude of factors—namely the bureaucrat’s personal views of the directive as a policy solution, the compatibility of the directive with the bureaucrat’s ethical framework, the status of the person issuing the directive, and the probability that the directive might cause harm to others. Notably, these decisions generally are not affected by the probability of retribution, or the expected type thereof. But they are affected by the magnitude of harm that may ensue if orders are obeyed and not resisted.