The federal budget can absolutely use some trimming, but Elon Musk’s quasi-formal Department of Government Efficiency isn’t using the needed scalpel, or even a chainsaw that he waved around on Thursday, but a bulldozer, recklessly plowing under great swaths of essential government with no regard to effectiveness or efficiency.
Musk and his team have delivered chaos, with mass firings and layoffs of probationary employees and others across government, with no rhyme or reason. From the FAA, to workers tasked with overseeing safety for the nation’s nuclear arsenal to those combating the bird flu epidemic, the pink slips have been flying fast from Musk’s eager cohort. They don’t care who gets whacked and have sometimes had to backtrack, as happened with the World Trade Center Health Program.
These are savings in much the same way that one might claim savings from suddenly refusing to pay your health insurance premiums. You might see a higher balance in your account for a couple months, but you’ll quickly come to learn that it’s not as simple as more money in your pocket. This isn’t just money going out the door to frivolities, it’s paying for services that the public relies on.
Musk is not picking favorites, as everyone is being targeted, and that’s the problem. What’s happening is not a careful audit to determine where overspending and where programs can be trimmed to maximize their cost to benefit. The DOGE people have made apparently zero effort to even understand what anyone in government does, and seem to consistently realize who they’ve defunded or fired and the repercussions of that only after the fact.
We have mentioned some widely-noted cases, but there are teams across the entire federal government doing all manner of crucial tasks getting let go without any real reason. That’s not efficiency, it’s self-harm.
This mess seems to stem from the fiction, apparently believed wholeheartedly by Musk and the rest of the Trump upper echelon, that most federal agencies are stuffed to the gills with listless paper-pushers, collecting a public paycheck because they couldn’t hack it in the private sector and otherwise do a lot of nothing.
The reality is often the exact inverse: many are people who could be making more outside government, but have chosen to dedicate themselves for years or decades to public service, performing thankless but crucial tasks that prop up our entire society in ways that will only become most acutely apparent when they’re gone.
And gone some will be, even if the government tries to rehire them. This isn’t like flipping a switch on and off. Going into government work had a certain promise of stability that helped draw folks in addition to the public-spirited nature of the work, and that is now gone, replaced by an administration that has shown itself deeply incompetent, contemptuous of their work and openly hostile.
Lapses in systems like food safety and cancer research can’t just be undone; they might impact work for years to come even if this destructive approach is reversed. All we can do now is limit the damage. Someone, whether President Trump or the courts, needs to take the matches away before Musk burns it all down.