We surely need to make our government leaner and more efficient, but there are decent and orderly ways that acknowledge the humanity of those losing their livelihoods.
The vicious attacks by Donald Trump and his “special employee” Elon Musk against federal workers are different and dark, two soulless billionaires gleefully flaunting their power to rain misery upon the working class.
These workers aren’t political appointees of the previous administration. They’re civil servants hired on a merit system as an apolitical foundation that keeps government functioning as administrations change.
Trump and Musk baselessly declared them enemies of the people, soldiers in some imagined “deep-state” plot to destroy the country.
Russell Vought, Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, has said he wants federal workers “to be traumatically affected.”
“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he said. “We want their funding to be shut down. … We want to put them in trauma.”
After Musk dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development without congressional authority, he crowed about throwing employees “into the wood chipper.”
The administration emailed a confusing buyout offer to 2 million employees, then abruptly ended it and began mass firings with emails that said, “The Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment with the Agency.”
None of the employees appeared to have been individually evaluated on the criteria in the form letter.
If Trump, Musk and Vought wanted federal workers terrorized, mission accomplished. Unpaid mortgages and hungry kids do that.
What healthy organization treats employees like this? These aren’t villains, but ordinary Americans doing unglamorous jobs that make them convenient scapegoats.
If you want villains, look at the politicians and administrators who make bad policies, provide poor leadership and enact the tangle of regulations that give the sluggish bureaucracy its bad name.
This isn’t a swamp draining, but an autocratic purge that values loyalty to the power elite ahead of expertise and civic loyalty — and keeps employees compliant via terror.
Exaggerated claims of savings from job cuts will be used to justify big tax cuts for the wealthy, and scrutiny of the rich and their industries will diminish with a hollowed-out workforce.
This disorganized carnage leaves our government at risk of becoming so broken it can’t perform basic functions of sending Social Security payments, warning us of a new pandemic or helping natural-disaster victims.
If they can falsely vilify federal workers to strike fear, they can do the same to any of us; it’s already starting with women, minorities, media, scientists and educators.
When Benjamin Netanyahu tried to dismantle Israel’s democracy by neutering the judiciary, opposition parties rebelled, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators hit the streets and strikes were called that slowed the damage.
What’s shocking as we face similar threats here is the deer-in-the-headlights response of opposition Democrats, the cowardice of congressional Republicans in fulfilling their oversight duties and the paucity of citizen protests.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
