Those of us who are aware of the “shock and awe” assault on America’s governance–and even those of us who are trying not to focus on the details of that assault–tend to shudder over our recognition that the Trump/Musk tantrum is doing immense damage. But few of us possess either the knowledge or the fortitude to enumerate what these know-nothing zealots are destroying.
In a recent Substack Letter, Paul Krugman provided a partial enumeration. He began by noting the difference between breaking ‘things” and breaking government processes.
“Move fast and break things” is sometimes an OK approach if the things in question are just hardware, which can be replaced. But what if the object that experiences “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is something whose continued functioning is crucial to people’s lives — say, something like the U.S. government?
As he points out, the (very) young techies Musk has sent into government agencies (Krugman dubs them “Muskenjugends”) share three characteristics:
First, they all seem to be extreme right-wing ideologues: whenever journalists investigate the social media trail of one of Musk’s operatives, what they find is horrifying. For example, Marko Elez, who had access to the Treasury Department’s central payments system, had in the recent past advocated racism and eugenics.
Second, they don’t know anything about the government agencies they’re supposedly going to make more efficient. That’s understandable. The federal government has around 2 million workers, many — I would say the vast majority — performing important public services, in a huge variety of fields. You can’t parachute into a government agency and expect to know in a matter of days which if any programs and employees are dispensable.
But the third characteristic of the Muskenjugend is that, like Musk himself, they’re arrogant. They believe that they can parachute into agencies and quickly identify what should be cut.
The Muskenjugend attack is compromising important–even essential–government operations. In their haste to “trim” the fedeeral workforce, Trump officials fired more than 300 staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, “apparently unaware that this agency oversees America’s nukes.”
The next day, realizing the enormity of the error, the agency tried to reinstate those workers — but was having trouble getting in touch, because the terminated workers had already been locked out of their government email accounts.
The administration also fired 3400 workers at the National Forest Service, which plays a critical role in fighting forest fires, and has mandated large layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (just as alarms are escalating about the potential for a bird flu pandemic.) The CDC has been pressured to withhold reports, so Krugman notes that we might remain unaware of the next pandemic until it’s well underway.
Large layoffs have also decimated the Department of Health and Human Services. According to CBS, those layoffs have included half the officers of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, who play a critical role in identifying public health threats. There have also been layoffs at the FDA, which monitors the safety of food additives and medical devices.
And according to the union, despite an uptick in air disasters, several hundred workers have been fired at the Federal Aviation Administration.
The list goes on. But peering through the details, the overall strategy is clear: Musk and his minions decided to summarily fire as many federal workers as they could without making any effort to find out what these workers do and whether it’s important.
It’s easy to criticise the growth of government in the abstract. It is a lot harder to explain why government should not be making sure our foods are safe to eat and our aircraft safe to fly, among the many other functions that must be performed collectively in modern societies. It’s easy to point to excesses of red tape, to find fault with systems that seem faulty or have become obsolete. It is much harder to identify and correct the flaws while taking care to maintain essential safeguards.
It seems all too likely that Americans are about to learn the real costs of austerity theater. Many of the suddenly laid off workers were providing essential services. Nor should we underestimate the demoralization the vindictive layoffs have created even among those workers who still have their jobs (so far.)
So when we experience our next wave of devastating forest fires, when significant numbers of Americans begin dying from preventable diseases and faulty medical devices, remember: These disasters will be partly the fault of arrogant, ignorant men who decided to smash up a reasonably functional government.
And don’t get me started on the effects our “Nazification” and bowing to Putin while betraying Ukraine is having on America’s global stature…
Do these processes actually stop in these agencies? Are they slowed only andcto what degree? Having been in the civil Air Patrol I looked directly at the FAA cuts. They were to 400 new hires, the Guardian stated they were for people in probationary positions then the union spokesperson in that same article said they were not.
The prblem is that we are running deficits at $2 trillion per year and corruption is everywhere apparently.
Biden git Trump elected again. No balance.
They are breaking people; people of all ages, colors, ethnicity, religions, gender, sexual orientation, economic levels, personal care habits, eating habits, travel conditions on our streets and highways. One of the most vital issues for people is the repealing of regulations to provide clean and safe air to breathe so that we might live to fight another day.
Government regulations are as necessary as criminal laws to protect our lives; both need people to perform the work to provide protection. All of this is being destroyed NOW; it is no longer a campaign threat from Trump. A South African immigrant is ruling the government with bare-bones unqualified students too young to understand the deadly results of what they are being told to do. The death rate from the losses of government departments and staff will begin and quickly move to epidemic levels. Trump is already working his evil at the global level, moving to the pandemic level he aided in his first term, and no one and no agency seems to be trying to stop him.
As I said so often on this blog about the Democrats being unable to UNITE as the MAGAs have; by leaving their egos behind when entering the polls to vote. It took uniting nations globally to end Hitler’s rampage; it took D Day to begin the end of his reign. Are we going to let it get to that stage with the loss of millions of lives before we come together?
Sharon Miller; the term “boots on the ground” has very different meanings for you and I. The “boots on the ground” I fear coming is another Civil War and Trump’s interference in Europe is seeking WWIII with our “boots on the ground” there but on the nuclear level he has always strove for.
Sharon; your meaning of “boots on the ground” is the one I am hoping will happen and will work. But I fear the MAGAs will force the “blood in the streets” version; they will not go quietly into the night. Built on violence, it can only end in violence.
Pretty bleak blogs today. No rays of sunshine through the fetid clouds of Trumpism. The laid-off workers will start collecting unemployment compensation. The laid-off workers will tighten their belts and stop buying stuff. The laid-off workers will help the deregulation wet dream of Republicans and companies will cut quality, service and self-control while raising prices without worry of being restricted. That will cause people of all employment levels – except the monied classes, of course – to stop buying things too. Uh. Oh. Stock markets crash. The rich begin to worry.
More deficits. The Republicans keep lying. The military shrinks and Putin “does whatever the hell he wants” with Europe. World War III starts in Europe. North Korea invades South Korea. China invades Taiwan.
And another “well-done” to those American voters who stayed home last November. How are you doing with your choices now? MAGAs don’t care. Their minds are so altered, that destruction of democracy, the economy and world war simply won’t register as the cult continues.
Probationary employees doesn’t mean only new hires. People that have just been promoted in to new positions even if they have 20 years of seniority are probationary employees. They’re not just cutting new hires!
“The problem is… corruption is everywhere apparently.”
John S, even if that were true, wouldn’t it be prudent to actually take a moment to identify the corruption (which might be assumed to be on the leadership end of the scale) before randomly firing people who do the actual work??
Or better, not letting a corrupt trillionaire be in charge of everything?
Consider the fact that most jobs are created when something is either new or wrong. What do I mean? New discoveries might require new skills. New processes require new skills. New skills require new job descriptions and usually new jobs. On the other hand, when things go wrong, we try to identify what caused it to go wrong. In the field of Medical research going wrong can have catastrophic results. If someone dies because of negligence on the part of a research team, you can bet there will be new controls in place very quickly. That may require new staff,with a different set of skills, probably more investigative. It might also require additional monitoring.
If it’s true that the cuts are “only” to probationary employees, consider the nursing staff at any VA hospital. They have always been short staffed. Now they have lost every new hire for the last year, making the shortage even more critical. The impact of this is catastrophic for the veterans who are in need of care.
On a personal note, that may make clear the conditions of those veterans, when I was being treated for cancer I continued to work. I thought that I could stay home and throw little pity parties for myself, or I could go to work and whenever I started to feel sorry for myself, I could just take a walk down the hall and know that, in every room I passed there was someone who was much worse off than I was.
Indiscriminate cuts to any workforce can be devastating. What the Muskrats are doing will end with people dying unnecessarily.
A country is an entity in a relationship with other countries, and states (cantons, provinces, or voting districts) exist in a relationship with others in a country. And so on, until you get down to individual humans, entities that exist inside and outside our skin.
Humans inside our skins decide on whom to give office to through politics, but once in office, the people we elect agree on laws that they and we follow because we agree to comply or suffer proscribed consequences.
That is, except for Donald J Trump and his doge balls, who do not agree to comply with any of them. They believe themselves to be above them. Their claim is based on the fact that 0.7% more of us voted for them over the alternative, which gave them office for four years.
All of that comes from the fact of that 0.7% who have a religion that believes DJT and the doge balls are supernatural and so agree that they can make laws that we, but not they, must comply with.
That is dysfunctional and broken and can only reverse the progress of 250 years as a nation. The question is, what do we do about it?
We have a model that answers that question called the Declaration of Independence.
The Oval Office has become a daycare center for unsupervised aging elders and a small man child, nicknamed ‘X’, making faces at the cameras.
As a quick note, Zelenskyy (an unelected president) has agreed to give Trump $500 billion of their rare earth minerals for the money we sent to Ukraine. Last I checked, much of their minerals are located in the south-southeast areas of Ukraine, which Russia currently occupies. What are Lavrov and Rubio talking about?
Krugman is part of the establishment and knows neoliberalism very well. We’ve been using it since Reagan. In December, Biden quietly extended contracts to private prisons aligned with the democratic party. Yes, both parties have been outsourcing government to the private sector. Look at NASA and Musk!!
This is part of the oligarchic kleptocracy we’ve been watching for forty years, and the only ones getting their taxes cut are the oligarchs and their companies. Why is everyone crying now that Trump is doing the same thing? Anybody that perused Project 2025 knew this was coming. For god’s sake, the Koch’s Heritage Foundation wrote the book on downsizing the government. And don’t forget, when given a mandate by the people (mainly populist progressives), Obama chose to sell us out and use the Heritage Foundation’s plan for healthcare, which profited the insurance companies and did little or nothing for the people. The establishment democrats have been worthless ever since.
What do corporate CEOs always do to boost their profits for Wall Street analysts? How do private equity firms make a fortune when buying a failing corporation?
They go after the expendable employees. This is basic how to run a corporation 101. This has been taught in every MBA class for decades. Remember, corporate raiders aren’t socially responsible. It’s 100% about profits. Now, they are treating the federal government the same way. I don’t know a republican who doesn’t think the government shouldn’t be run like a business. Some congresspeople even state the government is like a household. LOL
Trump and Musk are getting ready to disassemble the union apparatus in this country, followed by the states that have already neutered them as much as possible. The oligarchs want to eliminate that threat and will treat unionizers as anti-American terrorists. The un-patriots! The surveillance state will scour social media and the Internet for signs of an uprising. That will be Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard’s responsibility.
My hope, but I’ve been wrong before, is that these shock-and-awe tactics will finally wake up workers in this country and encourage them to organize outside of the captured unions. Lawsuits are okay, but starting to walk off your jobs around the country can cause real damage. Bring Amazon to a screeching halt and see what Bezos does.
The pure definition of democracy is people’s power. Trump is just the most recent politician to screw workers in this country. It’s happened since the ’70s and ’80s, and workers have done NOTHING. Where is the teacher’s union? Retail unions?
According to rumors, Trump is even going to make public-sector unions illegal, which will be followed by the states. That should wake up Americans across both aisles, but we shall see. You can march all you want, but that isn’t hurting the oligarchy. Withhold your productivity and labor like our ancestors did in the ’20s and ’30s. Create our own chaos!!
Todd, Zelenskyy *was* elected! Good grief, stop drinking the koolaid!
The Other Sheila,
I’m not sure what Kool-Aid you drink, but it’s relatively common knowledge that his term expired in May 2024. You’re over six months out of the loop. I suggest turning off your TV.
He canceled the elections due to “martial law.” He’s a hanger on…
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/16/volodymyr-zelenskys-five-year-term-ends-on-may-20th
I was going to respond to Todd but have decided it would be a waste of my time.
Weary, angry, and feeling that my voice means nothing in a state that has been manipulated to insure only one group dominates. White, straight, so-called Christian males are the only choice with concerted efforts underway to make their dominance permanent.
I am still waiting to see if my SS payment (and my Medicare premium) goes through this month. It is already a week past the deposit date done in January.
While I’m relatively certain that Todd will rebut this somehow, here’s a fact sheet regarding Zelensky’s “unelected” status: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/47510
Miriam Lewis; thank you for that web site, very informative. Ukraine’s democracy and Constitution appears to be more protective of its citizens than ours, as is obvious in the mass destruction in only 4 WEEKS by our greatest national enemy to have ever been allowed to sit in the White House.
It’s the Shock Doctrine in real time on full blast and in public. I’m going to get my book out and look for tips for next steps and maybe what to expect.
I’m going to keep looking for evidence that 2024 was stolen by Elon goons.
Thanks for speaking out, Sheila! General “what can we do” comment:
We are in this crisis because our GOP representatives are failing us, and effectively renouncing their oath of office. This is ultimately because they fear their MAGA constituents turning on them, at the primary ballot box and in person. We have to apply some pressure of our own so they hear from and “fear” their non-MAGA constituents. Not fear for their safety, but fear of angry Americans who show up at their offices, townhalls, public appearances, to insist that they honor their oath and oppose Trump.
Phone calls and e-mails aren’t sufficient. None have town halls scheduled. We can show up at their local offices and ask to speak with a staffer. Todd Young is at 310 East 96th, Suite 350 in Indy. Spartz is at 5540 Pebble Village Lane, Suite 400, Noblesville. Banks apparently does not have an Indy area office.
Unscheduled constituent drop-ins get their attention!
I did this a couple weeks ago, it was easy. They were shocked but cordial, invited me in to hear my concerns.