Terminating Federal Government Employees
Last month I wrote an article entitled “Eliminating Federal Budgetary Deficits” in which I laid out a number of ways in which the large annual federal deficits (approximately $1.5 trillion) could (and should) be reduced, if not wholly eliminated. I even commended the Trump administration for embarking on this task and appointing a group of tech-savvy part-time volunteers (dubbed the “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE”) to recommend ways in which fraud, waste and inefficiency could be eliminated from the federal bureaucracy.
Far from developing plans for making the federal government more efficient, this group has neither acted in an advisory capacity nor in a well-considered manner. Instead, it has embarked on an uninhibited campaign of employee terminations, paying little heed to the qualifications and roles played by those whose employment they are terminating. Perhaps, more significantly, many of the actions already taken by DOGE are illegal, if not unconstitutional, and would be so deemed even if they had been performed by President Trump himself. Such transgressions, however, may have been intentional—every accomplished pick-pocket knows that he has to provide a distraction for his victims as he makes off with their wallets.
Admittedly, the actions of DOGE are still in their infancy, but it has already become clear that its operatives are following the “wild west” adage of “shoot first and ask questions later.” For the most part, DOGE has chosen to attack the low-hanging fruit; namely, terminating only those government employees who have a “probationary” status. These employees are not protected by union contracts or civil service regulations and may be lawfully terminated by the Departments within the Executive Branch where they are employed. In case of USAID (discussed below), however, DOGE’s first step has been to effectively dismantle the entire agency before undertaking any efforts to ascertain the importance of its missions. In that case, DOGE simply seems to have assumed that USAID is wasting the government’s assets. In this and other cases the budgets of the agencies being attacked are so meagre that it is difficult to even ascribe cost-cutting as the reason for DOGE’s actions.
Not coincidentally, one of Elon Musk’s managerial techniques has been to fire a multitude of workers and then look to see which of the dismissed employees are necessary for continuing the entity’s core operations. Occasionally, he finds that entire departments or functions can be safely eliminated. In other cases, he discovers that the terminations of certain employees cause the activities of the entire entity to come to a halt. In those cases he immediately rehires or replaces the dismissed workers. This technique was used by him to eliminate 6,000 (or 80%) of Twitter’s 7,500 employees. It also allowed him to act quickly in reducing operating costs, while only subjecting his company to manageable downside risks. This strategy effectively prioritizes speed over fairness to the affected employees as well as the dangers to the enterprise itself. In the context of a national government, however, this approach only marginally reduces operating costs and can engender problems that are far more serious and difficult to reverse.
So far, only about 200,000 (of the roughly1.85 million active federal employees) have been terminated. Remaining untouched are the roughly 2.575 million retired federal employees who continue to receive pensions. When you consider the number of retired employees, as well as active employees of the federal government, less than 5% percent of individuals receiving federal paychecks will be eliminated.
In terms of dollars saved, the terminations of those 200,000 employees (with average annual salaries of roughly $50,000) only represent a nominal cost saving of $10 billion which is approximately 0.7% of the federal government’s annual operating deficit. Moreover, that level of cost savings, however, does not even take into consideration the federal government’s loss of roughly $2 billion in annual income tax revenues nor the roughly $2 billion in unemployment benefits that the states will have to absorb. Simply stated, you can’t fire enough federal government employees to make a significant reduction in the nation’s annual fiscal deficit.
Capturing the early headlines were DOGE’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency with 10,000 employees and a total annual budget of $40 billion which is roughly 2.67% of the annual deficits of the federal government. Thus, eliminating this entire agency also will do little to eliminate the nation’s annual deficits. Accordingly, this undertaking seems to have been designed to appeal to Trump’s economically-hurting MAGA supporters who believe that U.S. tax revenues should be spent on Americans. To be sure, a majority of Americans today are struggling to pay their housing costs and feed their families. To them, sending our tax money abroad seems like a very low priority. From another perspective, USAID’s annual budget is less than 5% of our nation’s military defense budget; and the work of USAID may be even more important to our national security than maintaining a strong military establishment.
The programs of USAID are far more than mere efforts to buy the goodwill of foreign nationals. According to Wikipedia, they help over 100 struggling nations (primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe) to develop their economies and maintain their political stability. They also implement programs in global health, disaster relief, socioeconomic development [and] environmental protection. Of particular importance are the USAID programs relating to public health which includes combatting infectious diseases (like the Ebola virus) abroad as a means of preventing their spread to the U.S.
Eliminating USAID is only one of the many myopic efforts of Elon Musk and his gang of DOGE volunteers. One of their more frightening actions was the firing of 350 of the 1,800 employees of the National Nuclear Regulatory Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy. The NNRA oversees our nation’s nuclear arsenal (consisting of more than 3,000 nuclear warheads) as well as the nuclear reactors powering many of our nation’s warships. When the Trump administration learned of their terminations, it sought to rescind their firings only to discover that it had no way to contact many of them as their email accounts had also been terminated. Unfortunately, when dealing with high-tech employees, finding suitable replacements can be both problematic as well as time-consuming.
Another apparent misstep was the firing of just under 400 of the Federal Aviation Administration’s 45,000 employees. The FAA is the federal agency which oversees the inspection and control of aircraft operating within the U.S. It also established and operates early warning missile interception facilities. These terminations took place in the wake of the collision near the Washington, D.C. airport of a passenger plane with a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter that led to the deaths of 67 people. At the time of the collision the FAA was already understaffed and in the three weeks following this accident there have been four additional aircraft accidents. Trump initially blamed the D.C. incident on DEI influence within the FAA. When that explanation was soundly refuted, he blamed the FAA’s antiquated equipment but without proposing that the agency’s equipment be upgraded. Subsequent reports indicate that the accident was likely caused by the Blackhawk pilot’s not utilizing his aircraft’s auto pilot system which is specifically designed to prevent this type of accident.
Another area where the Trump administration is planning significant personnel cuts is in the nation’s public health agencies. Specifically, the Department of Health and Human Services has announced that it will be terminating the employment of 5,200 of its roughly 80,000 employees. This includes 1,300 employees of the Center for Disease Control and 1,000 employees of the National Institute of Health. These cuts will be limited to “probationary employees” without regard to their professional expertise or service evaluations.
The U.S. has already had experience with what can happen when employees of public health agencies are randomly eliminated or their employees are intimidated from expressing their professional judgment. Shortly after Trump became the nation’s 45th President in 2017 he terminated the CDC’s representative stationed in China who served as an early warning detector of infectious diseases, many of which emanate from there. In addition, in 2017 Trump eliminated the 250 person Pandemic Response Unit within the National Security Agency. Thus, when the Covid Pandemic reached the U.S. in January 2020 the Trump administration was caught by surprise. To make matters worse, Trump limited the roles of experienced public health officials and eventually chose to rely on the advice of Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist with no public health experience. The results were that the U.S. suffered more Covid deaths per capita than all other developed nations.
The ostensible objectives of DOGE’s actions is to cut fraud, waste and inefficiency. That, however, does not appear to be the principal motive underlying them. Instead, they seemed more designed to obscure the nature of the actions the Trump administration has taken or is planning to take. Specifically, they seem intended to (a) justify the extension of the Trump 2017 tax cuts, (b) cut those regulatory agencies that protect Americans from predatory practices by businesses that support the Republican Party in general and the Trump administration in particular and (c) facilitate the imposition of martial law. As such the blizzard of job cuts is more designed to obscure harmful actions (some of which have already begun) than to effect cost reductions.
A few facts lead me to these conclusions. Among his first actions upon resuming as the nation’s president, Trump fired 18 agency Inspector Generals. These steps were in direct contradiction of his goal to reduce fraud and waste as the individuals serving in these positions were hired for the express purpose of reducing fraud and waste. In taking these actions Trump did not even complain (much less attempted to justify DOGE’s actions on the basis) that any of those individuals had been neglecting their duties. He similarly dismissed David Huitema, the head of the Office of Government Ethics, an entity created to ensure that executive branch employees are making decisions based on the good of the public by policing financial conflicts of interests. Huitema’s dismissal came in the second month of his five-year appointment. Again no explanation for his termination was provided by the Trump administration which simply notified Mr. Huitema of his termination via an email sent over a weekend.
It should be recalled that President Trump similarly fired five Inspector Generals during his first administration immediately following his first impeachment proceeding. Those terminations were clearly intended to prohibit the dismissed IGs (including the one whose disclosures led to his first impeachment proceeding) from reporting their findings to the Congress. These actions, therefore, strongly point to the conclusion that Trump is seeking to prevent the public from learning how he and his supporters plan to disregard the safeguards that the affected agencies have established to protect the public.
Another inexplicable action is the recent termination of 6,700 IRS employees. Most of the terminated employees were recent hires by the Biden administration for the express purpose of auditing the tax returns of wealthy individuals in an effort to collect the estimated roughly $700 billion of federal income taxes which go unpaid each year. Thus, far from preventing fraud and waste, these terminations will surely increase, not diminish, the fiscal problems of our federal government.
Similarly, although Republican politicians regularly rail against the high costs of the nation’s social welfare programs, the Trump administration is now seeking to roll back some of the actions taken by the Biden administration to reduce the costs of prescription drugs. Those drugs currently represent more than 11% of the costs incurred by the programs administered by Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Administration and Affordable Care Act which together represent 25% of the annual expenditures of the federal government. Prescription drug costs in the U.S. are slightly in excess of 2.75 times those charged for the same drugs in other developed nations; and if addressed could result in an annual savings to the federal government of approximately $150 billion. Rather than use his self-proclaimed negotiating skills to reduce these expenditures, he has taken actions to undo the efforts of the prior administration to reclaim those amounts.
Another important factor is that the employee reductions have been poorly conceived and will not have a significant effect on reducing the annual deficits being incurred by the federal government. For this reason, they seem more like PR ploys than serious efforts to rectify the problems in the way the federal government conducts its fiscal affairs. This factor is enhanced by the fact that the savings to be generated by DOGE’s efforts have been greatly exaggerated by people who are supposed to understand fiscal integrity. Added to that, President Trump has suggested that he is considering sharing 20% of those savings with the public. It’s not only that this suggestion runs counter to the whole exercise of reducing federal deficits, but it appears to be an intentional (but disingenuous) effort to convey the impression that working class Americans are going to somehow benefit from the “cost-saving” efforts now being undertaken.
The very manner in which this exercise is being undertaken also provides strong evidence that it’s a charade and not a serious cost-reduction undertaking. Far from acting in an advisory capacity, Elon Musk and his band of youthful terminators have made no attempt to either act in a considered manner or to comply with existing laws, regulations or Constitutional constraints. Particularly troubling is the fact that the DOGE gang has made little or no apparent efforts to interview the senior level employees of the agencies they are seeking to reform in an effort to understand the missions and constraints under which their agencies operate.
It's also hard to believe that President Trump is actually serious about reducing federal budgetary deficits while making it abundantly clear that his primary objective remains to extend and possibly also enhance the tax cuts that were enacted during his first term. Those tax cuts are almost certain to more than offset any savings that are likely to emerge from DOGE’s efforts. Cutting federal income taxes on corporations and the wealthy has long been a primary objective of Republican politicians and there is zero evidence that those tax cut will be beneficial to the growth of the nation’s economy or to a fair distribution of wealth among the nation’s citizens (see, the “Myth of Republican Economic Managerial Superiority”).
Among the more troubling actions that have been taken during the first month of President Trump’s second term is the firings of a number of high ranking the members of the U.S. Armed Services. Specifically, Trump has fired General Charles Q. Brown (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Admiral Lisa Franchetti (the Chief of Naval Operations), Admiral Linda Lee Fagan (the U.S. Coast Guard Commandant) and General James Slife (the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff). What makes these actions so unsettling is that Trump has frequently stated his intention to use the nation’s armed forces to carry out some of his domestic programs in violation of established U.S. law. When he tried to do this during his first term, his efforts were thwarted by then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley. These personnel changes presage what is likely to be a second effort to use U.S. military personnel to carry out an unlawful agenda and secure Trump’s tenure in office.
It's not just President Trump who has been using the firing blitz being undertaken by DOGE as cover for his own efforts to benefit himself. Elon Musk has been systematically attacking the federal agencies charged with regulating the entities which he owns or have been suing him personally for the manner in which he has caused those entities to operate. In many cases he has been successful in getting those agencies to drop charges they have made against him and/or the companies he controls or to simply have them terminate on-going investigations targeting him or his companies. It would thus appear that $277 million of campaign contributions can buy literally billions of dollars of protection.
Among of the big unknowns are what data the DOGE volunteers have commandeered from the federal government’s computer systems and what they plan to do with it. It’s quite possible that they intend to utilize AI assisted computer systems to scour this data to determine whether they contain duplicative or fraudulent payments as well as other forms of fraud and waste. It’s also possible that they have taken this data to use in their own businesses or even to sell it to others. These are frightening possibilities and we may not know the answers to these questions for some time. It would, of course, be reassuring if the DOGE volunteers had been more transparent in the way they went about taking possession of this data.
There is no denying that President Trump is a devotee of political theater and that he’s an accomplished con artist (think: “Trump won the 2020 election by millions of votes”, “tariffs are paid by the exporting country”, “Ukraine started the war with Russia” and “global warming is a hoax”). Nor can it be denied that he has few, if any, inhibitions about lying to the American public (more than 30,000 were made during his first term alone). Even a significant majority of Republican voters refuse to accept Trump’s characterization that the individuals who attacked the nation’s Capitol on January 6th were patriots whose transgressions deserved to have been pardoned.
Yes, our federal government has become largely dysfunctional and requires strong leadership to reform it. Nevertheless, entrusting that tasks to an adjudicated felon who’s enamored with Vladimir Putin and wishes to establish a Russian-styled dictatorship in the U.S. is not the right person to lead that process. His willingness to disrupt the lives of 200,000 federal workers whose only sins are that they are recent hires of (or have received recent promotions within) is ample evidence of his lack of fitness to hold the office which he now occupies.