Trump Team’s Plan to “Make America Great Again” Is to Eviscerate Public Safety

As the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) continues its rampage through government — so perfectly epitomized by Elon Musk’s ghastly dance with a chainsaw gifted to him by Argentina’s austerity-obsessed President Javier Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week — one basic public safety agency after the next is being compromised.

Anyone concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons can see that firing the personnel of the Nuclear Security Administration, the highly trained crew responsible for maintaining the safety and security of the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile, is a terrible idea. Except the boy-geniuses at DOGE somehow couldn’t work that out, and mistakenly fired the core of the country’s nuclear safety system. Similarly, with bird flu looming as the next great pandemic threat, now seems hardly the time to fire the USDA people responsible for monitoring the spread of the disease — as, again, was done, again allegedly by mistake, during the great culling of government employees.

In both instances, the government set about trying to rehire the experts only to realize that, because the laid-off employees had been instantly locked out of their government email accounts, they were hard to find. Whodathunkit?! While most were subsequently rehired, the episodes should serve as a massive canary in the coal mine warning of the dangers of the ill thought out decimation of government currently underway.

At the most basic level, summarily dismissing people with unique expertise in areas of critical public safety leaves a vast hole in the nation’s readiness to prevent, or to deal with, catastrophe. But the dangers go far beyond that: When people with highly specialized skills are treated as badly as those who have been summarily dismissed during the purge have been, when the government welches on paying wages and benefits, when it goes out of its way to humiliate the employees it seeks to dismiss — including by conjuring up nebulous “poor performance” reviews to justify termination — the government is essentially giving these people an incentive to instead sell their expertise to the highest bidder.

The U.S. isn’t a financially bankrupt state in the way that Russia was immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, but for some unfathomable reason, the Musk-Trump duo is making their decisions about dismantling our government at speed on the premise that it is.

In an alarmist mood, one might also fear other parallels with what happened after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991: Huge numbers of highly skilled operatives, experts in bioweapons, in nuclear weapons, and so on, were suddenly left out in the cold by their own government. In the years that followed, many were snapped up by mercenary groups, arms smugglers, and other governments.

And even if it’s unlikely that current U.S. federal workers will go running to support smugglers and other governments, the destruction of large parts of the federal system of government will still have vastly negative impacts. In the best-case scenario, these federal workers will likely move on to the private sector, if they find jobs at all. This potential transfer of skills and resources away from the federal government — and the public good — toward companies motivated entirely by their bottom line should concern us all. What would it mean for information about the spread of disease to end up behind a paywall, to be accessed only by the wealthy? This is the future the Trump administration likely envisions in encouraging federal employees to resign. In fact, its very own FAQ sheet on the “deferred resignation” period openly says: “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

This is why, rather than taking the time to carefully audit programs for waste, and to scale back the workforce of bloated programs in the wake of those audits, they have ordered what is essentially a squad of highly skilled young computer hackers into action. Many of these young men have long social media tails of racist, homophobic and sexist comments. They also have no knowledge of how government works. Yet, unfathomably, they have been empowered to go into federal departments, to take over their computer systems, and to then draw up lists of employees who can be summarily fired, all in the name of government efficiency and of dismantling anything remotely connected to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The declared aim is, simply, to reduce the federal workforce by 10 percent — reminiscent of the way Roman generals wielded decimation on their legions, some of whose members had committed crimes such as desertion or mutiny, by randomly killing 1 in 10 of all the soldiers in the unit as a collective punishment, and, presumably, a macabre encouragement to their fellow legionnaires to make sure to root out potential future mutineers or deserters — no matter the cost or collateral damage.

The sheer offense of handing the inner workings of government to Elon Musk and an anonymous group of young computer engineers becomes obvious when one looks at who is being fired.

The Federal Aviation Administration has long been understaffed, and has had several fatal air crashes on its watch in recent weeks, including a mid-air collision in Washington, D.C. Those understaffing problems have now been exacerbated by the decision to fire an additional 400 workers. The union representing them reported that these included aviation safety assistants, maintenance mechanics and some of the people responsible for updating the digital maps used by pilots in flight.

Two hundred Food and Drug Administration workers who monitored the safety of medical devices were laid off — although after a public outcry some were rehired. Meanwhile, so many people from the agency’s food safety division, with expertise on everything from unsafe chemicals in the food supply to the safety of baby formula, have been terminated that the head of that division resigned, saying it was pointless to continue given the lack of staff.

The list goes on and on. Firings have rocked FEMA, NOAA, the Forest Service, which is a vital part of the country’s wildfire-fighting infrastructure, the 9/11 first responder program, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and countless other agencies that help deliver everything from mental health services to school lunches.

If an adversary wanted to devise a way to weaken the United States, I doubt they could have come up with a more effective methodology than that being unleashed on the U.S. by the Trump administration and the DOGE shadow government.

Without any due process, contemptuous of the mechanisms that Congress has set up to regulate hiring and firing within the civil service, and absent public hearings or congressional debate, DOGE has put at risk basic government function. In doing so, it has dramatically increased the riskiness of daily life for all Americans.

In the short-term, Trump and Musk may boast about the chainsaw that they are putting to the so-called Deep State. In the long-term, I suspect most Americans will realize the chainsaw has actually been put to mission-critical functions that keep society chugging along without cascading disasters. But by then it might be too late; the experts will have left government service, many will have gone to private industry or to overseas interests, and ordinary Americans will have been rendered more vulnerable to everything from pandemics to malfunctioning medical devices to unsafe food to nuclear accidents.

Pardon my obtuseness here, but from where I’m standing, that comes off as quite a bizarre way to make “America Great Again.”