Cont'd
"Some pundits on the left have tried to attack Musk by valorizing federal workers, like Just Security’s Nicholas Bednar (
under “What the left is saying”), who argued, “Five bullet points describing one work week—a week that included a federal holiday—cannot capture the importance of the work performed by most federal employees.” This is an unnecessary claim, and probably untrue of many federal employees. The point isn’t that most federal workers’ jobs are so important and complex they can’t summarize their week in five bullet points — the point is that it’s ridiculous to demand millions of people to respond to a faceless email account to keep their jobs, while the person behind the plan bangs on across social media about what horrible, lazy, inefficient people they are.
Interestingly, liberals and anti-Trumpers aren’t the only ones making these arguments now;
some conservatives have started standing up for the federal workforce. Chuck Ross, a pro-Trump columnist and writer,
made the same points I did about how no self-respecting person would respond to this request. Conservative pundit Rick Moran
argued “neither Musk nor Trump has the authority to request such a list or make continued employment in the federal government contingent on replying.” And David Marcus, one of the most reliably pro-Trump voices at Fox News,
wrote that federal workers aren’t “billionaires or grifters,”
adding that “the federal government’s problem is not allegedly lazy, middle class government employees, it’s corrupt wealthy politicians and their donors.”
Now
those are some good arguments.
Musk, naturally, has begun to change his explanation for this exercise. It’s no longer about only keeping the most important employees or figuring out what federal employees are actually up to, but now purportedly a plot to discover federal workers who don’t exist. “Non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks,” Musk
posted. “In other words, there is outright fraud.”
Even if this underlying premise were true, why send an email to two million people to figure it out? I presume there are much better, more efficient ways to figure out which federal employees are dead and still getting paid or, alternatively, entirely made up people. More importantly, I don’t think the premise
is true. Some examples exist of the government wasting millions of dollars on “ghost” employees —
like police and military in Afghanistan — but we already have
oversight to catch that sort of thing. I suspect Musk’s assertion will go the same way as the claim that “billions of dollars” are being sent to 150-year-old people on Social Security, which Trump’s own Social Security Administrator recently
clarified was wrong (though Trump continues to
repeat it).
All of this leaves me dumbfounded. Musk is not an idiot. He’s not incompetent. Anyone
pretending so is deluding themselves. So what’s he up to? My best guess is he is trying to force more people out — or look for an excuse for mass layoffs — since fewer employees took the “fork in the road” buyout offer than
he apparently expected. As I said last week, Musk stands to
benefit personally in a dozen different ways from a beleaguered, downsized federal workforce, which has always been what DOGE is really about.
He is too competent to truly believe he’s making the government more efficient right now. The Wall Street Journal officially estimated that DOGE will save the government roughly
$2.6 billion over the next year; what are the odds that after all the future settlements, the
rehiring of workers, the increased cost of hiring workers who feel these jobs are not secure and the eight months of severance we’re paying to 75,000 people who took the buyout offer, that this all ends up
costing us money?
I honestly don’t know how long all of this will go on. Republicans in Congress are
privately starting to worry, and who can blame them? ABC estimates these layoffs are impacting
some 200,000 people. I suspect that means tens of millions of Americans now know someone who has lost their job due to these cuts. Some of them will have their lives ruined — they’ll lose homes, or get divorced, or have to
scramble to find health insurance for their sick spouse. I know of one woman who was five months pregnant, working in the National Parks, and had to leave her temporary housing (provided by her job) to go apartment hunting — now unemployed in a rural area with limited opportunities and sparse housing. She was fired without cause or explanation as part of the DOGE cuts.
People are going to be pissed. Social media is replete with Trump voters
asking why they or their family members lost their jobs. And those people are going to start demanding more responsibility from Congress. Eventually, Republicans and Democrats will have to do their jobs and control how these agencies are being run, how this money is being spent, and who gets to keep their jobs."
