By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost
We’re cutting down government. We’re cutting down the size of government. We have to. We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job. We have a lot of people that don’t exist.
– Donald Trump Feb. 26, 2025
Donald Trump appeared on The Apprentice, a reality-competition show, with a prize of a one-year $250,000 contract to promote one of Trump’s properties. Trump was the show’s centerpiece, which bolstered his reputation as a ruthless billionaire.
Personally, I find “reality” shows creepy, but even I could not escape Trump’s joyous declarations: “YOU’RE FIRED!!” According to Vanity Fair, the essence of his role was “to preen and slice people off at the knees” while getting pleasure out of firing them.
This love of being a fearsome boss has become the most prominent characteristic of his second term as president and has led directly to unrelenting attacks on those people he considers either unwanted or unnecessary.
The unwanted include many immigrants, with or without legal “papers,” and legal residents, often on visas, who openly oppose American support for genocide in Gaza. Also among the unwanted are those fired or forced into early retirement by Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). His vicious attempts to end these programs, both public and private, was the focus of my previous column.
The unnecessary include those characterized in the statement at the top of this page. These are indiscriminate targets of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) established by an executive order and directed by Trump’s mega-donor and the richest person in the world, “Chainsaw” Elon Musk.
DOGE was originally established with the stated purpose of “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” In a subsequent executive order, the purpose of DOGE was reconfigured to transform “Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public.”
Curiously, neither statement of purpose focuses on what seems to be the Department of Government Efficiency’s primary activity: the elimination of more than 275,000 jobs across 27 government agencies. Of course, no one can “maximize efficiency and productivity” by firing employees en masse without any analysis of what each individual is doing. But nor can anyone ensure “spending is transparent” by eliminating agencies.
What is DOGE?
Although DOGE acts as a federal department and is commonly referred to as such in the media, the executive branch does not have the power to create or finance new departments; congressional action is required. As a result, DOGE is not an official department. It is symbolic of Trump’s refusal to recognize the existence of checks and balances inherent in three co-equal branches of government.
Nevertheless, DOGE exists and has an operating budget of at least $40 million which is used to accomplish widespread dismissals, layoffs and salary buyouts of thousands of federal employees from numerous agencies, all the while ignoring the fact that the law requires being notified in writing of reasons for termination, including specific incidents or performance deficiencies.
According to Steven Hill, writing for Fulcrum, DOGE, like other aspects of the second Trump administration, emerged from Project 2025. He writes,”DOGE is the tip of the spear that is aiming to overturn the federal apple cart.”
Confirmed dismissals by mid-May include more than 99% of USAID, more than 99% of Voice of America, 85% of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, about 50% of the Department of Education, 24% of Health and Human Services, and substantial numbers of reductions from the Department of Energy, the IRS, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the National Science Foundation. Here are a few detailed descriptions:
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cut about 10% of the agency’s workforce. Some CDC employees then accused DOGE of laying off Black CDC workers at higher rates than other racial demographic groups, thus suggesting that the work of DOGE sometimes includes elements of the crusade against DEI.
These terminated CDC workers charged that the reductions were concentrated in areas of health study that have an outsized impact on Black people, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and gun violence.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH)
The National Institutes of Health terminated all probationary employees in research laboratories and clinics between 1,000 and 1,200 employees. One NIH scientist reacted by saying “I literally can’t work” without the terminated staff members, the scientist said. “There’s not going to be any research.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to protect “consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices” After it became a target of DOGE, the CFPB was ordered to stop work entirely.
The order to “stop work” at the CFPB was challenged by an employee union and, on March 28, the court held that the CFPB workforce be reinstated and “continue performing its statutory duties.” As a result, as I write, the CFPB continues to operate, but the director has been replaced. The acting director is now Russell Vought, who is also the Trump-appointed head of the Office of Management and Budget. On May 6, 2025 the CFPB announced a shift in enforcement priorities.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provides navigation information to ships, observes changes in the climate and oceans, and monitors hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tsunamis. In March NOAA began laying off 10% of its workforce. In response to lawsuits filed by workers and supporting unions, a federal court blocked the layoffs and the workers were reinstated. Then a second court reversed the reinstatements and those laid off were all re-fired.
NOAA employees who had not been fired were pressured to leave. They were given until April 17 to accept an early retirement or voluntary separation offer before the agency faced more layoffs. NOAA personnel were also advised NOT to discuss what’s happening for fear of being penalized.
The Department of Agriculture
In March the Department of Agriculture admitted that it accidentally fired employees working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak. Immediately they promised that they were attempting to rescind those layoffs. Then, in early April, Dr. Meghan Davis, a former dairy veterinarian and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told NBC reporter Suzy Khimm that “active surveillance of how the virus spreads is a necessity, but local health officials and veterinarians will no longer have the same support from the federal government.”
The Attack on Social Security
Trump and Musk have both claimed that the Social Security program wastes hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent payouts. Both men, in their hunt for “fraud, waste and abuse,” falsely imply that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security benefits. At a bizarre White House presentation in February , Musk announced that he had found “crazy things” in Social Security, including, he said, “people who are 150 years old.”
It was later confirmed that Musk was “misreading the agency’s records system, but that had little effect, and “…by the beginning of April, 7,000 workers had left, or been fired from the agency. It has been reported that there are plans to lay off thousands more. One immediate goal seems to be that reduced services or missed checks might sway public opinion toward privatization.
To put some of this in perspective, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Social Security benefits, way back in 2016, exceeded $900 billion, but “eliminating $3 billion per year of [assumed] improper payments would reduce costs by at most 0.4 percent.” While “cutting improper payments for the very old or the recently deceased would reduce program costs by between 0.00002 and 0.002 percent.”
Even the Department of Defense Will be Cut! … Promise!
Besides Social Security there are other federal agencies that have a recognized problem with waste or fraud but they usually appear untouchable. Exhibit one would be the Department of Defense and the Pentagon. “In November 2024, the Pentagon failed to pass its annual audit, meaning it wasn’t able to fully account for how its $824 billion budget was used.” That was the 7th failed audit in a row.
In an attempt to suggest that cuts are occurring everywhere, on March 4 the Department of Defense announced that “initial findings within the Defense Department by the Department of Government Efficiency reveals some $80 million in funds wasted on programs that do not support DOD’s core mission.”
Among these findings of “waste” were $1.9 million for holistic diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); $3.5 million by the Defense Human Resources Activity to support DEI groups; and $1.6 million to the University of Florida to study the “social and institutional detriments of vulnerability and resilience to climate hazards in [the] African Sahel.”
As a result, it is predicted that the Defense Department will be laying off tens of thousands of civilians, but at the same time President Trump has announced the “upcoming budget [of the DOD) would be “in the vicinity” of $1 trillion. That is an increase of more than $100 billion, putting the proposed $80 million cut in “funds wasted on programs” in perspective.
What is most evident in this attack on the federal bureaucracy is the steadfast campaign against employee rights. In department after department, DOGE has ignored any due process in its unrelenting assault on working people. As Tyler Walicek observed in a recent column “They proceed as if they’re entering the final stretch and before them lies the realization of the ultimate aims of the reactionary right: permanent hierarchy and corporate rule, mutually interlocking with untrammeled powers of state repression.”
How to Legally Fire Federal Employees
Federal employees can be fired, but the process involves multiple steps designed to ensure fairness and due process. Those steps include counseling, a notice of proposed action, a right to respond, evaluation by a deciding official, notice of decision, an appeal period and final action. In the vast majority of recent cases, these procedures were not followed.
In some cases, probationary employees were targeted, but reductions also included the termination of senior staff. In the cases cited above, mass firings were often announced through emails or by form letters lacking specifics. Many of those fired were simply notified that their jobs were “no longer in the public interest.”
The Trump administration insists that they are carefully purging the federal workforce by firing only low-performing employees serving in non-critical roles. CNN reports that firing decisions are more arbitrary and include employees recently promoted or who have received a mark of “achieved excellence” from their superiors within the past year.
However, the use of aloof and disrespectful termination notices is not limited to those people DOGE considers unnecessary. The same method of notification is used for some in singularly important positions, especially when the person is labeled a DEI-hire.
Dr. Carla Hayden, for example, was fired as the Librarian of Congress on May 8 via email. The email was at best indifferent. It was addressed, not to Dr. Hayden, but to Carla. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”
This is no way to run a government, or research disease, or predict the effects of climate change, or protect consumers from abuse. This is no way to treat dedicated professionals. But it does provide a way to avoid having to do anything until a specific problem becomes unavoidable. I can already imagine the future expressions of surprise from the White House: Who could have predicted that bird flu would spread so rapidly among humans?
What prepares many Americans to accept mass firings?
Over time most Americans have accepted a stereotype of “the government worker.” We have in our heads this intractable picture: the nine-to-fiver living off the taxpayer, who adds no value and has no energy and somehow still subverts the public will… This typecasting has always been lazy and stupid but increasingly it’s deadly.
– Michael Lewis, Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service 2025
At the beginning of the first Trump administration, I read Michael Lewis’ book “The Fifth Risk,” in which he examines the first Trump transition and the political appointments made in the departments of Energy, Agriculture and Commerce. Lewis described Trump in early 2017 as uninterested in preparation. “Getting to Know the U.S. Government had not been high on Donald Trump’s to-do list, even after he learned that he’d be running it.”
The title of this book, “The Fifth Risk,” refers to the risk associated with unprepared and poor management by unprepared and even hostile appointees.
Lewis’ new book, Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service is a collection of essays by various authors including Lewis. They each examine both the complexities of government and the often-overlooked work of public servants. In other words, the reader is introduced to the type of government employees now being fired.
Lewis is onto something fundamental in Who is Government? especially when he describes the dangerously simplistic stereotype of government employees as “living off the taxpayer.” Such a conviction, too often widely held, could even make mass firings seem deserved.
The tendency to typecast the jobs of government workers is not limited to those working for the federal government; it also includes the many employees of state and local governments such as teachers. And as a high school teacher for most of my life I was on the receiving end of such a perception.
I would be introduced to a stranger as “a high school teacher” and occasionally that would inspire thoughtless comments by my new acquaintance: “That must be great, getting summers off, going home at 3 o’clock, and using the same lesson plans over and over.” Admittedly, I usually did not react politely.
The counterpart to Michael Lewis’ stereotyped government worker is the often-negative image of government itself. In a Chris Hedges podcast with economist Richard Wolff, Professor Wolff explained how historic economic suffering in this country led to a raft of protections and regulations. Those began with the New Deal: “An awful lot of money was taxed or borrowed from rich corporations and wealthy people to provide a remarkable array of mass services, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, the Social Security system, government employment.”
Wolff then noted that, for the oligarchs, “This had to be rolled back.” He portrays the last 50 years as a story of attempts to roll back the New Deal. Hedges agrees, saying that the Trump administration, which is openly supported by major figures in today’s oligarchy, is “trying to essentially destroy government agencies like the Postal Service [and] education because they privatize it. They make money off it.”
They [the Trump administration] live in a world in which whatever the private sector does is efficient, more so than any other way of getting the job done. And anything that you can do to reduce the economic footprint of the government, thereby shifting the work over to the private sector, will be an increase in efficiency from which all of us will benefit.
Listening to this reminded me of hearing the naively simplistic solution to whatever problem is being discussed, “Government should be run like a business.”
In the End, DOGE is Elon Musk
Elon Musk famously admitted that, “We’ll make mistakes.” But when these mistakes are discovered, other members of the official power structure, sometimes even the titular vice president, are tasked with making the excuses.
Even if mass firings do not maximize efficiency and productivity, they definitely cut spending and downsize the government which, at least in the short term, saves money for Trump’s promised tax cuts. To be fair to Musk, he has not emphasized maximizing efficiency as often as he has touted terminations as a means to cut federal spending.
Here is some of what DOGE has “accomplished” in a very short time. DOGE has gained access to IRS tax records, sensitive data on migrant children and all of your Social Security records. By the time that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received the “stop work order” DOGE had gained read-only access to consumers’ data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In April NPR reported that a whistleblower’s disclosure detailed how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Staffers noticed “a spike in data leaving the agency.” And it is probable that the data includes “sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that … labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB”
On May 7, the Washington Post reported that the goal is “a centralized system with unprecedented access to data about Social Security, taxes, medical diagnoses and other private information.”
Imagine who might benefit from that — and who might be hurt.
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Jim Mamer
Jim Mamer is a retired high school teacher. He was a William Robertson Coe Fellow for the Study of American History at Stanford University in 1984. He served as chair of the History and Social Sciences department for 20 years (first at Irvine High and then at Northwood High). He was a mentor teacher in both Modern American History and Student Assessment. In 1992 he was named History and Social Sciences Teacher of the Year by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS).
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