The Atlantic / Don Moynihan - The DOGE Project Will Backfire (Gift article)
Trump's war on public employees is bad for all of us.
By Donald Moynihan
February 22, 2025, 9 AM ET
President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk justify dismantling the civil service as cost cutting. The federal government has "billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse," Trump claimed earlier this month, and Musk has complained about a "staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money." Their actions -- a barrage of executive orders, memos, layoffs, and attempts to unilaterally eliminate entire agencies -- have sparked outrage, but Musk sees that only as proof of their achievements: "They wouldn't be complaining so much if we weren't doing something useful."
For all of Trump's and Musk's talk of efficiency, their policies will likely slow down the government. The state needs capacity to perform core tasks, such as collecting revenue, taking care of veterans, tracking weather, and ensuring that travel, medicine, food, and workplaces are safe. But Trump seems intent on pushing more employees to leave and making the civil service more political and an even less inviting job option. He bullies federal employees, labeling them as "crooked" and likening their removal to "getting rid of all the cancer." A smaller, terrified, and politicized public workforce will not be an effective one.
To start, let's dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not. As a share of the workforce, federal employment has declined in the past several decades. Civilian employees represent about 1.5 percent of the population and account for less than 7 percent of total government spending. According to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, seven out of 10 civilian employees work in organizations that deal with national security, including departments -- such as Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security -- that the public supports.
The reality is that the federal government has long faced a human-capital crisis. Since 2001, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has classified human-capital management -- the number of people who are successfully recruited to fill skilled positions -- as an area of "high risk" for the federal government. The workforce is older than the private sector, and the federal government already has a hard time hiring people.
If the federal government should, then, rightly be focused on hiring, it is quite obviously doing the opposite, but the manner in which the Trump administration and DOGE are forcing workers out will only compound the error. Ten thousand USAID employees, for example, were recently placed on administrative leave. Employees on leave must still be paid, so little money will be saved in the short run. And if they're rehired, the agencies will have to incur the costs that resulted from the disruption in their work. The USAID inspector general's office has said that the agency has almost entirely lost its ability to track $8.2 billion in unspent aid. (The inspector general was fired the day after his office made that announcement.) Projects such as drug trials and medical treatments have been abandoned.
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