The Hole of Government Approach

Is it incompetence or malevolence? Looks like both.

Doctors have developed numerous “minimally invasive surgeries” that do less damage to the body, shorten hospital stays, and have fewer risks and complications.

The Trump/Musk team is using a chainsaw to dismember the living U.S. government with no recognition of or attempt to protect vital organs. They should have taken the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.

There are about 3 million civilian employees of the federal government. About 80% of them live and work outside the Washington DC metropolitan area. We don’t even know how many of them have already been threatened with termination or actually removed from their jobs. All we have are sporadic anecdotal reports. In many agencies, the human relations and data people who could normally answer such questions have been locked out of their offices and messages.

The DOGE spin machine is filled with hallucinations masquerading as progress reports. It’s artificial and not intelligent. Reporters have shown numerous errors.

Current operations are being curtailed

Without warning or preparation, thousands of federal workers are being sent home, locked out, suspended, or fully fired. Current operations, often giving help to deserving Americans, have been halted or drastically curtailed.

The Department of Veterans Affairs dismissed 2,400 people in February and plans to cut 83,000 by the end of the year.

Already, in the middle of tax season, the Internal Revenue Service announced firing 7,000 people and has developed plans to cut half of its 90,000 person work force.

The Social Security Administration is cutting 7,000 workers, while claiming there will be no cut in services. Sure, the elderly can drive further or wait longer to ask for help.

At least 700 people have been laid off by the Food and Drug Administration despite the importance of their work on food safety.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cut 1,300 and the National Institutes of Health cut 1,500 probationary employees, a category that includes both brand new hires and those recently promoted because they were so good.

About 400 FAA people whose work related to air traffic control were fired this month, despite the problems already revealed by the first deadly commercial crash in 16 years.

National parks are already feeling the impact of the firing of 1,000 people.

The General Services Administration fired its team of techies helping all agencies of the government.

The Trump administration is terminating the jobs of dozens of technology specialists whose broad portfolio of projects across the government included the I.R.S.’s free tax filing software and passport services.

The specialists, who belonged to a unit at the General Services Administration known as 18F, developed software and technology products for various federal agencies, with the goal of improving efficiency and better serving the public. In an email to workers at the agency’s Technology Transformation Services over the weekend, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is now the division’s director, said that 18F had been identified as noncritical and would be cut.

Their work had been halted so abruptly, the suspended employees continued, that they were unable to assist in an orderly transition or even learn where to return their equipment. Before their suspensions, the website continued, 18F staff were working to help the I.R.S. support free filing software, to improve access to weather data at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and streamline the process of procuring a passport.

And the U.S. Agency for International Development, our premier foreign aid organization since 1961, has been effectively shut down, with career staff ordered home, their current activities halted, their futures uncertain. If the Trump Administration had wanted to stop the aid program, they should have asked permission by Congress and worked out a phasedown, not a deadly cliff.

A senior USAID official, now fired, reported on the likely impact of the cuts in health programs: block

up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths;

200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of infections;

one million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition, which is often fatal, each year;

more than 28,000 new cases of such infectious diseases as Ebola and Marburg every year.

Of course, these victims are foreigners, so maybe they don’t matter to Trump and Musk.

The Pentagon has promised to fire 5,400 people, but won’t explain who or why.

No doubt there are many more people dismissed or scheduled for removal, and more current problems because of their loss, that haven’t gained notoriety. Most federal workers have some minimal job protections: they have to be fired for cause, for poor performance, or as part of a carefully studied reduction in force. The Trump/Musk chainsaw hasn’t been discriminate or compassionate either to employees or the people they serve.

If the administration really wanted to go after waste, fraud, and abuse, it shouldn’t have fired 17 Inspectors General – the very people already investigating or rooting out mismanagement and corruption.

Future capacity is endangered

About 29% of federal workers are at retirement age, and only 9% are under 30. Even if much of government could be done by a much smaller workforce along with artificial intelligence, we would still need millions of humans to perform vital public services in the decades ahead. But already the Trump Administration has closed many of the entry doors and removed their career ladders.

The cuts public health are scary.

At the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier biomedical research agency, an estimated 1,200 employees — including promising young investigators slated for larger roles — have been dismissed.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two prestigious training programs were gutted: one that embeds recent public health graduates in local health departments and another to cultivate the next generation of Ph.D. laboratory scientists. But the agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service — the “disease detectives” who track outbreaks around the world — has apparently been spared, perhaps because of an uproar among alumni after a majority of its members were told on Friday that they would be let go.

President Trump’s plan to shrink the size of the federal work force dealt blows to thousands of civil servants in the past few days. But the cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services — coming on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic, the worst public health crisis in a century — have been especially jarring. Experts say the firings threaten to leave the country exposed to further shortages of health workers, putting Americans at risk if another crisis erupts.

NIH even cut its summer intern program.

The NIH last week abruptly cancelled an internship program that for decades has given more than 1,000 college students hands-on research training each summer — a step many current scientists say was critical to embarking on a biomedical career. The termination comes as the National Science Foundation is also defunding many sites in its Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, which for 40 years has offered paid research positions to college students, many from groups underrepresented in science.

This is cutting STEM at its roots. The whole future of medical research is threatened.

In just six weeks, the Trump administration overturned NIH’s leadership, slowed its main mission of identifying the best new science to fund and silenced personnel at the biggest sponsor of biomedical research in the world — a nearly $48 billion enterprise that supports the work of some 300,000 external scientists.

“It’s terrible. It’s awful. People are afraid to open their emails,” one NIH senior scientist said.

Even in a climate of fear, NIH employees say they want to protect their institution. They worry this winter of disruption may be causing lasting damage to the way science is conducted in the United States.

“The whole thing could just disappear,” said Phil Murphy, senior investigator and chief of the laboratory of molecular immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “The biomedical research enterprise in the United States depends largely on NIH dollars. You take the dollars away, the labs go away, and you lose the next generation of scientists.”

The Administration also cancelled its talent pipeline into federal service, the Presidential Management Fellows program, [PMF]. I’ve had several students over the years who went into that program, did well, and stayed on. It was an opportunity for them and a benefit for the rest of us.

The two-year, full-time fellowship brings recent graduate students into agencies across the government with pay, benefits, training and mentorship. It bills itself as “the premier leadership development program” and has helped thousands of graduates get into government roles since its founding in 1977.

“This is one of the most unsettling, tragic pieces of news yet,” said Sean O’Keefe, a member of the presidential management program’s inaugural class who went on to become the NASA administrator under President George W. Bush. “This is a firing of convenience. They are looking for a headcount reduction; there is nothing qualitative about this.”

Critics say ending the fellowship is counter to Trump’s pledge to improve efficiency and ensure Americans are served by the world’s “highest-skilled” federal workforce.

“You don’t destroy your lead pipeline for best-in-class talent if your motivation is to make the government more efficient,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on improving government. “To destroy the program is destruction for no purpose.”

The Foreign Service Exam, the first step in qualifying for the Foreign Service, has been cancelled for now, and an introductory training class for new officers, the A100, has been cancelled this year. Sure, talented people will be able to find some jobs, but we need them to keep government good and strong.

The whole approach of firing probationary appointees because they don’t have adequate employment protections is stupid and immoral, not least because many are recently promoted and thus the kind of people we want to stay in public service and grow.

Wise Outside Advice is being Curtailed

Throughout the government advisory panels have been established to look into a broad range of subjects. Most contain people familiar with particular policies and programs, often because of prior service. Individually, they don’t cost much: per diem for an annual meeting and maybe some site visits. And maybe their advice isn’t very helpful. And maybe there are too many of them.

But the Trump/Musk chainsaw wants to eliminate most of them. All at Department of Homeland Security. All at Department of the Interior. NOAA’s space, marine life, and climate panels. FDA’s panel on flu vaccines. FDIC’s panels on community banks and credit unions. The military academy visitor boards. The list goes on and on.

One that I know about is the Institute of Peace, a government foreign policy think tank created in the 1980s. Here’s what it has done.

USIP’s central mission, by its own description, is “to counter the destabilizing influence of China and other U.S. adversaries in fragile states, reduce the transnational criminal and gang violence that cause mass migration, address the threat posed by the Islamic State group and terrorist networks, and strengthen U.S. alliances and allies in strategic regions.”

USIP fulfills that mission by training tens of thousands of peace negotiators, diplomats and security actors; deploying technical specialists to conflict zones; providing military planners and diplomats with strategic planning and gaming exercises; and connecting the public with our nation’s commitment to peace that dates back to George Washington.

The institute has deep partnerships with the Department of Defense and specializes in resolving armed conflicts, making it not just a think tank that provides important scholarship, but a think-and-do tank.

USIP staff work on the ground in conflict zones with local governments, civil society groups and nonprofits to prevent, mitigate and resolve wars that challenge U.S. interests. It is the premier training ground for civilian and military leaders who learn to bring together diverse groups in warzones to identify and address root causes of conflict, to mediate disputes and to prevent the escalation of violence. All over the world, USIP staff have quietly facilitated peaceful resolutions to conflicts.

Think back to the rise of Islamist militias and the complicated sectarian and tribal feuds that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Pentagon called on USIP professionals to help mediate tensions. USIP opened offices in Baghdad and Erbil in 2004 to support peacebuilding and prevent a violent escalation of the conflict.

In early 2007, U.S. and Iraqi military forces managed to drive back al-Qaida, local militias and armed gangs involved in bloody sectarian and inter-clan strife. Working in partnership with the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, the USIP reached out to a wide network of local sheikhs to encourage them to join in a peace process.

In the Balkans, the institute was one of the lead organizations behind the Dayton Peace Agreement that brought an end to the war in Bosnia in 1995. As early as 2010, USIP held dialogues and training workshops to bring Serbs and Albanian Kosovars into discussions about interethnic coexistence.

In Nigeria, which has seen terrible religious conflict, USIP personnel brought together interfaith leaders to calm the violence.

In Colombia, USIP helped to bring together women from different religious communities to promote a nonviolent culture, and helped local leaders understand the dividends of peace so they could help resolve conflicts.

For fiscal year 2023, Congress provided $55 million to USIP – a tiny fraction of America’s national security funding. Considering its far-reaching work training the next generation of peacebuilders and curbing violent conflict around the world, USIP is a bargain for America at any price.

Jim Fallows, a journalist and private pilot, tells how valuable the little-known advisory panels in aviation are to our safety.

So let me focus on one dull-sounding development that sooner or later will be killing people. Yes, I could be talking about changes in Medicaid or in vaccine coverage or in cancer research, or about the USAID shutdowns that have already left many people dead overseas. Or lots more.

But instead I’m talking about the sudden attack on part of the invisible infrastructure that has kept air travelers so safe in the skies. Reminder: before last month’s helicopter-airliner collision over the Potomac, the US had gone nearly 16 years without a major airline crash. Through those years, US airlines conducted well over 10 billion passenger-journeys. A total of two people died in US airline accidents through that time. [UPDATE: Just now, as I put up this post, I see news of a potentially catastrophic close-call this morning at Chicago’s Midway airport. More on that as extra info comes in.]

The morning after the mass-fatality collision over the Potomac, Donald Trump was sure (and was completely wrong) on who was to blame. He said “because I have common sense” he knew the root cause must have been DEI.

But after that crash, many people also noted something Trump had done just a few days earlier. One of the many federal bodies targeted for elimination by Project 2025 and the Musk boys was a federal group called the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. This had been set up after the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland, and had been empowered by Congress to connect everyone with a stake in anti-terrorism measures. It advised the TSA, the FAA, the airlines, law enforcement agencies, and other crucial participants. Trump dissolved it on his second day in command.

After the DCA crash, that Aviation Security executive order made some news. But what probably mattered more were all the other coordinating and advisory committees Trump has abolished or suspended at around the same time.

There are more of these committees than you can easily imagine. They’ve advised the FAA, NASA, the TSA, and other groups about the various ways that aviation can become faster, more efficient, cleaner, more convenient, and above all steadily safer.

Their names may look bureaucratic and boring—I’ve listed a few of them below.² But most of the important innovations that have improved travel in recent decades can be traced back to one or more of these collaborative groups. Better ways to keep planes safely separated when in the skies, and on the ground. More rigorous ways to understand and apply the lessons of accidents. Better “situational awareness” for pilots in the cockpit and controllers at their radar screens. Higher standards of crash-worthiness for airframes. More precise forecasts of the most dangerous forms of weather. Faster ways to certify and deploy advanced technical systems, while being sure they will be safe.

The committees have done this because they have institutionalized the kind of complex public-private, academic-practitioner, regulator-operator, military-civilian coordination that has made it so safe to fly.

And they are being dissolved. Elon Musk didn’t tweet that he had sent them “to the woodchipper,” as he claimed about USAID. But that’s what he and his henchmen have done.

Recently I talked with an aerospace veteran who has been on several such groups and who combines many aviation perspectives in one career. This person has been a commercial pilot, a government official, a tech visionary, a business executive, and some other roles. In the current climate this person would prefer not to be named. I’ll use the term “he.”

“It’s a disturbing scenario,” this person said, about the accident chain that could be starting with the end of many advisory committees. Why?

“The FAA relies deeply on these advisory committees,” he said. “They’re a crucial source of deep-think knowledge from people on the outside.” My friend said that government employees doing daily operational work had limited opportunities “to be out with the industry and staying abreast of the latest and best innovative thinking.” These committees, long established and trust-based, are ways they regularly got together. They also have a track record as a way that new-technology ideas for aviation “make it through the gauntlet of reliability, affordability, survivability, all the ilities.”

“The reason we have such an amazing safety record in aviation is that we have created a culture of respect, collaboration, curiosity, and ultimately investment that lead to improvements in safety before things get as bad as they can get,” he said. “This dynamic is absolutely key to keeping America’s airspace system as safe as it has been.”

And, according to this lifetime aviator, that is now what is being torn apart. “The corrosive effect [of suspending these organizations] is as disturbing as anything I have seen in my government experience over the decades.” He was talking specifically about aviation and air safety. But it could also apply to cancer research. New vaccines. Flood preparedness. Pandemic control. Everything.

You can think of F. Scott Fitzgerald as having foretold our story one century in advance: They were careless people.… They smashed up things and creatures and retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness. You can think of the Greek philosopher Bion (whom I’ve mentioned before) as having done so, many centuries earlier: Boys throw stones at frogs in fun. But the frogs do not die in fun, they die in earnest.

You can think of the majority party in the Senate and the House, whose members watch and willfully do not see. But even they will ride on airplanes. Some of which could go down, at the end of accident chains being started right now.

Outside experts see things the insiders miss. Their advice doesn’t have to be accepted, but it should be available.

The Trump/Musk administration is doing so much damage with its chainsaw. It plans, and wants, to do so much more. We need to wake up, slow it down, and look again with clear eyes.

Joni Mitchell had it right: "You don't know what you've got. Till it's gone."