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President Donald Trump and Elon Musk look like they’re having a blast in Washington, clear-cutting elements of the federal government and seizing power from states and Congress.
Their glee is at odds with the growing evidence of repercussions and anger out in the country at their approach of cutting first and asking questions later.
The success of Trump’s second term may hinge on how and whether these cuts, imposed indiscriminately and without transparency, are felt out in the country. How small should a bureaucracy be for a country of more than 330 million people that brings in and spends trillions of tax dollars each year?
The White House trolled its critics this week by sharing an image of Trump dressed up like a smiling king after his administration moved to end a congestion pricing program long in the works in New York City.
Musk, who recently bragged of feeding USAID to a “woodchipper” and essentially ending foreign aid, carried the lumberjack metaphor to a new level when he put on sunglasses and wielded a chainsaw onstage to wild cheering during an annual convention for conservatives just outside Washington on Thursday afternoon.
But while Musk was embracing the role of comic book character, down in Georgia, Rep. Richard McCormick, a Republican, was getting booed.
McCormick, who was reelected with nearly 65 percent of the vote in 2024, was hearing anger from a community upended by mass government layoffs that will ultimately touch communities across the country.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is based in Atlanta, cut about 10 percent off its 13,000 person workforce as part of the mass government layoffs that, for now, are targeting people hired within the last one or two years. At CDC, that included, according to a CNN report, an entire class of specially trained “disease detectives.”
Probationary workers have been fired at agencies across government, including hundreds at the Federal Aviation Administration just as the agency deals with a deadly plane crash and a string of other incidents that have spooked fliers.
About 6,000 Internal Revenue Service workers were laid off from locations around the country, including at a call center in Utah, just before tax season, sparking a protest in Ogden.
In Roswell, McCormick tried to channel Musk’s point about efficiency, suggesting that some CDC jobs could be done by AI, a comment that did not go over well.
While not criticizing Trump, McCormick also tried to draw an equivalence between Trump’s power grab and the Biden administration.
“I don’t think executive privilege should be as strong as it is. I think we’re out of balance right now,” he said.
But there is, for now, no check on layoffs as federal judges have so far declined to step in. And their admonitions for Trump to stop some spending cuts have been creatively ignored, at least according to some reports saying that international aid programs that should have resumed have not.
Americans generally overestimate how much taxpayer money goes to international aid — it’s less than 1 percent of the federal budget. And they might not realize that a good portion of that money used to feed the world stays here in the US, as Nick Levendofsky, Executive Director of the Kansas Farmers Union told CNN’s Jake Tapper earlier in February.
Firing all probationary employees is an indiscriminate way to go about cuts, and there have been clear mistakes in who has been let go.
The US Department of Agriculture owned up to mistakenly firing people involved with its Food Safety Inspection Service, which is in need at the moment as the country deals with an outbreak of avian flu. It’s not clear where the mistakenly fired workers, which USDA is working to bring back, were stationed. USDA has labs sprinkled throughout the country and its main lab is in Ames, Iowa.
Mistakenly fired nuclear safety workers — the Trump administration struggled to reinstate them — are based in Texas.
Many workers have been told it was poor performance that led to their termination, but Andrew Lennox, a Marine veteran hired to coordinate care for veterans in Ann Arbor, Michigan, told CNN’s Brianna Keilar he had not yet had a performance review and his supervisors had not been consulted. More than 1,000 recently hired workers have been laid off from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Federal workers out in the country, Lennox said, are veterans like him and people choosing public service.
“It’s your neighbors,” he said. “These are not the evil bureaucrats you think that are just coming up to system and living off the system. We want to work hard. We want to help people,” Lennox said.
The Pentagon has paused its plan to fire up to 50,000 employees, most of them outside of the Capitol region, after CNN reported that new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had not first conducted a legally required review of what effect the firings might have.
Defense officials were scrambling to create lists of workers who should be exempted from firings because they work in essential roles in cybersecurity, intelligence, operations and foreign military sales, according to CNN’s report by Natasha Bertrand and Haley Britzky. They add:
DOGE officials have been on-site at NASA facilities in Florida, according to news reports, alarming scientists and local lawmakers. It’s an area where Musk, the founder of SpaceX, which has multiple contracts with NASA, has a clear conflict of interest.
It’s also a reminder that a lot of government money goes to private companies and public institutions — meaning that a lot of people who rely on the government for funding do not actually work for the government.
Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, issued statements calling for workers at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to be exempted from firings. She also said planned cuts to grants from the National Institutes of Health will hit her state in multiple areas.
“I have heard from the Jackson Laboratory, the University of Maine, Maine Medical Center Research Institute, the University of New England, and MDI Biological Laboratory, among others, that these cuts, which in some cases would apply retroactively to existing grants, would be devastating, stopping vital biomedical research and leading to the loss of jobs,” Collins said in a statement earlier this month.
There are similar statements from lawmakers around the country trying to protect the research money that is spread around the country.
