Galt's Government Gives Way

Let's see how the Trump administration is doing at eviscerating state capacity.

Photo by Marianna Smiley on Unsplash

Earlier this month the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World posited that Donald Trump and Elon Musk were attempting a reverse Galt:

Trump has given Elon Musk and his business allies the keys to the government’s plumbing, endorsing their efforts to force out senior civil servants across the federal bureaucracy.

This is the Randian libertarian dream in two ways. First, if you accept libertarian dogma, the past two weeks are a best-case scenario. The wealthiest man in the world is taking a hatchet to the federal government, ejecting the looters and moochers who are viewed by many as the impediments to a dynamic society and economy. Surely the result will be a capitalist utopia.

The second way that it’s a libertarian dream? It’s not even remotely grounded in reality….

Maybe I am wrong and this will all work out as Musk plans. Maybe voters wanted a disruption of the federal government, regardless of the public policy effects. Maybe a “move fast and break things” ethos to reform will work out as intended. Or maybe this all turns out to be an overreaction — things calm down in a month and a relatively pleasant status quo persists.

But based on Trump’s leadership style — and based on what happened during his first term — I’d put my money on a far more disastrous outcome.

Less than three weeks later, it’s safe to say that this was not an overreaction. Indeed, nothing has calmed down. So let’s survey how the destruction of U.S. state capacity has been continuing apace.

The Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein, and Emily Davies reported on the Trump administration’s rash, messy dismissal of “probationary employees” — i.e., the latest hires by the federal government:

Many federal government employees were dismissed over the holiday weekend as managers confronted a Trump administration demand to fire workers by Tuesday. In group texts and in online forums, they dubbed the error-ridden run of firings the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

The firings targeted new hires on probation, who have fewer protections than permanent employees, and swept up people with years of service who had recently transferred between agencies, as well as military veterans and people with disabilities employed through a program that sped their hiring but put them on two years’ probation….

The Trump administration will not disclose how many workers it cut since last week ahead of its Tuesday deadline, but the government employed more than 200,000 probationary workers as of last year. The firings have extended to touch employees at almost every agency, including map makers, archaeologists and cancer researchers, The Post found, in choices that some workers said contradicted a U.S. Office of Personnel Management directive to retain “mission-critical” workers.

The Federal Aviation Administration let go hundreds of technicians and engineers just weeks after a midair collision a few miles from the White House killed 67 people, eliciting promises from Trump officials to improve air safety, workers said in interviews. FEMA, which handles the nation’s natural disasters, is preparing to fire hundreds of probationary employees, according to four people familiar with the situation who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The agency is already stretched thin responding to fires in California and floods in Kentucky. And the administration terminated scores of employees who work to bolster the nation’s nuclear defense, only to realize its error and start reversing the firings.

“I’d understand a strategic reduction in force if needed,” said one USDA employee, who was fired over the weekend. “But this was a butchering of some of our best. Does the public know this?”

The termination letters hitting inboxes all struck the same note: Probationary workers were getting the ax for poor job performance. But many of those fired had just received positive reviews, or had not worked in the government long enough to receive even a single rating, according to interviews with federal employees and documents obtained by The Post.

This does not sound like a well thought-out streamlining of the federal government. Instead, it sounds exactly like what Elon Musk did at Twitter — which, remember, has led to a company that “is now worth 72 percent less than the $44 billion he paid for it.” Also, this is your 6497th reminder that running the government is not like running a business, like, at all.

GovExec provides a full list of which probationary employees are being eliminated across the federal government. The Washington Post's Dan Lamothe, Alex Horton, and Hannah Natanson reports that the Department of Defense is next on DOGE’s chopping block, noting that, “Chaos surrounding fast-moving and sudden directives seemed to be a feature, rather than a bug, said a staffer with the U.S. Cyber Command.” They quote another officer explaining, “Morale is not great. No one trusts that they won’t jack this whole thing up.” Well, it’s not like morale has anything to do with warfighting, so I’m sure that will turn out fine.

Beyond the dismissal of probationary employees, the Trump White House is also intent on getting rid of experienced civil servants. In some cases this is because they are resigning rather than agreeing to obey orders that they believe to be against the law. In other cases, as at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the goal is more political. NBC News reports that, “The Trump administration is preparing to fire hundreds of high-level Department of Homeland Security employees this week as part of a move to rid the country’s third-largest agency of people deemed to be misaligned with the administration’s goals.”

Staying at DHS, the Trump administration is redirecting existing government resources to focus on their preferred set of policy priorities. Trump won the election, so that would seem like a reasonable request. The thing is, their priorities do not seem to make a great deal of sense from the perspective of, you know, protecting the homeland. Consider this from USA Today’s Josh Meyer:

The Department of Homeland Security has ordered its entire investigations division - composed of 6,000 agents - to divert focus on drug dealers, terrorists, and human traffickers and shift priority to the Trump administration’s mission of deporting people in the U.S. illegally, USA TODAY has learned.

The new focus for DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations agency (HSI), current and former officials say, is in keeping with recent executive orders signed by President Donald Trump that demand a wholesale shift in federal law enforcement resources toward immigration crackdowns and removal.

But they warn the shift will undermine high-profile investigations into some of the most dangerous transnational threats Americans face, including Mexican drug cartels smuggling deadly fentanyl across the border from Mexico.

“A lot of my colleagues were afraid this was going to happen,” after Trump won election on a hardline immigration platform, said Chris Cappannelli, a former HSI supervisory agent. “This is going to be a total train wreck.”

“Some of my friends short of mandatory retirement yet eligible are rushing to get their retirement paperwork in,” Cappannelli told USA TODAY. “Others are looking for other law enforcement jobs outside of DHS where they won’t have to be chasing migrants. This isn’t what they signed up for – or the best use of their skills and experience.”

How is any of this benefiting the U.S. taxpayer? Trump and Musk are claiming billions, if not hundreds of billions, in savings, but their math seems fuzzy and their facts seem alternative and their chain of command seems opaque. Plus, the risks created by these kind of actions are non-trivial.

So, to sum up: the federal government is being denuded of talent at both the senior and junior levels. It is happening in the most haphazard way possible. And it will make things that the government is supposed to do — disaster recovery, air safety, public health — that much harder to do. The harm being done is irreparable.

It’s now a question of when, rather than if, this administration is culpable for a preventable catastrophe that could only have happened on its watch.