This article in Government Executive describes Elon Musk’s savage attack on the federal workforce as the “triple cleaver” approach. It is actually the chainsaw approach, the very implement Elon waved around on stage at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual meeting. As he fires people without regard to their contributions, their experience, their worth, he celebrates and jumps around like a monkey on stage. Does he care about the lives he’s wrecking? Does he worry about the damage to the agencies he is decimating? Of course not! He’s our king!
Government Executive writes:
This president summarily fired tens of thousands of federal employees. This one cut more than 400,000 federal jobs, implementing a hiring freeze and dangling buyout offers to a vast swath of employees. This one opened thousands of government jobs to competition from the private sector. This one went so far as to issue an executive order requiring that all applicants for government jobs pass a loyalty test.
Now, in just a few weeks on the job, President Trump—via Elon Musk and his team of federal raiders—has found a way to outdo all of them. (Them being, in order: Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Truman.)
Musk and his squad at the United States Department of Government Efficiency Service—a name that even the most talented satirist couldn’t make up—have found a way to do what was once thought impossible, or illegal, or at least irrational: unload federal employees en masse. They have done so with a triple-meat-cleaver approach: a near-total hiring freeze, a buyout (sorry, “deferred resignation”) offer that may or may not be legal or affordable, and mass firings of workers without regard to their individual job performance or the importance of the work they do.
Most recent presidents have taken office having made promises to cut the fat out of the bureaucracy. But none have begun to do so in the absence of a rational plan, or even any consideration of the implications of what they were doing. That is, until now.
Musk has gone so far as to declare the federal workforce “unconstitutional,” so it’s no surprise that he and his team are taking a “fire first and ask questions later” approach to workforce reductions.
Their effort is radically different from the one taken by the previous Republican president: Trump himself. Back in 2017, federal management wonks were actually excited by a Trump initiative requiring agencies to develop restructuring plans aimed at reducing redundancy and improving efficiency in federal operations. Now that Trump has outsourced government reform to Musk and company, the emphasis is on simply slashing jobs, regardless of the consequences. The result is chaos.
Agencies have had to scramble to try to rehire employees in critical roles who were summarily fired. Other employees were let go after they accepted the deferred resignation offer, and are now left wondering if the promise of full pay through September still stands.
Very few of the jobs Musk and Trump are eliminating are filled by poor performers, or disloyal deep-staters, or involve operations that have been identified as unnecessary. And the monetary savings involved are trivial. After all, you could eliminate the entire federal workforce, and the reduction in spending would barely register in the federal budget.
As a percentage of American jobs, the federal workforce has been moving in one direction for decades—downward. It now stands at less than 2%. At the same time, we’ve asked federal agencies to take on more responsibilities—from airport security to combating deadly new diseases. And many of government’s already existing challenges have become more complex over time. Disaster response is just one example.
Mindlessly hacking away at the federal workforce is reckless, cruel and wasteful. Undoing the damage already done will take years. And Musk is just getting started.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Musk has not cut his own funding, however. He creates chaos because pain for others fills his pockets. He, like Trump, works for self interest. Unlike Trump, he has a brain.
Sudan will die and no one will care because keeping them alive might restrict Jeff Bezos’ personal freedom, making him keep such reports out of the paper.
Social Security will die because there are not enough workers to administer it, throwing millions into poverty, but Trump will create diversions that will make the 35% of the public who support him be the only votes counted.
Third world countries will turn to the Russian and Chinese orbits, isolating an unreliable United States.
Who knows if all this will cause the country to break apart. The balkanization of the United States would achieve a long dream of her enemies.
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Just a fact-check here. Soc Sec Admin plans to cut force from 57k to 50k. But, I get & agree with your gist.
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Chaos and disruption and breaking things is the point to create the conditions for seizure of power.
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Exactly!
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Repulsive Musk is like a drunken surgeon using brass knuckles to perform brain surgery. After four years of this destructive chaos our government will be a basket case on life support.
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Let’s make sure we trim that to two years.
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There’s so much coming at us day by day on the DOGE fed-worker-cutting front that it’s too soon to digest it, or begin totting up the damage. But Government Executive’s article gives us perspective.
We need more of that historical perspective. E.g., I recently read that Clinton’s 400k fed employee cut resulted in a huge shift of federal work to private contractors (probably intentionally—Clinton’s neoliberal approach). Many articles tell us # of civilian fed employees has been reduced—in a sense– because, tho population has doubled since year x, their #’s have remained at prox 2 million for decades. But other #’s suggest we’re actually talking about 4 million, when you count all the fed work subbed out to [for-profit!] contractors. DOGE is onto that, of course. When they look to cripple an agency [e.g., USAID], they cancel most of the contracts too.
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The bitterest man I ever met was someone who worked for a big corporation for years, regularly paying into their retirement program and, close to his retirement, the company was absorbed into another corporation (I don’t know the details) but along the way, the “new” company somehow and apparently legally would not take on the “debt” of retirement payments for the older employees. This was back in the late 80’s if I remember correctly. And a couple of books were written about it that were quite good–a kind of neo-liberal warning, from our present point of view perhaps, looking back over almost 50 years.
When I met him, he was working in a nickel-and-dime job and had no retirement benefits from the company he had worked for before for over 25 years. The financial hit was bad enough; but the betrayal ruined him as a person. He was totally absorbed by it–by having been treated so unfairly and being helpless to change it. His situation entered every conversation.
The deliberate breaking of long-standing trust, especially in existential matters, is one of the worst things a person or corporation or state can do to the general well-being of a person in the world. The federal firings reminded me of this most bitter person. It seems to me like poisoning at least a whole generation down the road with the same kind of bitterness.
Then think of how many people have paid into Social Security for their entire careers and trusted that it would be there when the time came. My God, what are we doing to our history. CBK
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In 1983, the Social Security Administration had 82,940 employees and 88,740 workyears, due to overtime (source: GAO report, HRD-87-66).
Can’t get anyone on the phone? Is your local office closing? Blame Congress.
Is the rogue DOGE coup legal? No. Why isn’t Congress standing up for the agencies they authorized and the funding level they appropriated?
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