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....Trump superfans and many normie American's who aren't MAGA believe that Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is just that, an arm of the government aimed at making government more efficient by fighting waste, fraud, and abuse. Americans seem divided on the question of whether Musk is doing this well: In an Economist/YouGov poll, 49% of respondents agree that "Elon Musk is cutting waste and fraud," while 51% believe that "Elon Musk is cutting useful programs." Clearly, the people in the former category think Musk is doing what he claims to be doing -- looking for wasted tax money -- and acting in good faith, while even some people in the latter category undoubtedly believe he's sincere but makng cuts in a misguided way.
The firings have ... excised the next generation of leaders at the C.D.C., the N.I.H., the Food and Drug Administration, and other agencies that the [Department of Health and Human Services] oversees. “It seems like a very destructive strategy to fire the new talent at an agency, and the talent that’s being promoted,” said Dr. David Fleming, the chairman of an advisory committee to the C.D.C. director. He added, “A lot of energy and time has been spent in recruiting those folks, and that’s now tossed out the window.” ...
On Monday, eight officials who led health agencies under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — including the heads of the C.D.C., the N.I.H. and the F.D.A. — issued a joint statement denouncing the cuts. It listed a string of initiatives, from combating the opioid epidemic to bringing primary care to rural communities, that are “vital to the economic security of our nation” and are carried out by public servants....
About 700 staff members were cut at the F.D.A., including lawyers, doctors and doctorate-level reviewers in the medical device, tobacco, food and drug divisions.
The cuts over the weekend have touched all manner of health workers. They are not only scientists and disease hunters but also administrators who oversee grant proposals, analysts figuring out new ways to cut health care costs and computer specialists who try to improve the government’s antiquated systems for tracking health information.
Most of the Times readers who commented on Stolberg's story seem to be horrified. Some have an alternate theory about what Musk wants -- and, obviously, they have a point:
It doesn’t matter how many federal employees they cut. It won’t come close to covering the cost of their tax cuts for the wealthy.But there's more going on than just an effort to line the pockets of Musk and his fellow billionaires.
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Most telling is that these cuts aren't actually designed to save money or improve performance - they're merely justifying high-end tax cuts that still won't be paid for.
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None of this will put even the tiniest dent in the federal budget and the ripple effects will last for years. It's just redirecting government expenditures into private pockets.
Musk, who desperately craves approval, experienced a new wave of right-wing adulation when he became "red-pilled" and began retransmitting right-wing ideas and memes. This echoes the life story of Trump, who found a right-wing fan base on Fox in the early 2010s, at a time when he was long past his 1980s heyday and his TV ratings on The Apprentice were slipping.
One reason Musk is doing this is that he craves right-wing praise. He's absorbed the ideology of Project 2025 and of RAGE (Retire All Government Employees), one of the pet ideas of the tech bros' favorite pseudo-philosopher, Curtis Yarvin. He's doing what J.D. Vance -- a Yarvin fan -- proposed in 2021:
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”I've been going to protests and wondering how to get across to ordinary Americans how bad all this is, and I can't quite imagine how to make the point that Republicans are extreme ideologues who have ideas that are strange and bad. One of their strange, bad ideas is that you're "the enemy," and therefore don't belong in government at any level, if you're not a zealous advocate of their other strange, bad ideas. In the sciences, these ideas include vaccine denialism and total denial of the existence of climate change. In other areas, they include a belief that no history of American race relations should ever be taught in schools, that abortion should be illegal under all circumstances, that gun proliferation is awesome, and that regulation of business is communism.
But in order to argue that Trump and Musk want to purge the government of everyone who's not an extremist right-wing weirdo, you'd have to explain to the public that conservatism and the Republican Party aren't normal and haven't been normal for a long time. During the presidential campaign, Tim Walz tried to tell us that Republicans are "weird," but the campaign shut that message down. It could have been an effective entry point for a lot of Americans. As it is, Americans seem to believe that the GOP is the Normal Party and the Democratic Party is the party of ideological weirdos, in part because D.C. Democrats apparently agree with Republicans that both of these things are true.
As a result of all this, the most effective line of attack against Musk is probably that he's cutting too much out of pure greed. But we shouldn't take the other argument, the one about ideological bizarreness, off the table. Maybe we need to start calling these guys weird again.
And we should also point out that Musk is a bully. In The Washington Post, Pranshu Verma reports:
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette works at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on reducing bureaucratic waste. He also happens to be blind. So when he criticized Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service in testimony on Capitol Hill last week, Musk unleashed an online attack Hedtler-Gaudette described as “surreal” in its juvenile bigotry.As a society, we simply accept the fact that right-wingers will abuse and threaten their targets, and that online right-wingers with large followings will summon armies to do the abusing and threatening. Musk gets emotional satisfaction from doing this -- this doesn't help make him rich, but because he's a sick fuck, it makes him happy. I wish we could get across to the public how deranged this practice, and how common. (The popular X account Libs of TikTok is entirely devoted to this kind of trageting.) Trump, of course, also enjoys cruelty. But I think the vast majority of Americans have no idea that sadism is a key aspect of the DOGE purge. We need to find a way to get that across.
First, Musk retweeted a post on X noting that the “blind director of watchdog group funded by George Soros testifies that he does not see widespread evidence of government waste” and added two laughing/crying emojis. The tweet garnered more than 21 million views, and sparked dozens of hateful messages to Hedtler-Gaudette’s account.
“He couldn’t see s--- … perfect excuse for being unable to perform your job,” one poster said. “The dei blind guy can’t see fraud. U can’t make up this garbage,” another wrote. One person even called for posters to surface Hedtler-Gaudette’s bank account.
The episode illustrates how Musk’s unparalleled online reach has given him a powerful tool to attack individuals who criticize DOGE, with one post able to spark hundreds of blistering responses from his followers.
