During a speech last year, Russell Vought, who is one of the chief architects of Project 2025 and now Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), warned that federal workers should experience a lot of trauma.
Vought was not kidding.
Trump has only been president for two months. In that time, his administration has fired, laid off, or otherwise forced or bought out tens of thousands of federal government employees. This has been done directly through buyouts, retirements and terminations. Trump has also reduced the workforce indirectly by eliminating or hollowing out entire departments, offices and agencies. The courts have intervened and deemed that some of these terminations are likely illegal (for example the executive order eliminating probationary federal employees) because they violate due process and other statutes, procedures and regulations. If Trump follows through on his goal of significantly reducing the size of the federal government this will mean eliminating hundreds of thousands or more jobs.
Trump is doing this for both ideological reasons (to remove federal employees and career civil servants who are loyal to the rule of law, democracy, the Constitution and the public good) and to destroy the American people’s faith in the very idea of government as a force for good and positive freedom. The ultimate goal: to cement Trump’s autocratic rule and remove potential opposition. Trump is also driven by personal self-interest. The public money that is spent on federal employees and government services will be given to the very richest Americans and corporations. Donald Trump would greatly benefit from that outcome. This is the very definition of a moral hazard.
USA Today provides this important context:
How did federal workers become the nation’s favorite punching bag?
From the conservative grassroots Tea Party to the MAGA movement, Americans have long expressed deep resentment about the power the government has over their daily lives.
Anger over federal overreach swelled during the COVID-19 pandemic as mask requirements and vaccine mandates clashed with individual liberties, said Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
Trump is stoking that populist stance to root out ideological opposition to his agenda and undercut public employee unions, a key base of political support for Democrats, Kettl said.
Support for federal employees has slipped in recent years. A Pew survey in 2022 found confidence in career civil servants has declined; 52% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in these workers, down from 61% in 2018.
“Americans have never much liked the idea of being told what they had to do, and Americans have famously never liked the idea of big, centralized power,” Kettl said….Disapproval of this workforce only grew with the size and influence of the government.
USA Today continues:
“You are not cutting costs. You are cutting investments,” said Malcom, former director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the Department of the Interior. “These are investments in the nation to make everything work better, and that means that everybody who benefits from those investments is going to be losing out.”
Itir Cole resigned from her position at the United States Digital Service after the majority of her team was fired and locked out of their computers.
For Cole, that meant walking away from her work on a Centers for Disease Control system to track dangerous illnesses and pathogens and prevent their spread.
Americans need the talented technologists in the USDS who work on these kinds of hard problems for two-year terms, she said. “Instead we’re telling federal workers: ‘We’re good. We don’t need you anymore.'”
“I think it’s a huge miss, and there will be ripple effects of losing these kinds of services and the people who work on them,” she said. “It’s really scary.”
So far that has not resonated with her own family, most of whom voted for Trump. Cole says none of them have reached out to check on her since her resignation.
Ideally, government is formed to solve problems that are too big and complex for any one person or group of people to resolve on their own. By comparison, Trump and other “conservatives” and right-wing thinkers and ideologues view government "bureaucracy" as an enemy and something to be greatly reduced if not eliminated except for the military, law enforcement and taxation.
As a group, the federal employees who have lost their jobs — and others who soon will — are not surplus, parasites, bums, leeches, waste, excess, “NPCs” i.e. non-player characters in a game, or lazy or some other dehumanizing insult. As a group, government employees value their jobs and the services they provide to the American people.
Losing one’s job is one of the most stressful experiences a person can have. Moreover, it is not just one person or family that will suffer hardship and other negative experiences from losing their jobs because of the Trump administration’s war on government employees (and the idea of government itself), but the larger community as well. Those parts of the United States that are heavily dependent on government spending will feel that pain disproportionately.
We need your help to stay independent
From The Wall Street Journal:
Oklahoma City lies 1,300 miles from Washington, where the Trump administration is roiling the federal workforce through mass layoffs and return-to-office orders. But the effects are rippling through the Oklahoma capital, too, in ways that are both disruptive and surprising.
The Oklahoma City metro area alone has roughly 30,000 federal workers who help inspect meat, staff prisons, fix military planes and train air-traffic controllers. They are among 80% of the U.S. government’s 2.3 million nonpostal and nonuniformed employees who live beyond the Beltway, including many who are concentrated in certain regions by military bases and collections of federal offices.
Social scientists and other experts have repeatedly shown that government spending can have a positive impact on the economy through job creation, providing services and driving economic activity more broadly. Government spending on education, science, research, infrastructure and health are investments in the future of the country.
There is a flip side as well.
Economists are warning that the Trump budget cuts in combination with tariffs and other policies will likely cause an extreme recession in the United States. Federal and other government jobs (most notably the United States Postal Service) have represented a great opportunity for Black and brown people, immigrants and members of other under-resourced communities to join the American middle class. The Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce and government will make the racial wealth and income gap worse and move the American Dream even farther out of reach for many millions of Americans.
And Americans who depend on government services will be made even more vulnerable by the Trump administration’s cuts.
Additional reporting from The Wall Street Journal highlights how:
Staff cuts have reduced or slowed services for health, education and even operations like weather forecasting….In many parts of the country, the Trump administration’s job cuts have hit services and constituencies that Trump pledged to protect.
Chief among them is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which plans to cut about 70,000 positions and has already laid off thousands. The agency employs about 470,000 people.
Fewer VA staff are handling veterans’ claims that will get them treatment for military-service injuries and mental health conditions, two current employees said. This has already resulted in veterans waiting longer to get treatment in North Texas, one said.
Fifteen homeless veterans getting services at a VA community resource center in Denver are now without their assigned housing advocate….
During a recent interview with CNBC about the health of the nation’s economy, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bennett said “Could we be seeing that this economy that we inherited starting to roll a bit? Sure. And look, there’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending….The market and the economy have just become hooked. We’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period….”
Bennett is using therapeutic language in a way that speaks not to responsibility and healing and a principle of stewardship and care over a healthy body politic and society, but instead to rationalize and legitimate the extreme harm that the Trump administration and Republican Party’s policies are causing and will cause to the American people.
To that point, Bennett’s explanation of the pain caused by “detoxing”, echoes the “shock doctrine” and/or “shock therapy” approach to privatization, capitalism and “free market forces” that were applied to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block Communist countries in the aftermath of the Cold War. As has been widely documented, this shock therapy both directly and indirectly caused an increase in alcoholism, suicides, heart attacks, psychological stress and other negative health outcomes in those countries and across the region. The total loss of lives (what public health experts describe as “excess deaths”) is estimated to be more than 10 million.
The Trump administration's shock therapy treatment (which in the lexicon of neoliberalism is also benignly and deceptively described as "austerity") and its dismantlement of government agencies such as U.S.A.I.D. will also cause great pain abroad. Former U.S.A.I.D. senior official Atul Gawande made the following horrific prediction in a recent conversation with\ David Remnick at The New Yorker:
The internal estimates are that more than a hundred and sixty thousand people will die from malaria per year, from the abandonment of these programs, if they’re not restored. We’re talking about twenty million people dependent on H.I.V. medicines—and you have to calculate how many you think will get back on, and how many will die in a year. But you’re talking hundreds of thousands in Year One at a minimum. But then on immunization side, you’re talking about more than a million estimated deaths.
This is a preview of the impact that Trump and the Republican Party’s draconian budget cuts will have on the American people. This will be compounded by an American social safety net that is already weak — and getting much weaker as the Trump administration’s budget cuts and other policies are put in place targeting such programs as social security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing support, food support, education and other public goods and services.
In an excellent conversation at the New York Times, Ezra Klein spoke with Gillian Tett, who is an economics columnist and member of the editorial board at the Financial Times, about the economic “detox” period that has been prescribed by the Trump administration.
Their conversation merits being quoted at length:
Ezra Klein: You brought up the idea of a detox period that the economy will need to go through — of economic pain caused by the tariffs and uncertainty. Maybe it will be a recession. Maybe it will be higher inflation or just higher prices.
But obviously the metaphor of the detox is that, on the other side, you have broken your addiction to something. You are stronger and healthier. And the pain was to reduce the toxin.
Do you buy it? If we have this recession, if they go through with all this, do you buy that there is something better for the economy on the other side? And if so, what is it?
Gillian Tett: When I listen to them with my anthropology hat on, trying to put myself into their mind and absorb their worldview without judgment, which is what anthropologists are trained to do, what I hear is a belief that if they can detox the American economy, wean it off its addiction to debt and to excessively large quantities of cheap imports, and wean it off its addiction to financialization — meaning that the economy is driven by excess money rather than actually making genuine things — you’ll end up with an economy that is more focused on industry, more self-sufficient, more focused on creating good jobs for working-class people and essentially stronger, dominant and less at risk of being disrupted by potential foes who might control parts of the supply chain, like China.
That sort of seems to be their vision. Do I buy it? Personally, with my nonanthropologist hat on, speaking as an economic journalist, I find it very hard to believe that it’s going to work without major disruption and big bumps along the way at best.
And the vision of brutal power politics, hegemonic power, trampling on the weak, trampling on your foes, I find very distasteful.
As someone who also spends a lot of time thinking about economic history and is head of King’s College, in Cambridge, which was where John Maynard Keynes was based, I’m also haunted by the fact that in 1919, after World War I, Keynes wrote a haunting pamphlet called “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” in which he pointed out that globalization pre-World War I had been very good for people — so had free markets and the free movement of people and innovation — and that had delivered a huge economic boom.
That was obviously disrupted after World War I. But after World War I, the governments had a choice: They could either go back to globalization, free-market capitalism and some element of collaboration — or they could go down the path of revenge politics and punitive policies that tried to essentially hurt other countries. Keynes begged them to go down the first path, and warned that if they went down the second, it would simply stoke up more hatred and lead to World War II.
Unfortunately, his pleas were ignored, and we actually ushered in the 1930s, which was all about revenge politics — with disastrous consequences.
So when I look at the revenge politics and the punitive measures and the beggar-thy-neighbor approaches being endorsed by the Trump regime, I think we’re back to the beginning of the 1930s. And it terrifies me.
The “deaths of despair” describes a phenomenon where working-age non-college-educated “working class” white men and women in the United States were dying at high rates from alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide and other maladies and self-harm as compared to other demographic groups. This concept became the subject of much public discussion during Trump’s first term in office.
It has been hypothesized that feelings of despair, loss, loneliness, aggrieved entitlement, and an overall feeling of loss of honor and direction in life explained support for Trump and authoritarian populism among that population. The deaths of despair hypothesis has been complicated by data which shows that it was not just “working class” and downwardly mobile white people, specifically white men, who were dying at a high rate but also Native Americans and Black Americans who have a similar socioeconomic profile.
UCLA Health summarizes these findings as, “A new analysis by researchers at UCLA Health found that mortality rates of middle-aged Black Americans caused by the “deaths of despair” — suicide, drug overdose and alcoholic liver disease — surpassed the rate of white Americans in 2022. Native Americans also had more than double the rate of both Black and white Americans that year.”
The United States with its version of late capitalism (what is more accurately described as “cannibal capitalism”) is, obviously, not the same as the former Communist Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries. That having been noted, the pain the Trump administration’s shock treatment will cause the American people will still be great.
What happens next? Who will the American people hold responsible for their suffering? Will the American people want more authoritarianism and fake populism happy pill poison? Or will the American people course correct and embrace real democracy and real populism that empowers and nurtures them and their communities and the larger society?
Unfortunately, the data, trends and how American society is so deeply troubled suggest that many Americans will choose more pain because of a false belief that it will somehow cure what ails them as their feelings of unhappiness and misery have become a new normal. Trumpism and authoritarian populism are symptoms and not causes of much deeper institutional and systemic problems. According to the 2025 Happiness Report which is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in conjunction with Gallup polling, the United States ranks 24th in happiness. The report ranks 147 countries on their happiness levels. Finland was number 1. Americans 30 years old and under are profoundly unhappy as compared to the American population as a whole. If happiness is connected to larger anti-democratic trends then America's future is dire. Fortune Magazine elaborates, "If you were only to assess those below 30, the U.S. wouldn’t even rank in the top 60 happiest countries, the report finds. It’s the same reason for the U.S.’s dramatic drop last year from no.15 to no.23."
Ultimately, America’s collective unhappiness is entangled with the rise of political polarization and rage at “the elites” and “the system.” The report explains, “The country-wide evolution of happiness and trust is highly associated with the rise in the likelihood of voting for anti-system parties in Western Europe and the United States.”
Shares