Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
The work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE, has created mass confusion in the American public service over the past few weeks. The infamous “Fork in the Road” e-mail, sent to two million federal employees by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, led to an estimated 75,000 workers taking a deferred resignation offer. Another 30,000 public servants have been terminated, including, perhaps most abruptly, most of the staff of USAID.
More cuts are on the way. The Pentagon has proposed cutting 8 per cent of its budget, beginning with firing 5,400 probationary workers next week; 7,000 people are expected to be terminated from the Internal Revenue Service; and there are plans for a reported 50-per-cent reduction of staff in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Last Saturday, Mr. Musk tweet-ordered and e-mailed federal workers to summarize their accomplishments for the week, warning that a failure to do so would be taken as a resignation.
The result is the purposeful decimation of the federal public service and the already threadbare American social-safety net.
The recent cull is, at its core, premised on a grave misunderstanding of the design and function of the public service. The sociologist Max Weber famously argued that the purpose of bureaucracy is to embed rational decision-making processes that are premised on skill, specialization and competence, rather than nepotism. Governments can (and should) change hands, but the career public servants responsible for administering and executing the directives of Congress and the president are, in their professional lives, non-partisan.
President Donald Trump and Mr. Musk claim that these cuts are about improving the efficiency of the federal government, which is undeniably an enormous, expensive and complex organization. DOGE, however, is not a government department or agency and has no statutory authority. Mr. Musk is a private citizen with an extraordinary amount of delegated executive power. His recklessness and impulsivity, combined with the fact that he makes impromptu, prodigious demands of public servants (often in proclamations on X), means that the lines of accountability that normally define the relationship between elected political elites and the bureaucracy have been severed.
Reading between the lines of the wholesale elimination of jobs, agencies and programs, however, is an attempt to root out the so-called “deep state” that the Trump administration believes exists to sabotage its agenda.
It is also an explicit attack on the very idea of expertise and those who claim to hold it.
The denunciation of experts and elites is a common foil of populists, though they often conflate the two. The specific brand of populism that won Mr. Trump the presidency also avoids differentiating the elites and experts they disparage from Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, who are elite, but in the perceived astronomical wealth kind of way, and whose claim to expertise is similarly assumed to be evidenced by their claims of financial success.
The drama of mass firings, budget cuts and dramatic shifts in the mission of government departments and agencies obscures a devastating assault on science and the pursuit and deployment of evidence-based knowledge. This is happening through several mechanisms, including major shifts in how scientific and social science research is funded.
The National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, had all of its grants frozen shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, though this was later blocked by a federal judge. On the table is a proposed US$4-billion cut in grant funding, which could paralyze medical research on cancer, genetics and infectious diseases conducted in universities and hospitals across the country. The Trump administration has now prevented NIH from considering new grant applications.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent agency that supports research in science and engineering, has fired 10 per cent of its staff and has similarly paused grant reviews in order to ensure compliance with Mr. Trump’s executive orders pertaining to the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion directives and programming. NSF employees were reportedly provided a long list of terms that would result in grants being rejected during the review process, including “female,” “bias,” “inequality” and “trauma.”
Scientific and societal advancement requires predictable and stable funding. And, to be blunt, people will die because of these decisions. Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk seem to think that only the private sector and Silicon Valley can contribute to the success of a nation. But the ripple effects of these attacks on expertise will set research on diseases, climate change and women’s health back by decades.