Firing federal workers

Even for an administration that revels in cruelty, it is striking to see the letter sent by Elon Musk’s twenty-something minions at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to the thousands of federal workers they’ve tossed into the unemployment line in recent weeks.
Here in the North Country, those fired workers include staff in the U.S. Forest Service offices in places like Cook and Ely, who received letters that included the following language: “The Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment with the Agency.”
There is much that could be said about the individuals who crafted these lines, individuals who undoubtedly found fulfillment in belittling others. Musk’s acolytes, who sent these letters to thousands of government workers, had never met any of the people they were discharging and had little or no idea what their jobs even entailed. They had never spoken to their supervisors nor asked to see job descriptions or performance reviews. The targets of these letters were simply names on a spreadsheet, whose only failing was being listed as a probationary employee.
The letter any decent human being would send in such circumstances would explain that their position was being discontinued for budgetary reasons and that their service to the government was appreciated. Instead, by falsely claiming these mass firings are performance-related, they are denying these federal workers — many of whom are veterans — unemployment compensation and harming their future job prospects.
Yet the young DOGE attack dogs have been let loose precisely to be cruel, which appears to be the only skill fitting the government’s current needs under the Trump administration.
Certainly, knowledge and ability are no longer criteria for government employment. Indeed, Musk’s DOGE crew is so lacking in understanding of the functioning of the government that they have repeatedly fired large numbers of workers only to learn later that their jobs were so critical, such as protecting the safety of our nuclear weapons or fighting the spread of the bird flu, that they had to be asked to return. Imagine being told you’re a worthless grifter taking advantage of the taxpayers one day only to learn you’re desperately needed back in the office the following day. It’s pathetic, comical, and tragic all at the same time — in other words, a perfect metaphor for the Trump administration.
We recognize that many Trump supporters are relishing the cruelty being inflicted on federal workers, out of some misplaced sense that they are getting even with the imagined “Deep State.” In fact, the people being laid off are mostly low-level, the folks who inspected their food at the processing plant, processed funding applications at the Small Business Administration, or swept the halls at VA hospitals. In other words, working-class folks just trying to make ends meet, who Musk and his henchmen have made out to be traitors deserving of nothing but disdain. It’s sociopathic.
Musk routinely touts the money he’s supposedly saving the taxpayers from the payroll cuts he’s making. The savings, relatively speaking, are miniscule, if they exist at all.
Contrary to popular belief, most federal jobs don’t pay much. A typical position as a GS-5 starts at about $34,000 a year and tops out at $44,000. Even a mid-level position, at a GS-9, starts at around $51,000 and tops out at just under $67,000. And since Musk is targeting probationary workers, the typical pay scales will be closer to the bottom of these ranges than the top. While federal workers receive benefits in addition to wages, those benefits are not what they used to be.
If Musk were to lay off a quarter of the roughly 1.87 million federal workers, it would save about $35 billion annually, assuming you’re robbing them of their unemployment benefits as well. While $35 billion is a big number for most of us, it amounts to just 0.5 percent of the federal budget and is a drop in the bucket if the Republicans are hoping to actually pay the $450 billion annual price tag of their planned extension and expansion of the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.
Even worse, the government likely won’t save anything at all in the end. Since the government hires workers to do actual jobs, many of those jobs will simply be outsourced to the private sector, for substantially more money. That’s the usual outcome from outsourcing the public sector workforce.
But then the bloodletting really isn’t about savings. It’s about optics and letting Trump supporters thrill to the vision of low-level federal workers losing jobs that their families depend on. It’s governing as a never-ending Trump rally, full of senseless and misdirected anger, fueled by a man at the top who draws power from the suffering of good people.