Expect More Calamities if Trump, Miller, Bannon and Musk Get Their Way on the Federal Workforce

Plane crashes are just the beginning if we gut the already fragile federal workforce. Democrats should respond by developing a massive government reform initiative.

I refuse to stoop to the mendacity of Donald Trump and link the shambolic first two weeks of his administration with the tragic crash at Reagan National Airport on Wednesday night. But I am confident that if Trump, Miller, Bannon, and Musk are allowed to continue their ravaging of the federal government, this fatal crash is only the first disaster our country will experience.

To be sure, the federal government is far from perfect. But it provides essential services and by and large does an excellent job for the American people. Intentionally destroying it, as Trump and his minions appear dedicated to doing, will cause grave harm that our country will regret. Trump’s opponents need to make it very clear that the Pottery Barn principle applies: If you break the government, you own its failures.

Even prior to Trump’s week of chaos, decades of underfunding, Republican-caused federal government shutdowns, and no-growth budgets have already taken their toll on the federal workforce. For example, the New York Times reported in 2023 that air traffic controllers around the country were overworked and had been “pushed to the brink” due to chronic staffing shortages. Many other agencies are headed toward personnel crises with 63 percent of major federal agencies reporting workforce shortages and 30 percent of the federal workforce eligible for retirement starting in 2023. The Biden Administration was able to make a dent in addressing this growing problem, for example, by meeting its hiring target for air traffic controllers for the first time in years. Yet, Biden merely put a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. The air traffic controller workforce is still 3,000 employees below what is needed.

Enter Trump & company.

Some claim that Trump resents the federal workforce because he believes career bureaucrats impeded his first term agenda. Even if this did happen in some circumstances, it is beside the point. Trump is hostile to the professional civil service because it is committed to the rule of law. In contrast, as demonstrated in the past two weeks, Trump disdains the law. He wants to impose his will, regardless of legal restraints, demanding that his underlings execute illegal orders and insisting that government lawyers fabricate specious arguments to justify his illegal actions. This is why Trump is getting rid of as many professional civil servants as possible through firings, intimidation, job transfers, and buyouts. The people hired to replace them will be chosen based exclusively on their willingness to do whatever Trump wants. Trump is trying to build a compliant, lawless government—in other words, an autocracy.

Taking a meat cleaver to federal agencies is also a performative balm for Trump’s political base, which has embraced the contradictory idea that Trumpian economic populism and small-government conservatism can co-exist. The remaining deficit hawks in Congress who support Trump have had to swallow a bitter pill in agreeing to take defense spending and entitlement reform off the table for budget cuts. To satisfy the Freedom Caucus’s bloodlust for deficit reduction, the non-defense, non-entitlement section of the budget (about 12 percent of the $6.75 trillion total) will need to be eviscerated. The multiple assaults on federal workers Trump unleashed in his first weeks are the opening salvo in this process.

Republican presidents in the past, as well as Republican majorities in Congress, have recognized that their anti-government rhetoric and mantra about waste, fraud, and abuse has never matched reality. So, they used their power to trim parts of the federal government they did not like but by and large left the enterprise functioning and intact. These Republicans also knew that if they fractured important federal functions like aviation safety, food inspection, disaster response, student loans, and the like, they would be held accountable.

The Trump team has no such grip on reality or fear that they will be held to account for their failures. They have swallowed the Kool-Aid and truly believe that excessive liberal government is at the root of all of America’s problems. They have also convinced themselves that even if failures occur, like a helicopter crashing into a passenger jet, they will find ways to blame others and escape accountability. Witness Trump’s laughable performance Thursday claiming that D.E.I. hiring in the Obama administration caused the D.C. plane crash (I do wonder how he thinks these incompetent D.E.I. air traffic controllers have been landing millions of planes since Obama left office in 2017).

Elon Musk’s effort to gut the federal workforce will also likely backfire. Of course, I have no problem with eliminating wasteful spending and improving government effectiveness. But this is not the core charge of the Musk project. No, Musk was tasked with finding trillions of budgetary savings in order to make way for Trump’s desired record-breaking multi-trillion tax bill. Since most of the budget is off limits for political reasons, Musk must slash huge swaths of the government, an approach he deployed at Twitter, where, in his first six weeks of ownership, he fired three-quarters of the workforce. Perhaps this could work at Twitter (now X), a company that produces nothing of genuine value and provides a service on which virtually no one relies for anything important. But when government services glitch, people often die, get sick, or face severe economic hardships. Musk seems to relish the chance to apply his business acumen to the biggest enterprise in the world, the American government. But I think he is in for a rude awakening when he finds out that firing so-called faceless bureaucrats means that important government functions will start to fail and real people will get hurt.

The aviation tragedy has also given Democrats and other Trump opponents an opening to confront Trump’s power. The roots of Democrats’ current political problem go back to Ronald Reagan, who gained enormous popularity from his incantation that “government is not the solution to our problem, it is the problem.” Ever since then, Democrats have been on the defensive. Democrats have protected the country from conservatives’ most damaging plans for the government, but that has put them in the position of being the defenders of the status quo in an era when public dissatisfaction with pretty much everything has been growing. Indeed, I think a lot of the election results can be viewed through this frame. Voters were disgruntled, Trump offered large-scale change, Kamala Harris did not—end of story.

Democrats need to do more than merely decry the damage that Trump is doing to our government. The party needs a bold reform initiative about changing the government however necessary to improve government performance and better serve the people. If Democrats want to get out of the political wilderness, they need to show a willingness to advance these reforms even if this agenda disappoints loyal Democratic constituencies like federal workers, teachers unions, and environmentalists. To recapture people’s trust, Democrats must demonstrate through a comprehensive reform agenda that serving the people, not interest groups, is their top priority. I am going to heed Frank Bruni’s wording suggestion and not call for Democrats to get behind Making Government Great Again, but that, in essence, is what Democrats need to propose to do.

I am confident that Trump’s radical assault on government is not what the electorate wants. People want real changes that will make their lives better. Following Winston Churchill’s advice to “never let a good crisis go to waste,” Democrats should use the disasters that are inevitably going to start piling up on Trump’s watch to convince the American public that they can do much better.