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The candor on the tarmac Sunday night at Joint Base Andrews, under the wing of the presidential aircraft, came without any flinch of self doubt.
“This is retaliatory,” President Donald Trump told reporters, essentially summing up his first two weeks in office in the most inelegant but honest bit of sloganeering. He was talking about tariffs against U.S. neighbors but he just as plausibly was describing his posture toward all corners of his new empire.
Gag orders. Mass firings. Legally questionable buyouts. Foiled breaches of classified data and personnel files. A game of chicken over sanctions. Purged people and websites alike. The anxiety across the civil service at this hour is rightly earned and has no sign of slackening. If you’re a career federal worker, you’re marking your time in hours at this point as Trump is looking to shed professional expertise in favor of political hacks. Trump has begun his one-sided war against his foes, and the costs are just starting to be counted. Just ask the feds who found themselves put on leave as punishment for having attended diversity training during the first Trump term.
The whole pile-up of chaos over the weekend left Washington insiders trying to figure out just how to triage the waves of norm-breaking headlines flowing from the White House without any real push-back from Republicans. Democrats, left in the minority for at least the next two years, tried to summon an opposition but found themselves once again stumbling over each other with so many competing theories about how to blunt the Trump aggressions in any meaningful way. The Democratic National Committee has a new chief, but there are no signs a shift in leadership is going to be anything passing for sufficient to counter the turmoil being cooked from the West Wing. The bipartisan Establishment can only shake its head at the massive break from the way things have rolled in the post-World War II cadences. When a veteran FBI agent calls for colleagues to “dig in” against the coming purges, it’s tough to argue that there is an over-reaction.
The weekend’s roll of maddening moves came quicker than most could handle. Chasing the developments was like tracing buckshot. Tariffs here and sanctions there. Calls to re-take the Panama Canal would have been banner headlines for typical administrations yet amounted to also-ran stories this weekend. Calls went out for whistleblowers to speak out against the new administration’s attacks on the civil service, but it’s not clear the hotlines had enough manpower to accommodate all the reports of intimidation and bullying. While Hill Democrats’ offices were ready to listen to the horror stories—putting out word to union allies that they want it all—it’s not evident that they have much more power than naming and shaming.
After all, even a shocking mid-air collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet last week turned into a political proving point, with Trump blaming diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for the fiery and fatal crash over the Potomac River. His loyalists were on TV on Sunday repeating his fact-free assertion that D.E.I. programs were to blame for the bodycount. Given a chance to make anything into a piece of the culture wars, the Trumpists missed no opening, leaving opponents shouting back with facts about a durable credible workforce but not getting nearly as much attention.
And, returning to Washington Sunday evening, Trump took a chance to double-down on the flurry of fancy, defending his empowerment of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to take a hatchet to the whole of government. “I think Elon is doing a good job. He's a big cost-cutter,” Trump said at Andrews. “He's very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.”
Musk, who has been raging against anyone who dares to get in his way, is smashing through agencies so quickly that Washington is struggling to fully understand what is happening in real time. A top Treasury official found out what saying no to Musk cost; having denied Musk access to the sensitive system overseeing trillions of dollars in payments, he was placed on leave and then retired suddenly, allowing Musk’s team to get what it wanted.
Separately, the heads of security at U.S. Agency for International Development, the nation’s marquee foreign aid arm, were put on leave after they refused to give Musk and his functionaries access to an internal data system that holds the nuts and bolts of a roughly $40 billion pile of cash that handles health care, disaster relief, and foreign assistance programs. The U.S. AID website went offline wholesale, and staffers are bracing for deep cuts and an end to its stand-alone status. Staffers were well aware that Musk had deemed it a “criminal” enterprise that needed to “die.”
Given the chance to calm those jitters, Trump did the opposite on Sunday, saying the flagship foreign aid shop is “run by radical lunatics.” Neither he nor Musk mentioned that it is the world’s largest provider of food assistance.
That push from Musk, under the auspices of the self-created Department of Government Efficiency—or DOGE, like the crypto trinket—is barrelling over the typically staid career staff that is tasked with keeping the cogs of bureaucracy going across administrations. In fact, that Musk regime seems to be spreading with little regard for what has been long-standing expectations inside the federal workforce.
In this environment, career feds see their time as limited. Trump has made clear he has little regard for their work, offering as many as two million the chance to end their career with a six-letter reply-all: “Resign.” He also hinted that loyalty tests were in the offing for those who chose to stay in their jobs. Staying may prove insufferable for those who opt against wearing the red MAGA caps.
It’s why feds around town were looking at what is unfolding at U.S. AID as a warning for what is to come more broadly. If Trump and Musk are able to dismantle a popular piece of bureaucratic backwater without much of an objection from the Republican majority, there’s no worry that they could move more forcefully elsewhere. Trump has made clear he wants the federal workforce to reflect his values and any holdouts or remnants of a more professional era are only nuisances. Now that he and Musk have started the hollowing out of the professional spine of the federal government, there’s no telling just how far Trump would go.
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