Elon Musk is “a dick” and a “billionaire asshole,” to borrow a phrase or two from Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.).
It is pretty clear that this is a majority opinion. More and more Republican elected officials are facing backlash from their constituents about Musk’s outsized role in the Trump Administration, slashing and burning federal government jobs and poking around in everyone’s most sensitive data with no oversight. “This is not what we voted for,” they say. “We just wanted cheaper eggs!”
(But, I mean, who are we kidding? The people who voted for Trump didn't just want lower egg prices. A vote for Trump was also a vote for mass deportations, the further erosion of reproductive rights, rolling back the civil rights gains of Black Americans, the erasure of transgender people from public life, tax cuts for rich dicks like Elon Musk, and other horrible shit.)
Anyway, eggs continue to be hella expensive. Great time to go vegan, I guess.
Every day there is another story about Musk randomly firing or driving employees to resign from one department or another. It’s hard to keep up, to be honest. But the conservative idea that federal government employees are just a bunch of do-nothing slobs on the government payroll who will never be missed is completely wrong. I mean, are there some guys like Milton Waddams from the movie Office Space who spend all day looking for their favorite stapler? Probably! But the majority of the people the federal government is losing are taking years of expertise, institutional knowledge, and basic competency with them. And that is really bad for all of us.
Take the mass resignation of federal technology staff, for example, including engineers and data scientists.
“These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services,” the technology staff’s resignation letter reads. “Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and American’s data less safe.”
Huh. Sounds bad! It’s almost like they were doing important work that they would still be doing if we had an even halfway competent leadership in the Executive branch. Unfortunately, we have Trump and Musk.
Anyone paying attention even a little bit is starting to notice that the absence of federal workers does not, in fact, make the heart grow fonder. Ask anyone getting on an airplane these days how they feel about hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees being fired just a few short weeks after a deadly plane and helicopter collision in D.C. Do they feel safer? It doesn’t take major critical thinking skills to see that these cuts, which were made hastily without regard to the important role the FAA plays in keeping planes in the air, are bad.
I keep thinking about the 1977 book I’m Going to Run Away by Joan Hanson. It was one of my favorites as a kid. In the book, a five-year-old boy is sick of being told what to do by his parents. They won’t let him run naked through the snow and they make him wash his hands before eating! So he’s just going to go it alone, leave his repressive parents behind and live his life.
As the book goes on, the boy keeps thinking of more and more things he will need on his trip. And the bag he’s taking with him keeps getting bigger and bigger until it basically contains his whole house.
That’s the Department of Government Efficiency in a nutshell. Making a rash decision (gutting the government) without considering the consequences (the American people actually need the things done that the now unemployed federal workers were actually doing).
At least the kid in the book comes to the conclusion that running away is actually a bad idea. He sees that he doesn’t have the means, knowledge, or life experience to live alone and that maybe he doesn’t have it so bad after all.
Alas, Musk does not appear to have this kid’s higher-level thinking skills. And there isn’t a bag big enough to hold all of the critical federal government components Musk is throwing out so that when his reign of error is over someone can figure out how to put the pieces back together. He is literally breaking the government, willfully and gleefully.
For people who say they hate government bureaucracy, boy are they going to miss it. As will we all.
It may feel like there’s nothing we can do, but that’s not entirely true. Your elected officials need to hear from you. Regardless of political party, you should be annoying the shit out of the people who are supposed to represent you. For a quick and easy way to do that check out 5 Calls.
Another thing you can do is to talk to people you know about what’s going on. I’m not talking about arguing with distant cousins on Facebook. If you’re someone who is tuned into politics and the goings-on in government, it’s easy to think that everyone is paying as much attention as you are. They aren’t. If you’re feeling frustrated, scared, or overwhelmed by what’s happening in D.C., tell the people you care about how you’re feeling and why.
Or, at minimum, tell a therapist. We could all use one right now.