Musk and Trump aren’t just decimating the federal workforce. They’re denigrating it.
At a recent House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — perhaps best known for heckling former president Joe Biden during his State of the Union addresses and blaming Democrats for causing hurricanes — ripped into this nation’s beleaguered federal workforce.
“Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue, by the way. They’re consuming taxpayer dollars,” said Greene, who, despite not knowing what she was talking about, kept going. “Those jobs are paid for by the American tax people who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes, and then pay these federal employees.
“Federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks,” she brayed. “And these are jobs that can be fired at will.”
Apparently it’s not enough that Elon Musk and President Trump are decimating the federal workforce with mass layoffs and lies about making this nation’s government more efficient. Some Republicans feel they must denigrate federal workers as leeches who have been stealing from the American people for years.
But it’s the federal workforce that’s paying the price — not just in lost careers but sullied reputations.
In the first Cabinet meeting since Trump took office and Musk took over, the president said the federal workforce had to be reduced because, “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job.”
As usual, he presented zero evidence to back claims meant to demean an already devastated workforce of more than 3 million people — more than 80 percent of whom work outside the nation’s capital. There isn’t a corner of this country untouched by the chaos unleashed by these layoffs.
Since the layoffs began, workers across various federal agencies have detailed how their work histories filled with commendations and promotions have been smeared with lies about laziness and incompetence.
Carolyn Corrigan told CNN that she never received a negative review during her nearly 10 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But when the single mother of two was recently fired via email, “poor performance” was listed as the reason for her abrupt termination.
“I do believe that was a lie,” she said. “I have documentation that shows that I wasn’t in any way a poor performer.”
In a Feb. 26 memo from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management, heads of executive departments and agencies were ordered to draft “reorganization plans” by March 13 in prepare “to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”
Echoing Trump’s words, the memo referred to the “bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy.”
Russell Vought, OMB’s director, is an architect of Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for gutting the federal workforce and pretty much everything Trump has inflicted on this nation since his return to the White House.
What’s happening to thousands of federal workers recalls something that occurred during Trump’s first term and played a role in his first impeachment.
Marie Yovanovitch had been US ambassador to Ukraine until she was forced from her position in 2019 by a Trump-led smear campaign. The president and his allies, including Rudy Giuliani, spread lies that Yovanovitch was corrupt and working against the president and his interests in Ukraine. At the time, Trump was pressuring President Volodomyr Zelensky to investigate Biden, then Trump’s presumed Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s false accusations about Yovanovitch left her “shocked, appalled, devastated,” she said during a House impeachment inquiry in 2019. Those wounds to her reputation and a career in foreign service that spanned decades cut as deep, she said, as losing her ambassadorship and the vital work it entailed.
Now that’s happening to federal workers. To justify a purge conducted so haphazardly that some laid-off workers, such as those who manage this nation’s nuclear weapons, had to be rehired, Musk and Trump are painting them as a freeloaders, radicals, and so-called “Deep State” operatives who must be flushed out to save the nation.
Under any circumstance, being laid off is traumatic enough. But in demeaning federal workers — real people abruptly robbed of their real jobs — Musk and Trump are willfully adding unnecessary insult to unprecedented injury.
By: Renee Graham
Source: Boston Globe