America’s reality show?
3rd March 2025 · 0 Comments
Here in Louisiana, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan loses his job monitoring national forests just as another young woman loses hers monitoring waste, fraud and abuse at one of the federal government’s billing facilities near the University of New Orleans.
Critical federal responsibilities are being abrogated by the Trump administration’s wholesale firing of every “probationary” employee – that is anyone with less than two years in the Federal Service. Critical departments with bipartisan support from the Centers for Disease Control to the Veterans Administration have been gutted almost to operational oblivion.
The sentiment was best displayed when hundreds of visitors to Yosemite National Park assembled to watch nature’s light show one week ago, as the reds and oranges of the late afternoon sunlight turned El Capitan’s waterfall into what appears to be a flow of lava. With cameras and smartphones at the ready to record the phenomenon, the spectators were treated to an unexpected sight at the mountain top: an American flag hung upside down, historically a sign of national distress, unfurled some 3,000 feet above them.
Park rangers and maintenance personnel were remonstrating against budget cuts that have come out of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“We’re bringing attention to what’s happening to the parks, which are every American’s properties,” Gavin Carpenter, a Yosemite employee and military veteran who supplied the flag, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s super important we take care of them, and we’re losing people here, and it’s not sustainable if we want to keep the parks open.”
If laying off employees across the board stands as the only way to reduce the federal budget, one would think layoffs would occur without prejudice. Everyone would endure the same pain. However, probationary jobs for bureaucrats who passed billions of dollars of business on to multinational corporations are being rehired.
Not quite a week after mass firings at the Food and Drug Administration, some probationary staffers received unexpected news over the weekend: The government wants them back.
Beginning on March 28, FDA employees overseeing medical devices and other key areas received calls and emails notifying them that their recent terminations had been “rescinded effective immediately,” according to messages viewed by The Associated Press.
Admittedly, almost half the FDA’s budget, or about $3.3 billion, is profit from fees paid by device, pharmaceutical and tobacco companies. Broad staffing cuts to those programs, therefore, will not add much toward Musk’s stated goal of shrinking the federal budget. Those employees net the federal government a profit. Still, when the fees fund regulators, those job losses were not so quickly rescinded. The agency’s tobacco center – which reviews new products like electronic cigarettes and nicotine pouches – is 100 percent funded by industry fees.
Currently, no effort to rehire any of the estimated 100 or so employees fired from the tobacco center has been expended; nor for USAID health programs that made a large health impact across the planet. Those jobs remain vacant.
The Washington Post’s Matt Bai observed last week:
“[Secretary of State Marco] Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs—such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa—would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House. But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, [DOGE’s] Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments—a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries such as Congo.”
Musk and Trump have set lofty goals for DOGE, bragging that they would like to slash as much as $2 trillion in federal spending by the time the group’s efforts are scheduled to conclude on July 4, 2026. So far, DOGE’s website reports a total estimated savings of $55 billion, coming from a combination of canceled and renegotiated contracts and leases, as well as fraud detection, grant cancellations, job cuts and more. However, Musk’s “wall of receipts” represents only a subset of canceled contracts, the page claims, that amount to approximately 20 percent of “overall DOGE savings” – so far, at least, just $11 billion.
Moreover, even if those cuts succeeded in every one of its estimates, that only constitutes savings within 16 percent of the federal budget. If Musk achieves $500 billion in savings, doubtful at this rate, the deficit would only go down by 26 percent.
The irony is if Musk could rid himself of every federal employee, military included, and the U.S. Treasury would likely still be running a deficit. Entitlements drive the debt. Without undertaking serious reform of Social Security and Medicare, through a combination of tax increases and benefit limitations, a balanced budget remains an impossible dream.
Of course, neither party wishes to engage with “the third rail of politics,” so America owes more in debt than the nation currently produces in goods and services in an entire year. With a $36 trillion debt, serious budget reformation is necessary, yet little serious thought has been given on how to truly achieve the goal.
Congress’ proposed budget will only make the fiscal deficit situation worse.
The U.S. House budget measure passed on Tuesday, February 25 – at President Trump’s behest. It calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and a goal of $2 trillion in spending cuts. It demands more than $100 billion in new spending on immigration enforcement and the military, though. To compensate, the House Energy and Commerce Committee has been charged to find $880 billion in cuts to federal programs.
Republicans say some of that will come from reducing spending on Medicaid. In Louisiana terms, Healthcare accounts for $21.4 billion, or 43.4 percent of the state’s total budget. Louisiana taxpayers will be expected to put up $3.23 billion of that amount through the state general fund during the next fiscal year. Any decrease in federal funding would require the state to pay more.
Put another way, the budget legislation would add $5 trillion to $11 trillion to the nation’s $36 trillion debt, and rob millions of health insurance coverage, just as piecemeal reductions in federal employment would do little to reduce that staggering figure.
This article originally published in the March 3, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
