THE OTHER SIDE: Firing the better, not the worse

Few Americans would argue with the premise: Root out waste and incompetence in our government, vigilantly search out corruption. According to NPR, this is what President Donald Trump said when he appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE):

Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement’ … I look forward to Elon and Vivek making changes to the Federal Bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans.

Like so many things Donald Trump told us, the story of DOGE and its purported mission was a lie. And it all goes back to another lie he felt he had to tell the American people if he was going to win a second term:

Yes, some of the things Project 2025 was saying were absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. But, unfortunately for us all, Trump went several steps better than just wishing them luck: He put those ridiculous ideas into practice.

Committed to dismantling government as we knew it, everything Elon Musk did with DOGE was in service of his own business interests and the primary aims of Project 2025. And so, for example, those departments of our government dedicated to serving our veterans, protecting our public health, preserving our environment, ensuring a fair taxation system, providing for law and order while preserving our constitutional rights, educating our young people, and responding to natural disasters were attacked, demeaned, and hollowed out. Why? Because the radical right and MAGA have declared war on a government by and for the people they do not approve of.

Early on, Project 2025 made clear what their main targets were:

The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.

Really, even “reproductive health”? There is more, as they extended “pornography” to include anything they do not approve of:

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection … Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.

The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.

Allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end. For public institutions to use taxpayer dollars to declare the superiority or inferiority of certain races, sexes, and religions is a violation of the Constitution and civil rights law and cannot be tolerated by any government anywhere in the country.

[Emphasis added.]

Now, the great thing about the radical right and MAGA is their incredible ability to tolerate hypocrisy if it means winning. They proudly embrace Christianity, marriage, and family, and yet their president is a felon who bragged about grabbing women by their genitalia, cheated on his first wife, and was convicted of sexual assault. His current marriage is a farce, and his family has, using the perks of the presidency and thanks to influence-peddling, scammed itself to so many hundreds of millions of dollars. Our current secretary of war, as he likes to call his position, is an alcoholic who has cheated on his first wife and has admitted payed $50,000 to a woman who accused him of rape.

They talk about “child predators,” rush to ban library books about gay people, harass kindergarten teachers, and want to prosecute doctors treating gender dysphoria. Yet their president, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, and Pam Bondi conspire to prevent the truth about one of America’s preeminent child predators, Jeffrey Epstein, and his unnamed co-conspirators from seeing the light of day. Then they offer immunity to convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and reward her with a transfer to a country-club faux prison for saying how much she respects Donald Trump and swearing she never saw him with underage girls.

Regrettably, their Christian impulses do not extend to the poor, the immigrant community, our veterans suffering from PTSD, or those on Medicaid or SNAP who are about to see their benefits cut to provide amoral tax cuts to the one percent.

By the way, would you be surprised to discover that one of the principal authors of Project 2025 is Brendan Carr?

He, you might remember, is the current Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As The New York Times reminded us on September 17, 2025:

ABC announced on Wednesday evening that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show ‘indefinitely’ after conservatives accused the longtime host of inaccurately describing the politics of the man who is accused of fatally shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The abrupt decision by the network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, came hours after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, assailed Mr. Kimmel and suggested that his regulatory agency might take action against ABC because of remarks the host made on his Monday telecast.

The network did not explain its decision, but the sequence of events on Wednesday amounted to an extraordinary exertion of political pressure on a major broadcast network by the Trump administration …

Mr. Carr, in an interview on a right-wing podcast on Wednesday, said that Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were part of a ‘concerted effort to lie to the American people,’ and that the F.C.C. was ‘going to have remedies that we can look at. Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,’ Mr. Carr told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson.

[Emphasis added.]

I guess we need to add comedy to the list of egregious crimes that Project 2025, MAGA, and Brendan Carr are convinced do not deserve First Amendment protection.

Back to Project 2025:

Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agency’s bureaucrats—not just unelected but seemingly un-fireable—then leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congress’s preening cowardice. The federal government is growing larger and less constitutionally accountable—even to the President—every year.

• • • A combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes;
    • Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a feckless Administration, order border and immigration enforcement agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity;
    • Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms;
    • Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists;
    • Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend ‘training’ seminars about ‘white privilege’; and
    • Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about ‘intersectionality’ and abortion.

Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy by Congress. Colleges and school districts are funded by tax dollars. The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf. Members of Congress shield themselves from constitutional accountability often when the White House allows them to get away with it. Cultural institutions like public libraries and public health agencies are only as ‘independent’ from public accountability as elected officials and voters permit.

Let’s be clear: The most egregious regulations promulgated by the current Administration come from one place: the Oval Office. The President cannot hide behind the agencies; as his many executive orders make clear, his is the responsibility for the regulations that threaten American communities, schools, and families. A conservative President must move swiftly to do away with these vast abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats who fuel it.

[Emphasis added.]

As the AP explains:

President Donald Trump is swiftly breaching the traditional boundaries of presidential power as he returns to the White House, bringing to bear a lifetime of bending the limits in courthouses, boardrooms and politics to forge an expansive view of his authority. He’s already unleashed an unprecedented wave of executive orders, daring anyone to stop him, with actions intended to clamp down on border crossings, limit the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship and keep the popular Chinese-owned TikTok operational despite a law shutting down the social media platform.

Democrats and civil rights organizations are rallying to fight Trump in court, but legal battles could drag on before slowing the president down. Meanwhile, Trump is drafting a new blueprint for the presidency, one that demonstrates the primacy of blunt force in a democratic system predicated on checks and balances between the branches of government. ‘He’s going to push it to the max,’ said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama.

Trump tried to take a similar approach in his first term, with mixed results. This time, there are fewer guardrails. His administration has few of the establishment figures that once tried to curb his penchant for upheaval. The U.S. Supreme Court is stocked with conservative justices, and recently decreed that presidents are broadly immune from prosecution for any official actions taken during their term. Republicans are in complete control on Capitol Hill, where the leaders owe their majority positions to Trump’s support or acquiescence.

In a striking display of Trump’s dominance, almost no one from his party challenged the decision to pardon almost everyone charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. ‘We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,’ said Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota.

Given what is happening, Project 2025’s concern “with these vast abuses of presidential power” is as funny as it comes. Look through all of Donald Trump’s executive proclamations and pretty much every one threatens American communities, schools, and families.

So what exactly has so enraged MAGA, Project 2025, and Donald Trump? Efforts to substitute clean energy sources for the coal and oil that propel the climate crisis. The attempt to undo the harm that has resulted from the discrimination against Native Americans and the tragedies of slavery and segregation. The desire to guarantee the rights of women to control their own bodies. The once constitutionally protected separation of church and state. The reality is that they want to return to the glory days of the substantial white privileges of straight, though sometimes closeted, men. And as Elon Musk has reminded us, please do not forget to add the rich to that list. Yes, pretty much everything that has happened in Trump 2.0 is about making the rich even richer.

In Teresa Ghilarducci’s April 11, 2025, Forbes article “7 Alarming Facts About Wealth Inequality: Bring On the Pitchforks,” she shares these statistics:

As of Q3 2023, the top 10% of Americans owned a record 93% of all U.S. stocks. A decade ago, that number was ‘just’ 81%. Meanwhile, the bottom half of American households own less than 1% of stocks and mutual fund shares.

The richest 1% hold $25 trillion in stock wealth: That top 1% owns more than half the total value of the public equity market—a concentration that would have been unimaginable a generation ago notes Inequalty.org.

The median retirement savings for half of Americans is $0: That’s right. Zero … In contrast, families in the top 10% hold a median of $610,000 … Roughly 50% of U.S. workers don’t have access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan … According to the OECD, about 23% of Americans aged 66 and older live in relative income poverty—the highest rate in the G7.

The racial wealth gap in retirement is stark: Median wealth for Black and Hispanic households is $24,000 and $36,000, respectively. For white households? $143,000, notes EIG.

And everything about DOGE, the cuts at critical federal agencies, and the reordering of the federal budget are about preserving privilege. The agencies most affected are precisely those agencies that have tried in various ways to expand opportunity and level the playing field—in voter rights, fair policing, providing hearings for immigrants to seek asylum, improving education for the rural and urban poor and the developmentally impaired, protecting public health and the environment from toxic contamination, and equal treatment for the LGBTQ community.

Not surprisingly, one of the first set of government workers to be fired were the inspectors general, the guardians of ethical behavior. Yes, and those most qualified to root out any criminal behavior and financial fraud in the agencies they oversee:

As the AP reports:

The Trump administration has fired about 17 independent inspectors general at government agencies, a sweeping action to remove oversight of his new administration … Trump confirmed the move in a conversation with reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday, claiming, ‘it’s a very common thing to do.’ He said he would ‘put good people in there that will be very good.’ … ‘Inspectors General are the cops on the beat preventing bad things from happening,’ Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, said in a statement. ‘Their work saves the taxpayer tens of billions of dollars every year.’

Here is the law providing for the appointment of inspectors general:

By firing all the inspectors general, Donald Trump has limited oversight of the work of his entire administration. So, despite everything that Elon Musk and DOGE and Donald Trump have said about efficiency and waste, what they were ultimately after was loyalty and the willingness to sacrifice one’s oath, one’s dedication to the facts in favor of obedience. We recently witnessed the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Her failure was to faithfully report what the statistics actually revealed:

According to The New York Times:

When President Trump didn’t like the weak jobs numbers that were released on Friday, he fired the person responsible for producing them. It was a move with few precedents in the century-long history of economic statistics in the United States. And for good reason: When political leaders meddle in government data, it rarely ends well … But economists and other experts said that Mr. Trump’s decision on Friday to fire Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was a troubling step in that direction. Janet L. Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, said the firing was not what is expected from the most advanced economy in the world. ‘This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic,’ Ms. Yellen said.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is officially part of the Labor Department, whose secretary is a member of the president’s cabinet. But the agency operates independently, producing detailed, nonpartisan data on employment, prices, wages and other topics. Economists say that reliable, independently produced statistics are critical to good decision making in both the public and private sector. Officials at the Federal Reserve rely on government-collected data on inflation and unemployment to decide how to set interest rates, which affect how much Americans must pay to get a mortgage or a car loan.

As CNBC puts it, “President Donald Trump on Friday fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, hours after the agency reported that job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near-halt.”

FOX Business News adds these details:

The BLS reported on Friday that 74,000 jobs were added in July, well below the 110,000 estimate of economists polled by LSEG. The report also revised job growth in May and June downward. May’s gains were pared back by 125,000 to just 19,000 jobs created, while the June figures were revised down by 133,000 to just 14,000 jobs added that month. According to the BLS, the last time a revision was down more than 133,000 was in March 2021, when it was revised down by 146,000 one year into the COVID pandemic.

Meanwhile, a majority of Americans experience rising prices at the supermarket, gas prices nowhere near the illusory $2.00 a gallon the president keeps touting, a housing crisis, and significant increases in health insurance. A far cry from the privileged world of crypto bribes and constant golf outings that Donald Trump enjoys:

I do not think we have yet realized how much damage MAGA and Musk and the Trumpists have done to our way of life. Let’s pick an institution and take a moment to look at how many competent employees they have sent packing and the consequence of their cruelty.

Remember the Texas floods? Well, they had fired weather forecasters and FEMA disaster supervisors. Their ideological determination to strip services not surprisingly led to death, heartache, and unnecessary suffering, they eliminated those who previously warned us of and protected us from natural disasters. Yes, they replaced the better with the worse.

Why would MAGA and Project 2025 want to attack the weather forecasters and the researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)? Because they had learned more than anyone else about the pressing dangers of the climate crisis. And the recognition of the climate crisis and the move away from fossil fuels drove Donald Trump mad—he of the never-ending rant about windmills and electric cars. Again, it is back to Project 2025:

As for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), they were in trouble from the moment Krist Noem took over the Department of Homeland Security:

The Washington Post explains:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said Sunday that she would recommend to President Donald Trump that he ‘get rid of FEMA the way it exists today’ and allow local officials to have more say about how federal aid is used after disasters. ‘We still need the resources and the funds and the finances to go to people that have these types of disasters, like Hurricane Helene and the fires in California,’ Noem, whose department oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said on CNN. ‘But you need to let the local officials make the decisions on how that is deployed, so it can be deployed much quicker.’ The Trump administration has been weighing the future of the disaster relief, and The Washington Post has reported that a small team from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has gained access to sensitive data to carry out a review of FEMA’s grants.

A week later, by February 22, 200 FEMA employees were laid off. According to NPR:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began firing staff on Thursday, continuing a wave of government-wide layoffs ordered by the Trump administration. The terminations, which include staff at the National Weather Service, could impact weather forecasting used by many people and industries across the U.S. economy.

Then, on March 10, CBS News reported:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is preparing to lose an additional 1,029 employees … DOGE has also announced it may terminate the leases of 19 NOAA offices across the country, including key buildings that maintain radar operations and generate vital weather forecasts. As one of several scientific agencies within the federal government, NOAA is responsible for everything from weather forecasts, to coastal restoration, managing fisheries, and supporting marine commerce.

Of course, their stubborn refusal to acknowledge our worsening forest fires, hurricanes, and floods—and their willingness to cut the programs that were specifically designed to deal with those threats—was a recipe for disaster.

In a story entitled “What the firings at FEMA could mean for the next hurricane or wildfire,” NPR reported:

In recent years, FEMA has faced increasing demands as wildfires and floods have caused widespread destruction, especially as disasters have happened more frequently, often at the same time. As the climate gets hotter, hurricanes and rainstorms are only expected to get more intense.

Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, regardless of who you voted for or what state you live in, nobody should feel particularly assured that FEMA is coming to their assistance in your time of need,” says Rob Moore, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental group …

As disasters have become bigger and more frequent, FEMA has struggled with having enough personnel to respond. A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that FEMA had a 35% gap in necessary staffing in 2022, amounting to hundreds of people, and that a heavy workload was leading to burnout and retention issues.

During Hurricane Helene last year, which caused destructive flooding from Florida to North Carolina, FEMA deployed 900 employees to the area, some who reported working long hours of overtime to meet the overwhelming demand. FEMA called in hundreds of personnel from other government agencies to fill the gap, as the agency also did after hurricanes and wildfires in 2017.

‘Reducing the capability of FEMA could potentially put people’s lives at risk for future events,’ says Michael Coen, chief of staff at FEMA under the Biden and Obama administrations. ‘We’ve been behind at FEMA as far as our recruiting goals. And now to let go of a whole year’s worth of people who have been hired is only going to put the agency in jeopardy.’

That is precisely what happened. Kristi Noem’s dream scenario where the State of Texas could and would quickly solve the problem of their river flood backfired. As for her dream that nobody would remember she had turned FEMA upside down and inside out and dispensed with more than a thousand critical employees, well, it turned into the nightmare any sensible person could have predicted:

Here is what The Washington Post reported:

As Texas flooded, key staff say FEMA’s leader could not be reached. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s acting administrator, David Richardson, is often inaccessible, several current and former officials say, raising concerns within the agency. On a Friday morning in July, shortly after deadly Independence Day floods swept through parts of Texas Hill Country packed with camps full of young children, the Federal Emergency Management Agency scrambled to coordinate a response. The next afternoon, teams readied search-and-rescue crews, imagery and other emergency equipment. Then their hustling hit a roadblock.

Back to The Washington Post:

They couldn’t reach a key U.S. official needed to deploy the resources, one required by law to be accessible during emergencies: FEMA’s acting administrator, David Richardson. Just a few weeks earlier, his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, instituted a policy requiring her approval for any expenditure over $100,000. That meant, in order to deploy resources to Texas, FEMA officials needed Richardson to get those requests in front of Noem — fast.

But for about 24 hours in the early aftermath of one of the nation’s deadliest flash-flooding events in decades, key staff members could not reach FEMA’s top official, according to eight current and former officials with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they said they feared retaliation. The agency’s typical posture is to get resources to a disaster zone before state and local governments even have to ask for them, current and former officials have said, because minutes can cost lives.

‘Nobody could get a hold of him for hours and hours,’ said one D.C.-based senior official who coordinated search-and-rescue resources … documents obtained by The Washington Post show.

FEMA’s urban search-and-rescue teams — those with specialized training for swift water rescue, equipment to look for bodies and data to do any damage assessments — would not arrive in Texas for nearly four days, limiting the region’s access to high-level resources and expertly trained crews during a critical window when responders were still looking for missing people.

By the way, according to Wikipedia: “Kerr County did not have a dedicated flood warning system, despite prior proposals from local officials citing the area’s high flood risk.” Costs that could have been offset in part by one of the grants FEMA used to reward to local communities.

At least 135 people, including 37 children, died during the Guadalupe River floods.

Tragically, the shortsighted, twisted agenda of the MAGA-Project 2025 alliance continues. Do you remember when Donald Trump argued with the weather forecasters at the National Weather Service? They had predicted that the people of Alabama would be spared the fury of Hurricane Dorian? Master of the weather, Donald Trump had other ideas. But they were right, and he was wrong. So, rather than say he was sorry, he re-wrote history and, with the help of his Sharpie, offered a redrawn map of the predicted path of Dorian. And now, thanks to the shameless, sheep-like Republicans of the Senate, the president has pathetically rewarded his Sharpie-gate accomplice by making him the head of the NOAA:

As The New York Times tells us in “Senate Confirms ‘Sharpiegate’ Meteorologist to Lead NOAA“:

Neil Jacobs … was found to have violated NOAA’s code of ethics in 2020 after an investigation into an incident that centered on an altered hurricane forecast map President Trump presented in the Oval Office in 2019. The investigation found he had bowed to political pressure in releasing a statement critical of National Weather Service forecasters in Alabama, who had stressed on social media that Hurricane Dorian was not expected to affect that state, despite warnings to the contrary from Mr. Trump.

Sadly, this story of firing and hiring is just one of many examples of what happens when those in power opt for blind loyalty over experience and competence, when they fire the better, not the worse.