Incredibly, many Trump-supporting MAGA dupes still believe any of this is being done in the name cutting government “waste, fraud and abuse” — much less “efficiency” in the federal government. As discussed on today’s BradCast, I guess there are still millions who won’t give a damn about any of it unless — more likely, until — it effects them directly. And it will. [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]
As David Dayen helpfully reported last month at The American Prospect, if you fired every single federal worker in existence — all 2.3 million of them — you’d save about $271 billion per year. While that may sound like a lot, it’s just 4% of the annual budget. Of course, we’d lose much more in uncollected tax revenue, unprosecuted fraud in the private sector, lives lost, just to name a few big points. And, of course, Americans, such as Social Security recipients would lose a lot on a personal level when there was nobody left in government to send out their monthly checks.
But, as Republicans have been telling us (lying to us about) for decades now, the federal government has just become too bloated. It must be cut down to size, even if it’s randomly done through mass firings at every federal agency, of anybody viewed as legally fireable (whether they are or aren’t doesn’t matter.) But here’s another fun fact from Dayen: in 1960, amid the Golden Age of America’s middle class, the federal government comprised 4.3% of all workers. Today, that number is just 1.4%.
Other than that, our government is huge, bloated and out of control! Who needs all that air traffic safety, security of nuclear weapons, food inspections, safe drinking water, disease tracking, cancer cures, law and order, disaster response, medical care, education, Social Security checks or life-saving weather reports and climate data? The federal government is just too “big”. Let’s gut it all! Legally or otherwise!
Much more on all of this — and some of the heroes (even Trump-appointed ones!) trying to block and/or call attention to the worst of it — on today’s program, as culled from, among others, some of the following source material…
- AP: Delta jet flips upside down on a snowy Toronto runway and all 80 aboard survive
- Rolling Stone: FAA Employees Say Trump and Musk’s Firings Are Dangerous
- AP: Trump fires FAA air traffic control staff, just weeks after DC crash
- NYT: Adams’s Lead Prosecutor Quits Defiantly: ‘It Was Never Going to Be Me’
- WaPo: Mass resignation marks a new kind of defiance in the second Trump era
- WaPo: High-ranking D.C. federal prosecutor resigns in protest
- WaPo: Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS
- WaPo: Top Social Security official exits after clash with Musk’s DOGE over data
- NBC: Department of Homeland Security preparing to fire hundreds of senior leaders this week
- Bloomberg: US Health Department Layoffs Expand to Medicare, FDA
- NBC: CDC ‘disease detectors’ among hundreds fired as Trump administration ramps up agency cuts
- Politico: Mass firings continue across nation’s health agencies
- Guardian: NOAA imposes limits on scientists, sparking concerns over global forecasts
- The Hill: EPA fires nearly 400 workers after OPM order
- The Hill: EPA puts employees who tackle pollution in overburdened communities on leave
- The Hill: National Science Foundation cuts 10 percent of staff
- Wired: National Science Foundation Fires 168 Workers as Federal Purge Continues
- AP: Trump’s firing of 1,000 national park workers raises concerns about maintenance and operating hours
- SF Chronicle: Yosemite halts camping reservations, with no timetable for their return
- Fox 13 Utah: ‘Crisis’ at Zion as mandated job cuts hit popular national park
- Reuters: USDA probationary staff fired at three agencies, sources say
- NBC: USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is trying to rehire them
- The Oregonian: At least 600 workers to leave Bonneville Power Administration, spurring concerns about transmission grid
- CNN: Hundreds of FAA probationary workers fired by Trump administration, union says
- AP: Trump wants states to ‘clean up forests’ to stop wildfires but he cuts funds
Other than that, slow news day.
Also, on similar notes, we close today with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, as the costs of our climate crisis continue to mount in from coast to coast in recent days; Trump’s FEMA is already denying critical disaster aid; and the Administration is desperately trying to find fired Dept. of Energy workers after figuring out that they were the ones who safeguarded the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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“Incredibly, many Trump-supporting MAGA dupes ” – Brad
Indeed.
Another way of saying dupes is Sycophant (Beware of the Sycophant Epidemic).
Another way of saying dupes might be massive Stockholm syndrome.