Elizabeth Linos
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So this is a message that very clearly is saying, we don't think you're doing anything useful and you're going to need to affirm what you do every day to justify your job. If you just take this at a human level, anyone who's receiving that type of email from their boss is getting the message that they are not wanted and they are not valued. So
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
To me, it seems, you know, part of this broader effort to make people not want to work for government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
The second part, which I think is still up for discussion in the courts, is what does it mean for someone from Doge and Elon Musk specifically to send an email of that nature that implies resignations or layoffs without going through any of the formal processes associated with layoffs and performance evaluations?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, anytime you see an administration that is so hostile towards their civil service, of course, you're going to have people in career positions that are trying to navigate what that looks like for their staff. You know, what we're hearing, at least on our side, are conversations about how to reassure people that their work matters and that their work is important.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, one question that has often come up even before this period is that a lot of what government does is invisible to the American taxpayer. People don't know exactly what the Department of Energy does unless there's a problem. People don't fully understand necessarily what happens to make sure our food and our air is safe. And that's on purpose, right?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
We hear about government when there's a problem. But on any given day, there's millions of people that are trying to keep Americans safe in ways that are invisible. And so one of the questions that has come up as part of this process is what would it look like if we could bring those stories to the surface, explain to people and show people what it means to have a functioning government?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Would they still want all those programs cut if there was a clear understanding of that, how that would affect their lives?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So under normal circumstances, the way that you would appeal something like this is going through the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, so the MSPB. This is an independent quasi-judicial agency that is meant to protect federal employees from unfair or improper personnel actions.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
One of these protections is the protection against being fired for reasons that are unrelated to merit and are more related to political influence or personal bias. And so there is a process within the MSPB to appeal, these decisions if a federal employee believes that they're wrongfully terminated. They do, you know, a bunch of other things as well, including whistleblower protections.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
But it's really important that that board is there to manage and analyze those appeals independently. The purpose of the board is really to ensure that the civil service remains nonpartisan and maintain those protections. And so it seems that some employees might go through that path to appeal these decisions.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
There are other ways that we might see lawsuits or legal appeals happening, but that's the traditional way an employee would go about appealing something like this.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, absolutely. So you're right that this is not a new idea. People have been saying that the government is bloated at least since Reagan. And it's a common refrain that we've heard from multiple administrations, both on the left and the right. When Reagan was in the White House, there was a promise that he was going to cut the federal workforce that simply failed.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So when Reagan departed the White House, there were more people working in the federal government than when he took office. The rate is, as I mentioned before, very similar to today, around 2 million federal employees. The next effort where we saw that happen more systematically is under the Clinton administration.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
where there was a big project called Reinventing Government that had some of the same flavors of what we're seeing today, but was different in very important ways. So the purpose of Reinventing Government was to rethink both the size of government and what type of employees we needed to push for more accountability and higher productivity and performance in government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
But there are a couple of things that were really critical to that process. One is that it was authorized by bipartisan congressional legislation. So this isn't kind of a thing that happened overnight by a team that isn't really clearly a department to begin with. The second thing is that that process, that project, worked over a series of years.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So they started first by identifying what they believed to be inefficiencies in government. They involved federal workers in the process, brought in a series of reforms that had to do with bringing technology and the Internet and other things into government. And so over the course of seven years, there was a reduction in the workforce.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
About 400,000 federal positions were cut through a combination of departures and attrition and some layoffs. But it was a much more systematic process to say, where do we need to cut? Where do we not need to cut? And the logic there was quite clear. Yes, we might want to cut government. We might want to change what government does. But at a fundamental level, government still needs to function.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
People still need to you know, get their payments processed or get their passports. They need to feel like the water that they drink is safe. People need to inspect meat packers. All of these things that we take for granted as the work of government still needs to happen while you're making these large-scale reforms.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, you're right that this perception seems to persist. But if you look at the numbers, the size of the federal workforce has stayed relatively constant since the 60s. even though the population of the U.S. has grown, even though our expectations about what government should do has grown.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Now, one thing that's interesting with that effort is that there has been some evaluation of whether or not that worked in the medium term. And depending on who you ask, even that effort where we saw a reduction in federal positions didn't lead to the outcome that that administration was hoping for.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So what we saw in response to this reduction in the government workforce was an explosion of contractors. And so today we have something like three times as many people delivering the work of government who are not in fact federal government workers than actual federal employees.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah. So right now there are programs and services where the person who's actually processing the benefit or the government program is a contractor. So you can think about this in terms of the social safety net, for example. You can think about it in other areas as well.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
In many cases, the contractor and the federal government employee are working in the same building with access to the same data doing similar kinds of work, but only one of them is on the formal government payroll and the other is a contractor.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
What that means, according to at least some public administration scholars, is that this effort to reduce the workforce led to higher levels of expenses for the federal government as a whole because those contractors end up being more expensive than having more federal employees to begin with.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So at the end of the day, even these efforts that were much more thoughtful and much more strategic about reducing the size of government haven't led to a fundamental shift in what we actually need to be able to deliver the services that people expect.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
We just replaced a federal employee with a contractor to be able to keep up with the demand and the expectations that the American people have of their government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, absolutely. And again, these things take time, but under multiple administrations, including the last Trump administration, there were people in government who were dedicated to finding inefficiencies in government and finding ways to improve the customer experience for residents. Some of these cases are easy to see after the change has happened.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So, for example, if you try to go renew your passport today, you don't have to take months and months. You don't have to go to the post office. You can just do that online. The reason you can do that is because there was a team of people in government that we're trying to figure out what are the exact pain points in this long bureaucratic process? How can we simplify them?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So if you just look at the numbers, we're about at 2 million federal employees, a little over 2 million employees, and that really hasn't changed over time. If you look in terms of the budget, again, we're not seeing significant amounts of bloat on the public payroll. In fact, the budget for these workers is about 6% of the federal budget.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
How can we create a user interface that is easy for a customer to access online and make it as seamless and as simple as possible? So anytime you see a simplification on the front end, there's a team of people before working really hard to make that happen on the back end. There are other examples where previous administrations invested in data and analytics and evaluation support.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
all of that is really about improving how government functions and having the data to support that. So rather than making decisions based on an anecdotal experience or keeping the status quo, really investing in this fundamental question, is the program working? How can we improve it? Those teams had a lot of successes that were just about to go live. So for example,
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
There was a pilot program associated with making it easier to pay your taxes. Everybody in the country complains about the process of having to file your taxes, and they're quite right. A huge effort was done within government to pilot a new approach that would have made it easier for people to file their taxes for free.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
It seems like those efforts are all being now gutted, and it's unclear why that would be the case if the purpose of Doge is to make government run more efficiently.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
I think it's helpful to remember what we ask of our government. If we say that we can just turn the government off and on again in this way, we're kind of missing the fundamentals of what is needed for an economy to be able to develop, for people to be able to take risks and innovate in the private sector, in the nonprofit sector. And so, yes, of course, we can correct mistakes.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
But even with, you know, a few weeks worth of this process, we're seeing harms that are not going to be easily undone, not only in terms of local economies that are But for example, data that was regularly collected that is now not going to be collected, it's really hard to go back and fix that afterwards.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And at a fundamental level, it's taken generations of work to try to convince motivated, specialized talent to work for government. It's going to be really hard to rebuild that narrative after what we've heard over the past few weeks. So I'm worried that some of this harm
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
can't be undone quickly, and we're going to have to work collectively to rebuild trust both within government and in that kind of social contract with residents to fix some of this over time.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So in a government that, you know, spends $6 to $7 trillion a year, this is really not a matter of bloat either on numbers or on budget. But you're right that this belief seems to persist over multiple administrations, both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, in some ways, it's quite clear that there are a lot of parallels, which makes me think that, you know, this idea that government workers are bad and lazy and unmotivated isn't really a very new or innovative idea, even as we look across the world. So as you said, I worked in government during the Greek financial crisis or the global financial crisis where Greece was at the epicenter.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And we had The smartest people in the world thinking about broad-scale public sector reform, whether they were coming from Brussels or the IMF or top economists across the world.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And what was interesting during that period was even then, as we were asking for these large-scale reforms, the pervasive belief was that government workers, so the bureaucrats that were going to deliver all these large reforms, were lazy and unmotivated and corrupt people. and that the government workforce was bloated.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And that assumption existed well before we were looking at any of the actual numbers on how big the government was and where efficiencies needed to be made. That pervasive belief, I think, really hampered the efforts for reform.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Because if you think about it, what people were asked to do during that period was to change how they worked, with whom they worked, what they worked on, without any significant change in the resources that were given to them to do that change. all the while being called lazy and corrupt and unintelligent in the media. And so, you know, this to me was an open question.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
How can we ask people to change everything about how they work overnight if we don't understand what they do, appreciate the work that they do, and really invest in giving them the resources to do their work well?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
This is an area where a lot of people are starting to see rumblings of problems in local economies, and we might expect to see larger impacts over time. But You're absolutely right. Most people who work for the federal government don't, in fact, live in the Washington, D.C. area. So there are parts of communities and labor markets that might be drastically affected by this.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And this is going to be true across different agencies. So the examples that we've started seeing are employees who work, for example, for the National Park Service. There are parts of North Carolina or Arizona where many layoffs are happening and that's going to affect the local economy. We're starting to hear more about cuts for the IRS. The IRS has hubs across the country.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And so if you work in Kansas City or if you work in Ogden, Utah, you might be affected not just because your neighbors and friends are being laid off, but because that's going to affect the local economy in a way that affects everyone who lives there.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
I certainly don't know how much of that is real, but you're right that that number seems to be off by a huge order of magnitude. Sometimes that's just pure mistake. So a lot of articles have come out recently that points to literal mathematical errors in how those savings are being calculated. But there are other parts of that calculation that are a little bit more nuanced.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So for example, some things are listed as savings even though a contract has already been paid out and therefore there's no actual savings to canceling that contract. In other cases, what seems to be happening is that there's a misunderstanding of how some of these contracts are written, where there is a maximum amount that the government could pay, but the government isn't paying that amount.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And the Doge team are calculating savings related to that hypothetical maximum amount, not the actual amount that the government has spent. And so in reality, we haven't seen anything close to $55 billion in savings at this point. It'll be interesting to see how that changes over time.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
One thing that is clear is that the federal workforce budget isn't going to be the huge moneymaker here or the huge savings maker here because that's not really where most of the budget is spent.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
In any given year, about $270 billion are spent on federal worker salaries and benefits. But to put that number in context, that's, you know, around 6% of total federal spending. So it's not a very large amount of money when you think about the overall budget of the federal government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Just to put that in perspective, there are specific departments whose contracting budget is larger than that budget. And so you're absolutely right that at least at the federal level, the payroll is not a huge part of the federal budget.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You're right that given what has happened in the past few weeks, it's really hard to predict what the federal workforce and what government will look like a year from now. One thing that I'm thinking about in my work is what does it mean to try to cut the federal workforce in this way? So I imagine one of three things might happen.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
One is they will successfully cut the federal workforce in a way that immediately reduces the quality of services that the government can deliver. So we'll see that happen. in longer processing times. We'll see that in more dangerous health outbreaks. We might see that in worse roads and safety. That's one option.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
A second option is that this will be similar to what happened during the Clinton administration. And it will become very clear that we needed those government workers. And so we'll expand the federal budget by bringing in more contractors. Contractors are not only more expensive in some cases, but also have fewer layers of accountability.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, so we've had a civil service system that really prioritizes merit-based hiring of some form.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So we'll have less transparency and less accountability for how services are delivered. There's a third option, which is probably the largest threat to democracy overall, which is that we're going to see a replacement of professional nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists. And that could have all sorts of ramifications for what the next few years look like.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, I think it really depends on which citizens we're talking about. One area that I'm looking at quite closely are cuts to the VA and to anyone who works in related medical fields. That seems to be an area where we might see effects very, very soon where people are not able to access services that they've been promised because of a reduction in the workforce.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
That could lead to long-term challenges, both in terms of health and mental health and other services that have been promised to veterans where we could really see major disruption soon. There's kind of medium-term effects that I'm expecting as we look at reductions to the IRS that could affect our ability to collect taxes in ways that has long-term impacts for people.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
since 1883 since the Pendleton Act and that was really set up in response to what was called the spoil system so in the 19th century the idea was you could get a job in government just by displaying loyalty to the new political administration and what that led to was lower levels of performance less merit in government and ultimately worse outcomes for residents and so in 1883 the
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So there's many ways that this might show up in people's lives. In some ways, the areas where we're seeing a lot of concentrated frustration right now are things that affect people's lives today. Like they want to go to national park and it's closing earlier because there aren't enough staff, or the bathrooms are going to be dirty or closed because there aren't enough staff.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
But they may not be thinking about what's happening on the side of the CDC or protection against future outbreaks in terms of avian flu or in terms of measles, where that could have huge consequences in people's lives and could have consequences relatively soon, but are harder to trace back to these cuts in federal spending.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
The Pendleton Act basically said, look, we're going to have a civil service commission that's going to standardize recruitment. We're going to promote professionalism. And for the first time, you're going to need to take an exam to become part of the civil service.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Fast forward to 1978, where we had another big reform, the Civil Service Reform Act, that basically did a lot of the things that we're talking about today at a first level. So it created OPM, which is the Office of Personnel Management. It created the Merit Systems Protection Board, MSPB.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And both of these agencies were really designed to bring performance and accountability into the civil service. Each of these reforms was really set up to say, look, we need a civil service that can exist and can manage large-scale programs and services regardless of who's in the White House. Because the types of things we ask our government to do go beyond one administration.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yes, it's hard to really understand what the underlying beliefs are here. But what we're hearing in kind of public rhetoric is this pervasive disdain for the careers of public servants and especially citizens. civil servants who were there before and theoretically will be there after this administration.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
In some ways, it's taking us back in terms of rhetoric to the 19th century where the system of government was set up to be directly loyal to the president.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, my sense right now is that a lot of the language that is being used by Doge and not only Doge, other members of the Trump administration are directly set up to discredit public servants and to make clear that this administration does not value the career civil servants.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So the civil service has various types of employees within it that have different levels of protection. Your kind of classic civil servant who has been working in government for a very long time has some basic protections against being fired without documented evidence of very low performance or being
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
without any evidence that is usually part of a larger restructuring or reduction in force, as it's called. The employees that we've seen being targeted right now, at least in the past few weeks, are probationary employees primarily. So these are employees who have worked in government for one to two years and haven't reached that level of protection.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And so for them, it's much easier to be fired with fewer protections. But ultimately, at a really fundamental level, the system is set up where if you're going to be fired from the public sector workforce, there has to be a documented reason related to performance, which of course we're not seeing today.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, I think it's a really hard time to be a government worker for a bunch of different reasons. On the one hand, what I'm hearing from a lot of people who work in government is that the uncertainty is causing a lot of anxiety. So for some employees, they were fired on a Friday and then unfired again. on a Monday.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
There are people who are not sure what's going to happen to their teams, or they don't have information about what the direction is of the Trump administration. And, you know, in some ways that uncertainty is causing a lot more challenges than the facts themselves as of today.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
We've heard from members of the Trump administration that they are hoping to create a sense of trauma in the workforce in an effort to, you know, induce more voluntary resignations.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And so it's possible that a lot of this back and forth that we're seeing in terms of producing anxiety, the disdain that we're seeing in public comments about the public sector workforce are intended to create more stress right now. You know, a lot of public sector workers are working around the country and they have families and mortgages and they're worried about losing their jobs.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Entire towns are going to be affected by layoffs at this level.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, this makes me think of a lot of the employees that I've spoken to who were probationary employees. I've spoken to someone who entered government, very, very talented, entered through one of these programs that appears to be cut. For example, the Presidential Management Fellowship Program is a program that is designed to bring in new specialized talent into government, and it seems—
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
you know, as of today, that the program is going to be cut completely. And when I was speaking to a fellow of this program, you know, all I heard was, of course, anxiety and stress and disappointment, but also this broader question around, you know, how can I continue to work in government? It's not super clear.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
what jobs will be available in other parts of government, like state and local government as well. And so right now people are really scared that they took a chance. They didn't go into consulting or the private sector or the nonprofit sector. They took a chance on government as part of these pipeline programs. And they moved their families to serve.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And right now they just don't know what's going to happen next.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Well, this keeps changing every day, but we have some information from the initial deferred resignation. So as you'll remember, the first stage of this process was an offer to buy out employees that committed to resigning. At that stage, about 75,000 people resigned. resigned or took the buyout offer. But I want to put that number in context.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So that might sound like a very large number, but in fact is very similar to just the natural retirement rate that we see every year in government. And when I say retirement, I do mean retirement. It doesn't include the regular turnover in terms of resignations or other reasons why people separate. It's about half of regular turnover in any typical year. And so from the perspective of Doge,
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
That first attempt to get people to resign seems to have not worked, at least as planned.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah. So I think what we heard from the Doge team and others in government was this assumption that that if we offered payouts to federal workers, they would all take it because they're all sitting around doing nothing anyway. There was this belief that this would be an easy exit strategy for people who are lazy or not hardworking or aren't motivated to do their job well.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So if you start with that assumption, you offer people this buyout, and then people don't take it, you would have to question whether or not that initial assumption was right, that people were just sitting around waiting for a buyout. My sense is that this is at least a first piece of evidence that that's not what we're looking at in terms of the federal workforce.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, so before this year, one of the things that we were all thinking about is how do we bring in specialized talent into government? I want to be clear.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Everyone on both sides of the aisle understands that government would be better if we could modernize parts of it, if we could bring in specialized talent, if we could bring in young early career professionals that have specific skills that don't exist yet as much in government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So probationary employees are exactly that group of people that we were hoping to attract and convince to go work for government. These are people who are coming in with specialized skills. They might be early in their careers. Many of them were coming in through programs that were specifically designed to bring in new talent into government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So one of the oldest programs in the federal government is called the Presidential Management Fellowship Program. And that program is taking people with master's degrees that have a lot of different options on the labor market and convincing them to go work for the federal government. By design, those are two-year programs.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So anyone who's working in government for less than two years is in this category of probational employees. You know, if you're trying to change the face of government or change the types of services that are delivered, you should be investing in that specialized talent. You should be spending more time convincing people with that skill set to come into government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
not gutting those programs right before people actually get good at their jobs.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yes, that's exactly what we're seeing. And that's where it becomes quite clear, at least to me, that the
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
effort to trim the government workforce isn't really based on some sort of strategic, thoughtful process around where we need more people in government and where we don't, or a broader kind of ideological framework that says we're going to invest in, you know, this type of government versus a different type of government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
It really is just cutting the people that we can cut, which unfortunately and inevitably means that early career professionals are more vulnerable.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, until this year, until this new administration, the big challenge or the big human capital crisis that we were all talking about in public management is what's called the silver tsunami. So, you know, baby boomers who were either retiring or about to retire were And depending on what estimate you use, about a third of federal employees are retirement eligible.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So really, we have a significantly older workforce in government. And the big challenge is how do we bring in young people with specialized skills and talent and energy to replace a generation of employees that are about to retire?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
My first reaction was that this is an effort to make people hate their jobs at some fundamental level. And it reminds me of something that we've heard Russell Voetze, who's the OMB director. in private speeches. And it sounds like he said something along the lines of, we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
And so when I first saw this email, I thought, yep, that's how you would do it. If you look at the evidence around what it takes to have happy and engaged and productive team, trust in your leadership and feeling like you're valued by your manager is fundamental. for people to be able to do their job well, not just in the public sector, but in the private sector and the nonprofit sector as well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Thank you so much for having me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Yeah, you're right that this perception seems to persist. But if you look at the numbers, the size of the federal workforce has stayed relatively constant since the 60s. even though the population of the U.S. has grown, even though our expectations about what government should do has grown.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So if you just look at the numbers, we're about at 2 million federal employees, a little over 2 million employees, and that really hasn't changed over time. If you look in terms of the budget, again, we're not seeing significant amounts of bloat on the public payroll. In fact, the budget for these workers is about 6% of the federal budget.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So in a government that spends $6 to $7 trillion a year, this is really not a matter of bloat, either on numbers or on budget. But you're right that this belief seems to persist over multiple administrations, both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Well, this keeps changing every day, but we have some information from the initial deferred resignation. So as you'll remember, the first stage of this process was an offer to buyout employees that committed to resigning. At that stage, about 75,000 people resigned or took the buyout offer. But I want to put that number in context.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So that might sound like a very large number, but in fact is very similar to just the natural retirement rate that we see every year in government. And when I say retirement, I do mean retirement. It doesn't include the regular turnover in terms of resignations or other reasons why people separate. It's about half of regular turnover in any typical year. And so from the perspective of Doge,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
That first attempt to get people to resign seems to have not worked, at least as planned.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Yeah. So I think what we heard from the Doge team and others in government was this assumption that that if we offered payouts to federal workers, they would all take it because they're all sitting around doing nothing anyway. There was this belief that this would be an easy exit strategy for people who are lazy or not hardworking or aren't motivated to do their job well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So if you start with that assumption, you offer people this buyout, and then people don't take it, you would have to question whether or not that initial assumption was right, that people were just sitting around waiting for a buyout. My sense is that this is at least a first piece of evidence that that's not what we're looking at in terms of the federal workforce.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
My first reaction was that this is an effort to make people hate their jobs at some fundamental level. And it reminds me of something that we've heard Russell Vogt say, who's the OMB director. in private speeches. And it sounds like he said something along the lines of, we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And so when I first saw this email, I thought, yep, that's how you would do it. If you look at the evidence around what it takes to have happy and engaged and productive team, trust in your leadership and feeling like you're valued by your manager is fundamental. for people to be able to do their job well, not just in the public sector, but in the private sector and the nonprofit sector as well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So this is a message that very clearly is saying, we don't think you're doing anything useful and you're going to need to affirm what you do every day to justify your job. If you just take this at a human level, anyone who is receiving that type of email from their boss, is getting the message that they are not wanted and they are not valued.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So to me, it seems part of this broader effort to make people not want to work for government.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
The second part, which I think is still up for discussion in the courts, is what does it mean for someone from Doge and Elon Musk specifically to send an email of that nature that implies resignations or layoffs without going through any of the formal processes associated with layoffs and performance evaluations?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, anytime you see an administration that is so hostile towards their civil service, of course, you're going to have people in career positions that are trying to navigate what that looks like for their staff. You know, what we're hearing, at least on our side, are conversations about how to reassure people that their work matters and that their work is important.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, one question that has often come up, even before this period, is that a lot of what government does is invisible. to the American taxpayer. People don't know exactly what the Department of Energy does unless there's a problem. People don't fully understand necessarily what happens to make sure our food and our air is safe. And that's on purpose, right?
Fresh Air
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We hear about government when there's a problem. But on any given day, there's millions of people that are trying to keep Americans safe in ways that are invisible. And so one of the questions that has come up as part of this process is, what would it look like if we could bring those stories to the surface, explain to people and show people what it means to have a functioning government?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Would they still want all those programs cut if there was a clear understanding of how that would affect their lives?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Under normal circumstances, the way that you would appeal something like this is going through the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, so the MSPB. This is an independent quasi-judicial agency that is meant to protect federal employees from unfair or improper personnel actions.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
One of these protections is the protection against being fired for reasons that are unrelated to merit and are more related to political influence or personal bias. And so there is a process within the MSPB to appeal these decisions if a federal employee believes that they're wrongfully terminated.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
The purpose of the board is really to ensure that the civil service remains nonpartisan and maintain those protections. And so it seems that some employees might go through that path to appeal these decisions. There are other ways that we might see lawsuits or legal appeals happening, but that's the traditional way an employee would go about appealing something like this.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Yeah, absolutely. And again, these things take time. But Under multiple administrations, including the last Trump administration, there were people in government who were dedicated to finding inefficiencies in government and finding ways to improve the customer experience for residents. Some of these cases are easy to see after the change has happened.
Fresh Air
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So, for example, if you try to go renew your passport today, you don't have to take months and months. You don't have to go to the post office. You can just do that online. The reason you can do that is because there was a team of people in government who that we're trying to figure out what are the exact pain points in this long bureaucratic process? How can we simplify them?
Fresh Air
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How can we create a user interface that is easy for a customer to access online and make it as seamless and as simple as possible? So anytime you see a simplification on the front end, there's a team of people before working really hard to make that happen on the back end. There are other examples where previous administrations invested in data and analytics and evaluation support.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
all of that is really about improving how government functions and having the data to support that. So rather than making decisions based on an anecdotal experience or keeping the status quo, really investing in this fundamental question, is the program working? How can we improve it? Those teams had a lot of successes that were just about to go live. So for example,
Fresh Air
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There was a pilot program associated with making it easier to pay your taxes. Everybody in the country complains about the process of having to file your taxes, and they're quite right. A huge effort was done within government to pilot a new approach that would have made it easier for people to file their taxes for free.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
It seems like those efforts are all being now gutted, and it's unclear why that would be the case if the purpose of Doge is to make government run more efficiently.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
I think it's helpful to remember what we ask of our government. If we say that we can just turn the government off and on again in this way, we're kind of missing the fundamentals of what is needed for an economy to be able to develop, for people to be able to take risks and innovate in the private sector and the nonprofit sector. And so, yes, of course, we can correct mistakes.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
But even with, you know, a few weeks worth of this process, we're seeing harms that are not going to be easily undone, not only in terms of local economies that are going to suffer and But for example, data that was regularly collected that is now not going to be collected, it's really hard to go back and fix that afterwards.
Fresh Air
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And at a fundamental level, it's taken generations of work to try to convince motivated, specialized talent to work for government. It's going to be really hard to rebuild that narrative after what we've heard over the past few weeks. So I'm worried that some of this harm
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
can't be undone quickly, and we're going to have to work collectively to rebuild trust both within government and in that kind of social contract with residents to fix some of this over time.
Fresh Air
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This is an area where a lot of people are starting to see rumblings of problems in local economies, and we might expect to see larger impacts over time. But you're absolutely right. Most people who work for the federal government don't in fact live in the Washington, D.C. area. So there are parts of communities and labor markets that might be drastically affected by this.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And this is going to be true across different agencies. So the examples that we've started seeing are employees who work, for example, for the National Park Service. There are parts of North Carolina or Arizona where many layoffs are happening, and that's going to affect the local economy. We're starting to hear more about cuts for the IRS.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
The IRS has hubs across the country, and so if you work in Kansas City or if you work in Ogden, Utah, you might be affected not just because your neighbors and friends are being laid off, but because that's going to affect the local economy in a way that affects everyone who lives there.
Fresh Air
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You're right that given what has happened in the past few weeks, it's really hard to predict what the federal workforce and what government will look like a year from now. One thing that I'm thinking about in my work is what does it mean to try to cut the federal workforce in this way? So I imagine one of three things might happen.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
One is they will successfully cut the federal workforce in a way that immediately reduces the quality of services that the government can deliver. So we'll see that happen. In longer processing times, we'll see that in more dangerous health outbreaks. We might see that in worse roads and safety. That's one option.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
A second option is that this will be similar to what happened during the Clinton administration. And it will become very clear that we needed those government workers. And so we'll expand the federal budget by bringing in more contractors. Contractors are not only more expensive in some cases, but also have fewer layers of accountability.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So we'll have less transparency and less accountability for how services are delivered. There's a third option, which is probably the largest threat to democracy overall. which is that we're going to see a replacement of professional nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists. And that could have all sorts of ramifications for what the next few years look like.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, I think it really depends on which citizens we're talking about. One area that I'm looking at quite closely are cuts to the VA and to anyone who works in related medical fields. That seems to be an area where we might see effects very, very soon, where people are not able to access services that they've been promised because of a reduction in the workforce.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
That could lead to long-term challenges, both in terms of health and mental health and other services that have been promised to veterans where we could really see major disruption soon. There's kind of medium-term effects that I'm expecting as we look at reductions to the IRS that could affect our ability to collect taxes in ways that has long-term impacts for people.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So there's many ways that this might show up in people's lives. In some ways, the areas where we're seeing a lot of concentrated frustration right now are things that affect people's lives today. Like they want to go to a national park and it's closing earlier because there aren't enough staff or the bathrooms are going to be dirty or closed because there aren't enough staff.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
But they may not be thinking about what's happening on the side of the CDC or protection against future outbreaks in terms of avian flu or in terms of measles, where that could have huge consequences in people's lives and could have consequences relatively soon, but are harder to trace back to these cuts in federal spending.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Thank you for having me.