DOGE has eliminated thousands of federal jobs and canceled more than 1,000 contracts. Harvard professor Elizabeth Linos warns, "We're seeing harms that are not going to be easily undone." Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the premise of the government workforce changes under Musk?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Here's a hypothetical question. If he wanted to, could Elon Musk establish a new bathroom breaks policy for more than 2 million federal employees?
Well, he hasn't, but since the Trump administration took office and gave Musk's Department of Government Efficiency a mandate to shrink the government, Musk has wielded an astonishing level of authority over the federal workforce.
After gaining access to the Treasury Department's massive payment system, Musk and his team have dismissed thousands of employees, terminated countless contracts, and targeted two government agencies created by Congress for elimination. Last weekend, federal workers received an email instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week.
Musk added in a social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. That got pushback from several Trump-appointed agency leaders who told their employees not to respond. Much of what Musk has done is under court challenge, but President Trump has said he'd like to see him become even more aggressive.
To help us understand these efforts to drastically reshape the American government, we've invited Elizabeth Linus to join us.
She's the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and director of the People Lab, which does research on how to recruit, retrain, and support the government workforce and integrate evidence-based policymaking into government.
Earlier in her career, she was a policy advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece, pursuing government reform at a time of financial crisis. Well, Elizabeth Linos, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me.
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Chapter 2: How has the size and budget of the federal workforce evolved over the years?
There's a perception in all of this recent activity that the public payroll is bloated, not just inefficient, but just too many people. How does the federal workforce compare with, I don't know, past decades?
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.
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.
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.
Now, before we talk about the specific measures that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as Elon Musk's outfit is called, let's just talk a little bit about the rules here. I mean, I know that most federal government employees work under the civil service system. Just tell us a little bit about how long we've had that, what it was intended to do.
Yeah, so we've had a civil service system that really prioritizes merit-based hiring of some form.
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
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What is the impact of Musk's policies on federal employees?
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.
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.
Speaking in general, what protections does the civil service system offer government employees?
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
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.
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.
You know, it's been a really turbulent few weeks for federal employees. I wonder, you know, you've done work with these folks. Have you talked to federal employees? What have they told you about their experiences?
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: What are the challenges faced by probationary employees in the federal workforce?
Is there one employee that maybe you could describe for us without identifying them by name or position?
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—
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.
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.
And right now they just don't know what's going to happen next.
So let's talk about what's happened here. Do we know how many government employees have been taken off the payroll so far by Doge, more or less?
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.
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,
That first attempt to get people to resign seems to have not worked, at least as planned.
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Chapter 5: What legal options do affected federal employees have?
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.
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?
You know, there was an extraordinary move, and I mentioned this in the introduction, which I think is a measure of Musk's influence in the government, that he got these emails sent to people last weekend instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week. There was some pushback. Some agency had said, you don't have to do that.
But, you know, Musk added in this social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. What was your reaction when you heard about this?
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.
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.
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
To me, it seems, you know, part of this broader effort to make people not want to work for government.
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?
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Chapter 6: What efforts are being made to preserve Fresh Air's legacy?
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?
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?
Would they still want all those programs cut if there was a clear understanding of that, how that would affect their lives?
There have been media reports of people who were discharged with language about poor performance or similar language, but who have said in interviews that they've had nothing but positive performance reports. Generally speaking, what kinds of rights do they have to appeal these firings?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Elizabeth Lino. She is an associate professor of public policy and management at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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