Proposals from DOGE, Elon Musk's entity tasked with making the federal government more "efficient," have resulted in lawsuits, pushback from other federal agencies, and a lot of uncertainty for the millions of people who work for the federal government. We look at what's happened & what's to come. This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, and correspondents Shannon Bond & Chris Arnold.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is DOGE and how is it affecting federal workers?
More overnight train journeys. If you can lay down on the train, then it's just like next level. That's almost luxury. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And today, the latest on the Trump administration's continuing efforts to remake the federal government. Doge, the entity that Elon Musk has been the face of, is just one aspect of these changes.
And how Doge wants to reshape the federal workforce has been steeped in controversy and court battles. And NPR correspondents Shannon Bond and Chris Arnold have been focusing on all of this. And join me now. Hello to you both. Hey, Sue.
Chapter 2: Why are federal employees being terminated?
Hey, Sue.
Chris, let's start with you. There are more than 2 million federal employees doing all different kinds of jobs all over the country and even the world. And you talked to just a couple of them, people who work at national parks who have been impacted by what Doge is doing. Tell us about them.
Yeah, right. A lot of these workers who've been fired are what are called probationary workers. And that can sound at first like, oh, well, maybe they got hired six months ago, so maybe it's not that big a deal. But in many cases, it's not that. You could have worked someplace for five, six, seven, ten years, and then you get a promotion and you're in a new job because you were doing a good job.
You're a good worker. And now you're in a probationary period in that new job. So these folks were in that category. And I talked to Eileen and James Kramer, and they worked at a national park in Alaska. It's called Lake Clark National Park. These guys have both gotten promotions recently. Everything seemed good. And then they get these letters saying, you know what, you're doing a lousy job.
And so you're fired today. No details, no reason. And it just looked like a formally letter with their names filled in. And here's Eileen and James.
That was really, I think, the hardest part about it was that they were saying we were underperforming, which isn't true.
They obviously didn't look at our personnel file because... We have evidence showing that we're great performers and we've exceeded expectations and we've received performance awards.
I got a regional award specifically in efficiency last year. So it's a little bit ironic to me that I'm being terminated as part of this government efficiency initiative.
Chris, I think this is really interesting for a couple of reasons. I'm glad you made that point that like not all probationary workers are, you know, first job out of college types. But also personnel records are legal documents.
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Chapter 3: What legal actions are being taken against DOGE's policies?
I mean, that's what's happening right now. I mean, there are lawyers just gathering these up, you know, and being like, here's the letter. It's the same as the other thousand letters. And when you actually look at the personnel file, you know, this person got this commendation and, you know, and also they're talking and it turns out their own supervisor was like, I don't want to fire this person.
I had no choice.
And so, Chris, what exactly is happening with these lawsuits now?
Well, there's one in federal court in San Francisco against the Office of Personnel Management, which apparently the lawsuit alleges a lot of these letters just came from OPM and then kind of went through the agencies. But it wasn't even these agencies saying, we want to fire these people. But it also zooms in on this idea like you were talking about, like, well –
You can't just lie and say these people did their jobs badly and use that as a justification to immediately terminate them. There was just another kind of related case. Things were resolved in the last couple of days involving the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. And a few workers were put back to work or will be in a couple of days.
So, you know, the courts really might come back and say, you know what, guys, like this just wasn't done right. Like these federal workers have rights and you cannot fire them this way.
I think at this point, a lot of our listeners know what OPM is, but we should just note it's the Office of Personnel and Management, which essentially serves as like the HR for the federal government. And I think pushback is maybe thematically what we're seeing more of here, Shannon, especially when it comes to how Musk has been operating.
And by that, I mean there was this federal government-wide email sent out at his directive asking all federal employees to do a five bulleted point list of what they had accomplished that week to sort of justify their existence.
And it didn't end up that simple. So Musk posted about this on X on Saturday, said everyone's going to receive this email. And by the way, if you don't respond, we're going to take that as a resignation, which is sort of kind of a stunning thing to announce, like by this person who He is a special government employee, but the White House has said he's not running anything, right?
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Chapter 4: How are federal agencies responding to Musk's directives?
Like, just again, like people are just like, who is in charge? Who is making the decisions here? And I think we're going to see, like, to what degree do some of these political appointees who have been Senate confirmed, right, to their positions? you know, how are they going to continue to assert their power over Musk?
And it seems to me that the timing of this is not coincidental because Musk started taking these actions as soon as Donald Trump was inaugurated into office. But these cabinet secretaries are now being sworn in, the cabinet's being fully actualized, and it
Shouldn't perhaps come as a surprise that the people that are supposed to have ownership over these agencies and its workforce are maybe looking to Musk and saying, like, not necessarily that they oppose the end goal, which is reducing spending, reducing the size of the workforce, but saying, like, I want to make these decisions, not this guy. Right. Right.
And like, also maybe I know best, right?
So like an example here is like the Department of Energy, right? Which as we reported on, you know, when these sort of initial probationary layoffs or firings happened, you know, cut a bunch of workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration. You know, these are people who work with nuclear warheads and then had to rehire them, right?
Because actually they were like, oh no, we can't actually fire these people. Like we need these people. They're very much in the position now, right? I think there's a bit of like
You know, the actual functionality of these agencies, they do have work to do and they need to make sure that if they are going to trim down, they trim, you know, not trimming people who actually need to be doing some of this work. And I guess I think some of this is about like ego and sort of turf battles over like who ultimately is the decider here.
Like, you know, these are all people, many of them, you know, themselves have business backgrounds, right? They're coming in saying like, I want to be in charge here. And like, you know, I'm not going to just like let Elon Musk tell me what to do.
But it's been quite interesting because I think a lot of people were sort of speculating, you know, is it Musk and Trump who are going to have a fallout? Like what's going to happen here? And actually, I think some of the first battles we're seeing is between Musk and these cabinet secretaries. OK, we got to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
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Chapter 5: What challenges are facing federal management under Musk's influence?
Similarly, this idea of like reporting in five things you accomplished last week, you know, that is something he has implemented at his companies. Even the title of that email, what did you do last week? That is something that he had famously texted to the then CEO of Twitter, like when he was basically making the decision to buy the company and try to kick out current management.
And we're seeing again and again, he's bringing this playbook in from his businesses that, you know, I think to his mind has been successful in the past, right? Yeah. And I think what that tells us very much is – and we've talked about this before, right? He – Musk sees the government, you know, as not really any different from a corporation. He's talked about this.
He's called it America Incorporated. And it needs to have a corporate restructuring. And he's very much going about it the way he would, you know, if you were the, you know, pretty independently powerful CEO of a large company where you can say, yeah, I'm going to fire wide swaths of people.
I mean, this is also played out in the same way at Twitter, where Twitter fired people and then had to rehire them, right? Because they actually found out some of them were doing jobs that the company needed. But part of the reason we're seeing kind of so much like confusion and disruption and pushback is that like the problem is fundamentally the government is not a corporation.
And so, yes, if you were going to do large scale reductions in force, like there are actual legal channels you need to follow. There are requirements over things like preference to people who have veteran status or people with disabilities. Like there are things that exist in the government world that may not exist in the corporate world.
And I think that's where we're seeing so many of these clashes. But it is really kind of this like very differing kind of view of what the purpose of government is and really different value system. I think that we're seeing Musk bring in that I think is causing just so much of this like confusion and drama and like honestly heartache for a lot of the workers that we're talking to.
There's also this murkiness, too, where on the one hand, Elon Musk is very clearly in charge here or at least making critical decisions. But the government and the administration at the same time this week is trying to say, no, technically, he's not the administrator of Doge.
Well, and I think like that's a big difference between the private sector, too. Right. I mean, if Musk buys Twitter, which became X, I mean, yeah, he's in charge. He can fire half the people. The parallel with the government like stops there. Right. It makes me think I used to cover Silicon Valley and you'd see guys who made gajillions of dollars.
And then they're like, I want to solve public education. And they would try to wade in. And then they'd realize like, oh my God, no, I'm dealing with the unions. And I don't have like a room full of really smart grads from Stanford, like making this one thing. I'm dealing with a hundred things and they're all way more complicated. And it's like, it kind of reminds me of that.
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