Protesters take a stand against DOGE’s layoffs of federal workers. Credit: Shutterstock / Julio Javier Vargas

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

“It was no more clear to me how important federal workers are than two years ago when I took office and there was a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio,” U.S. Rep. Emilia Sykes told a crowd of government employees and supporters who rallied on Capitol Hill early last month.

On Feb. 3, 2023, 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern freight train went off the rails and burst into flames, creating an airborne toxic event that caused the evacuation of thousands of residents and lofted hazardous chemicals over 16 states.

“I was dispatched to East Palestine,” Sykes, an Ohio Democrat, recounted. “I don’t even represent East Palestine but it was important to be there. I met with people from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who were dirty, who were exhausted, but they had a smile on their faces because they knew the work they were doing would make sure the people of East Palestine would have clean air, clean water and monitoring. So, when I think about the EPA who have been there for us and continue to be there, that’s why I’m standing here.”

The American Federation of Government Employees rally at which Sykes spoke went depressingly under-covered in the mainstream press.

Meanwhile, a train wreck of a different sort dominated headlines last week as President Trump’s billionaire-stocked cabinet met for the first time. One of them, a dubiously naturalized citizen named Elon Musk, stole much of the spectacle, but Trump himself boasted that his new EPA director plans to slash up to 65% of the agency’s budget.

Adding Carolina reaper pepper juice to the wound, the Ohio county in which Palestine is located went 3-to-1 for Trump last November.

That proposed budget cut also could eliminate 10,000 EPA jobs on top of the unprecedented number of firings Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans.

So much for the notion Trump is a champion of working people. Especially if they happen to be civil servants.

Although the salaries of federal workers sit well above average, many have nobly forgone more lucrative opportunities in the private sector to serve their nation.

“Elon Musk is talking about efficiency,” AFL-CIO leader Liz Shuler said at the aforementioned rally. “Is it waste and fraud to make sure your Social Security check comes in on time? Is it the workers who spend their days and nights and weekends protecting us on our streets, our parks, our airports that are the problem? Is it the nurses taking care of our veterans who are the problem? The real waste and fraud is the billions of dollars in handouts and tax breaks we give to the wealthiest corporations in America.”

To her point, where are the purported savings of the Elon Chainsaw Massacre? The numbers we’ve heard from DOGE simply don’t add up.

“It’s so easy when you just get to make it all up,” Michael Masnick, founder of the blog Techdirt wrote of the preposterous claims DOGE has already saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. “The really dumb part is how Musk and DOGE keep using the word ‘fraud.’ It’s a powerful word! It implies crimes and corruption and shadowy figures doing shadowy things. What DOGE has actually found, though, is … different spending priorities. Which, sure, you might not like every government program. But that’s not fraud.”

Earlier this month, Musk retweeted a memorable fake headline from right-wing satire site The Babylon Bee: “Trump becomes first fascist in history to reduce size of government.” Popular conspiracist podcaster Timothy Pool parroted the logic.

“These people are saying that Trump and Elon have consolidated power, they’re taking over the country, it is fascism, and I’m like, yo, they’re firing people, OK?” Pool said. “They’re reducing their power in government.”

But historically, purges are kind of a fascists’ thing.

For example, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service that Nazi Germany enacted in April 1933 sought to fire all “civil servants who … cannot guarantee that they will always stand up for the national state without reservation” — a group that overwhelmingly designated non-Aryans. Workers could also be retired without cause “for the purpose of simplifying administration.”

Were the Nazis not fascists either?

That German law compelled a socialist named Albert Einstein to resign from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and emigrate to New Jersey. Like him, a third of those previously involved in Musk’s DOGE racket have resigned in protest.

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” 21 staffers wrote in a letter to the White House chief of staff covered by Time Magazine. “We will not use our skills … to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.”

It’s hard to fathom how anyone can view fired USAID workers as members of some sinister “Deep State” as they carry the contents of their desks from the building and tear up over the fate of the world’s poorest people. Doesn’t sending in billionaire swamp creatures to “drain the swamp” at least spark an ember of cognitive dissonance?

“You see, these claims of fraud by President Trump and Elon Musk feel like they’re a fig leaf,” Steve Vladeck, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, told 60 Minutes. “What we’re really seeing is a consolidation of power. Fraud provides a plausible-sounding reason for running over what had been historical constraints, whether they were statutes or norms limiting the president’s ability to centralize power. The endgame here seems to be controlling every single apparatus of the federal government directly out of the White House, and that’s just never been how we’ve understood executive power.”

We needn’t choose whether the broligarchs’ reckless cruelty amounts to a malice-laden game of three-dimensional chess or jaw-dropping incompetence. The relevant point is that when authoritarians seize power, they search for undesirables on which to pin the blame. And by now, we ought to know how that story goes.

The Capitol Hill rally by government employees ended with a chorus to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

They divide us by our color; they divide us by our tongue,
They divide us men and women; they divide us old and young,
But they’ll tremble at our voices, when they hear these verses sung,
For the Union makes us strong!

At best, the mass firing of federal workers is nothing more elegant than union-busting. But at worst, we may say in retrospect, “First they came for the civil servants.”

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This article appears in Mar 5-18, 2025.