Late last week, Politico published an insidery DC horror story about the “dark mood” at federal agencies as government bureaucrats fretted about the ramifications of President Donald Trump returning to the White House. These government functionaries fear that Trump is “coming for their jobs” with new executive orders aimed at paring back the horribly overgrown federal bureaucracy. “I am terrified,” complained one staffer.
It’s a bit odd for a collection of employees just offered generous eight-month buyout plans by the President if they’d no longer like to continue in their jobs. Maybe if the threat of firing really is so “terrifying,” such an offer would be a lifeline. That the bitter rumblings have continued since says a lot about the actual interests of these employees.
And the coverage of them over the last few weeks says a great deal about the legacy media that so much reporting has been devoted to the plight of these poor bureaucrats. For example, the New York Times reported last weekend that “a Federal Trade Commission employee was so anxious that he told family members not to talk about politics on unencrypted lines.” Meanwhile, Reuters noted that federal and even public sector workers were “stunned” and afraid. Similar themes were also picked up in the Washington Post, CNN and Politico (again).
Lost in this narrative is why these positions have become expendable. Trump ran on a commitment to shrink the federal bureaucracy, which clearly chimed with the American public. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is premised on this very idea: the size of government has grown too large and unwieldy, and so must be reined in.
But because these workers hail from a similar social milieu as journalists, their job losses have received outsized attention. Other industries have not been so lucky. Take the example of coalminers and other workers tied to the extractive energy industry that has powered America for hundreds of years. Back in 2019, former president Joe Biden told them to “learn to code”. The media lapped it up, primarily because the miners were seen as enemies of the green agenda. Take this 2021 piece, from the New York Times, titled “The Achilles’ Heel of Biden’s Climate Plan? Coal Miners.” The sub-headline is even richer: “Unions representing other workers affected by climate legislation have struck deals, but opposition from coal miners has persisted, complicating the path to enactment.”
For simply fighting back against their jobs being eliminated, these coalminers weren’t real flesh-and-blood humans, but instead complications to a political agenda. This view was confirmed by a piece from CNN around the same time, which asserted that the end of the coal industry was the only way for “humanity […] to save itself”. And any complaining about this was simply, as a Politico piece claimed, a problem of “mindset”. If these miners can’t learn new skills and adapt, well, the future will simply leave them behind — they should’ve pursued more valuable skills, we’re told.
That even after the 2024 election, the corporate press still sees America as divided between the ennobled Left and the deplorable Right makes one other important point clear: it hasn’t learned anything since Trump’s first term. Journalists still see themselves as crusaders interested only in telling the stories of beleaguered liberals. It’s not journalism, rightly understood, just narrative-creation — and one prone to all of the mistakes made by the press last time around.
The media should simply apply the same cold logic it applied to coalminers to the bureaucrats. Political reality has passed them by. Industries evolve, jobs change. The federal bureaucracy is no exception to this. Maybe, then, they should learn to code.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeYou would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
In the meantime, here in the UK tens of thousands of workers in the private sector will be loosing their jobs due to unaffordable tax increases imposed to fund lavish pay rises for the public sector, the public sector of course being shelters from said tax increases.
Not to mention UK farmers, many going back generations working on the land, who’ll be forced to give up due to the insane inheritance tax burden introduced by Labour.
In the US, once these state-sector jobs start to disappear, the need to undertake a useless degree (period of indoctrination) will become much less enticing, which can only be a good thing. Then too, the academics in many non-STEM subjects coasting along might need to think about actually contributing something worthwhile to the economy.
How long will we need to wait until the tide turns in the UK too?
The farming sector in the UK does need reform, it’s simply become (another) place for capital to dump large amounts of cash so I think an inheritance tax on farms isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
However the weekly returns on farming are so poor that many simply won’t be able to pay the bill when it arrives. That issue needs to be rectified (fair prices paid by supermarkets etc) before you put the inheritance tax in place, otherwise you’re simply driving the small farms to bankruptcy
Opening up valuable land for global finance to buy until eventually all farming land is owned by monopolies and food prices can be set as high as they wish and the rest of us will be working only to survive. Leftist totalitarianism by the back door. The Fabians have almost won. You will own nothing, keep quiet about it, and say thankyou for your rations?
That doesn’t sound like a very left wing scenario to me, that would be the complete opposite in fact
History tells us that left-to-right is a circle – not a line. The difference between extreme left and extreme right is minimal.
Fair prices paid by super markets – their profit margins are actually razor thin and competition on price is ultimately driven by the consumer. We don’t want to pay a fair price for food because then we’d have less money left over for recreation.
Price isn’t driven by the consumer though, that only applies to items you can choose not to buy which isn’t really the case with food. People need to eat so are price takers in that regard. Whilst the supermarkets may make less margin on food than other items they’re still the ones that largely set the prices given to the farmer for produce, which isn’t nearly high enough to be sustainable long term
There’s a key element missing from the discussion here: subsidies.
Within a globalised market place, you have constraints for your local producers through high regulation. Hence higher costs. Competing with producers unburdened from regulation.
To counter this state induced market distortion you then get a « one size fits all » subsidy system.
Ie another state distortion. One where the biggest beneficiary is the crown. The absurdity ! Aside from this fun fact, it also means that smallholders have been able to survive, barely, poorly. Deregulation would entail consolidation, and there is a precedent in NZ. It would be carnage for smallholders to abandon the subsidy scheme.
The inheritance tax is a debate worth having but in the right sequence.
The same point could apply to the dreadful farm to fork insanity.
Much as with energy, we are being forced to confront decades of cowardice, short term electoral horizons and sacred cows, as we stumble along, heavy boots laden with contradictions
“Learn to code”, only to have an AI agent take your job a year later.
Pretty sure that’s a very big part of the process in the 2 trillion target.
Just take the 8 months
We get the same thing in Canadian media – particularly the CBC. Pipeline project shut down by government fiat and 10,000 people put out of work? No problem – maybe you shouldn’t be a dummy who wears a hard hat. 500 government jobs eliminated through retirements without one person losing their job? Breathless wall to wall coverage. At the end of the day the culture wars really are a class war.
Legacy media.. every time you dig, they deliver, in spades, something truly pungent.
Bravo to the author, I hadn’t spotted this one. Keep up with the dissections!
Same with Canada, Musk can come here next and try to deal with powerful public sector unions at all levels of government, huge pay raises being paid by higher deficits mostly. Good luck with that. Draining the swamp will cause a flood. Mr A.I. can review the bureaucracy and conclude that there is no point in trying to improve efficiency when most people working there aren’t actually doing anything. And cutting all those jobs will cause a recession, what a conundrum.
Take the 8 months payout, then simply contract yourself back to the department you were working for anyway for double the wages.
My prediction: The US will spend less on salaries for public sector workers after this mass lay off but spending on consultants and contractors will skyrocket, more than offsetting any gains made from the redundancies
If you’re a numbers guy, how do you account for the low level bureaucrats trying to obstruct and sabotage your agenda.
It’s not a raw cost cutting measure. Its asking people that aren’t on board to go some place else.
I wasn’t offering an opinion on the subject, merely a prediction on what will happen based on watching it play out numerous times before
My prediction: The US government will just do less – thankfully.
That’s certainly been my experience in large private sector organisations. Somebody, many levels removed from the coal face, decides costs need to be cut. A wave of redundancies follows, then come the consultants.
This kind of cutting can only be done by identifying what internal processes are wasting time and then abandoning them. DEI is a good example.
I used to submit a monthly board report. Every month, on the sixth page, I wrote “preparing this report has wasted another two hours of my time and several days of the accounts department’s time.” It took 4 months for anybody to notice.
It appears that most of the nations in the Western world need a Trump.
Schadenfreude
What the author fails to understand is that while Americans complain about “The Federal Government” there are real constituencies for the products and services of that government. Will banks feel great about convincing depositors their money is safe if the FDIC is eliminated or rendered toothless? How are airlines, not just US ones, going to feel about convincing the public to fly with them after air traffic control is privatized? And food companies, will they feel great about convincing consumers to buy their products if the public gets to watch the FDA get eviscerated? There is this illusion that government employees are just worthless wastes of space, and no doubt some are, but almost all federal agencies exist because someone, somewhere, demanded them to solve a real problem or allay a real fear. Those fears and problems largely disappeared under the federal efforts and diligence. Do you think they won’t come back if the watchdogs are all put down?
How many state tourist industries rely on people coming to visit national landmarks and parks that remain open because of the National park Service? Will they be happy if the parks and landmarks close and people stop visiting and spending money there?
One of the best illustrations of how important a federal employee can be seen in the U.S. opioid crisis. The opioid manufacture’s efforts to markets its addictive pills get a huge boost when a FDA employee didn’t stick to his guns and allowed the company to make remarkable and false claims about its products efficacy and risks. Yes, that watchdog failed, but would it have been better had their been no safeguard there at all?