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Elon Musk warned Wednesday in his first appearance in the White House Oval Office as Donald Trump signed another presidential executive order, this time regarding a "large-scale" reduction in federal public employees: "We are moving fast and sometimes we will make mistakes. If we do, we will fix it."
In the chaos of thousands of layoffs across multiple administrations, the mistake the next day, Thursday, was particularly egregious: more than 300 employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration were laid off. According to CNN, the guys from Doge, Musk's task force, didn't realize that this is the agency that inspects nuclear weapons in the US arsenal and oversees private contractors. Apparently the laid-off workers returned to work on Friday. The government didn't deny it, but it dismissed it, saying it was a mix-up involving about fifty employees.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the chaos into which the public sector is increasingly sinking: the threat of massive layoffs has already pushed 77,000 employees to resign, accepting a bonus of 8 months of salary: a lot, but much less than Trump's goal of eliminating at least 10% of the federal workforce (2.4 million Federal Service employees, not counting half of the Federal Service employees).
And so, mass layoffs began on Friday in several other administrations, starting with the elimination of many of the 220,000 employees hired less than a year ago and, therefore, not yet covered by legal protections for civil servants (Trump also considers them dismissable, but there he already has to deal with the courts suspending the procedures).
Many new employees were laid off on Friday: they had only 30 minutes to empty their drawers and leave. The website is filled with horror stories of people being fired with a video message announcing an official email that never arrived. There is no official confirmation: it is not known how many there are, because the government (despite Musk's promises of maximum transparency) does not provide information on the matter. And perhaps it does not even have them, given the chaos that characterizes this phase of public employment restructuring. Which has begun to bite not only in Washington, but across the country, from Michigan to Florida. There are federal employees in every state: even those with Republican majorities are being affected.
Government insiders warn that this is just the beginning: the Federal Office of Personnel (the same function as the human resources departments of private companies) has given the various administrations until Tuesday to fire recently hired employees. But then it will be the turn of others: in his teleconference speech at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Elon Musk said that, after UsAid, he plans to eliminate many other federal agencies. And for this he continues to have the full support of Trump, confirmed by the president. /Pamphlet
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