The Challenge of the Washington Chain Saw Massacre (Part 1)

I once had a boss who told me: “Anybody can cut ten percent of employees from any company – public or private. The hard part is cutting the right ten percent.”

But he proved he could do it. He set up a small internal working team, reminded them of the mission of the organization, then charged them with figuring out who was mission-critical and who we could let go. A couple of months later – poof! – a lot of old employees were gone, a few new employees had been added in key areas and we were down net 10% in head count. I don’t think we missed a beat.

I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve watched the work of the group charged with downsizing the federal government. It’s been a different process.

There’s been no concern about the quality of employees we might lose: the first step in the DOGE’ing of government was to offer every employee, regardless of where they worked or what they did – some 2.3 million – an eight-month buyout. Next, every employee, regardless of performance or function, was ordered back to full-time office work. Then every new (“probationary”) employee, regardless of what and how they were doing, was fired.

There has been a focus on carrying out the mission of the administration, which appears to be “starving the beast” of government and getting rid of agencies it doesn’t like. A Washington Post story this week found that besides shuttering the Department of Education and USAID, the administration is planning on cutting half of the employees of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 43% of the Small Business Administration, a third of the people at the IRS, 30% of the Commerce Department, and 25% of the Department of the Interior. The Department of Health and Human Services will cut some 25,000 jobs, including 3500 at the Food and Drug Administration and 2400 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Forty-seven Social Security offices across the country will be closed or relocated, and inperson appointments for people with questions about Social Security will be limited as part of the agency’s effort to save $800 million this year.

The messaging has been pretty clear: federal government workers are bad. On a podcast last August, candidate Donald Trump said last August that “they’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people.” Elon Musk has described them as “fraudsters” who can’t be trusted to do their job. He’s asked them to submit weekly performance reports, not to their bosses, but to his agency. President Trump agrees, stating that many of these employees don’t even exist and are creating “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud.” So if that’s what you believe, then it makes sense to get rid of any number of those people that you can.

So who’s up for the beast starving?

A Pew Research poll found last year found that about 49% of people surveyed believed that government should be smaller and offer fewer services; 48% believed it should be larger and offer more services. About 56% of us say “Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” while 46% of us say it does a better job than we give it credit for (the last two were responses to separate questions, but the fact that they add up to more than 100% gives you some idea of how divided we are on this question).

As far as the individual agencies go, the IRS is the least popular: Half the people view it “unfavorably” (50%); 38% view it “favorably.” That’s what pollsters call a -12 (you don’t want to be in the negative in these kinds of surveys). Two other agencies (Department of Ed and Department of Justice) have slightly more people viewing them unfavorably than favorably (-1). Every other agency in federal government has more respect than disdain: the CIA is +11; the CDC +20; Social Security +21; Veterans Affairs +22; the National Park Service is +69.

*Federal government agencies are less unpopular than you may think (Graphic from Pew Research Center)*

You could argue that most people don’t really know what government does, and that if they did, they would feel differently. I agree, but that argument cuts both ways.

I’ve been reading a book this week that tries to demystify part of the “government-as-black-box” problem and put a face to a few of the faceless bureaucrats. Edited by Michael Lewis, the book, Who is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, tells a series of stories of government workers doing their jobs. And it argues that one reason we have the stereotype of the lazy, unmotivated government worker is that government does a lousy job of telling its story. Another, says Lewis, is that “our elected officials…use (rank and file government employees) for their own narrow purposes. They take credit for the good they do. They blame them when things go wrong. The rest of us encourage this dubious behavior.”

That means that a lot of what government workers do goes unnoticed. Here are some examples from the book:

· A doctor at the CDC who created a program that delivered a billion vaccinations and eradicated polio in India;

· A guy inside the Energy Department who finished a project to clean up a nuclear waste dump $30 billion under budget and 60 years ahead of schedule;

· A woman at the US Department of Agriculture who “found ways to create products from misshapen fruits and vegetables unsuitable for market, a $400 billion problem for the US each year”;

· A man inside EPA who created AirNow, a service that provides the best air-quality forecasts in the world;

· A DEA agent whose team found and seized more than 900,000 fentanyl capsules and arrested those who sold them.

Chances are really good you either hadn’t heard about any of these stories – I hadn’t – or thought about the people behind them – I hadn’t. It’s easy to dismiss those folks and others doing their jobs in important ways with faint praise – “that’s what we’re paying them for, idiot!” And it’s easy to declare them outliers – “what about all those people sitting on their butts doing nothing?”

But those are the same kinds of arguments I have with the DOGE approach. It extrapolates from a simplistic point of view – “all government is bad, so less government is great” or “here’s one example of waste fraud and abuse; aha, it’s EVERYWHERE!” – to make its point that it doesn’t much matter which jobs we cut.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

I think it makes a great deal of difference where and how and why we cut jobs. Next week: two case studies of government workers you’ve never heard of; one about a revenuer and one about a regulator. Could there be any two more useless, hated government workers in the world? I think you’ll love them.

-Leslie

Notes:

Candidate Trump on federal workers: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/08/trump-calls-federal-workforce-crooked-vows-hold-them-accountable/399138/

Hundreds of billions in fraud?: https://www.trtworld.com/us-and-canada/trump-alleges-ghost-workers-are-stealing-billions-from-federal-funds-18268424

Return to work frustrations: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/03/25/federal-employees-return-office-trump-musk/78968497007/

Estimated cuts by agency: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/27/trump-presidency-news/

Timeline on firings, buyouts: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/01/key-dates-trump-federal-workers-firings/80835324007/

Location of closing Social Security offices: https://www.kiplinger.com/retirement/social-security/social-security-offices-close-after-doge-cuts

Pew poll on size and reputation of government agencies: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/