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They were fired with an afternoon email. Denied their pensions. Told their health care ended immediately. One worker got the termination notice an hour outside her new duty station after driving cross-country for five days. Another was ordered to stay home with full pay — psychological warfare designed to inflict maximum humiliation. 

A USAID employee wept, not for herself but for the children overseas who would now die of starvation because food programs were canceled overnight.

This is what it felt like from the inside when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to the federal workforce. And we’ve never heard these stories — until now.

On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk with journalist Sasha Abramsky, the author of American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and Doge Butchered the US Government. Abramsky spent six months embedded with 11 fired federal workers from eight different agencies, documenting their lives as they unraveled in real time. 

Through their eyes, we see not policy abstractions but intimate devastation: families losing health insurance, professionals forced from careers they’d dedicated their lives to, and the quiet courage of public servants who still believed in missions they could no longer fulfill.

And — spoiler alert! — the firings weren’t about efficiency — workers sat idle on full pay while vital work went undone. They weren’t about waste — institutional knowledge built over decades walked out the door. This was ideological demolition, executed by Musk’s young “foot soldiers” targeting agencies MAGA despised: consumer protection, climate science, public health, foreign aid.

And it’s not over. As the Supreme Court signals this week that they’ll give President Donald Trump even more firing power, these 11 stories offer a cautionary tale: a preview of what happens when government workers are seen as enemies to be purged rather than public servants protecting the common good. 

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Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. This week, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority signaled that they’re ready to hand President Trump sweeping new powers to fire independent government officials. In oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts called the landmark 1935 precedent-limiting Presidential Firing Authority a dried husk. Justice Elena Kagan warned this would put massive, uncontrolled, unchecked power in the hands of the president. Power that could reshape dozens of commissions and boards overseeing everything from trade to nuclear energy to plane crashes. But here’s what makes this argument this week so chilling. We’ve already seen what happens when a president decides federal workers are enemies to be purged rather than public servants protecting the common good. We don’t need to imagine the consequences. They’re already here, documented in devastating detail. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about America’s administrative machinery in the 1830s, he marveled at how the young republic had built systems to serve its people. Nearly two centuries later, we’re witnessing what may be the most aggressive dismantling of that machinery in our nation’s history. Not through democratic deliberation, but through what can only be described as administrative shock and awe. The story of what happened in the early months of Donald Trump’s second term isn’t just about budget cuts or government efficiency. It’s about 148,000 federal workers who woke up one morning to find their careers and their country’s social contracts shattered. It’s about the unelected world’s richest man given carte blanche to take a chainsaw to agencies that protect consumers, ensure workplace safety, collect taxes, fight pandemics, and provide food to the world’s most vulnerable populations. My guest today has done something remarkable and necessary. He’s given us 11 deeply human stories, federal workers from eight different agencies whose lives were upended by what’s being called DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Through their eyes, we see not abstractions, but the intimate devastation of families losing health insurance, the despair of professionals forced out of careers they’ve dedicated their lives to, and the quiet courage of public servants who still believe in the missions they can no longer fulfill. My guest, Sasha Abramsky, is the author of 11 previous books, including The American Way of Poverty and Chaos Comes Calling. His new book is American Carnage, How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the U.S. Government. It is the first full account of this unprecedented moment in American governance, a moment whose consequences may echo for generations. It is my pleasure to welcome Sasha Abramsky back to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about American carnage. Sasha, thanks so much for joining us.

Sasha Abramsky: Jeff, I’m delighted to be on your show, and thanks for such a generous introduction.

Jeff Schechtman: Well, it’s a delight to have you back, and I appreciate it. And I want to talk about the human side of this story. We know the story. We know what Musk did, going in there and firing and breaking up departments. But the people that were affected by this, the human consequences of this, is a large part of what you focused on. Talk a little about that in a general sense first.

[00:03:33] Sasha Abramsky: Yeah, I’m a journalist. I’ve spent 30-something years going around America, chronicling stories of real people in real situations and looking at how, as our economy and our politics change, so that impacts real people on the ground. And in January, when it became clear that Trump and Musk were going to literally take a chainsaw to large parts of the American government, that they were demonizing federal workers, that they were firing them without due cause, that they were eviscerating their pensions, that they were denying them healthcare. And in most cases, when they were firing them, they were literally giving them an afternoon email and telling them their work would end at the end of that business day. And in January, I thought, well, you know what? This has got to be a story worth telling, that if we want to understand how Trump is reimagining America, and I use the word reimagining in the most negative way possible, how he’s breaking the social contract, how he’s shattering institutions that are essential for the functioning of government and of democracy. If we want to understand all that, it seemed to me vital that I actually find real workers in real agencies and tell their stories, because this isn’t an abstraction. So I spent a lot of time in January and February tooling around social media sites, calling friends of friends, any contacts I could get that would get me an entry into these at-risk federal agencies. And I ended up finding over the course of those two, three months, 11 workers in eight agencies, people dotted all around the country. I didn’t want to have just a cluster of people in Washington, DC. I wanted men and women. I wanted young and old. I wanted senior and junior. I wanted black, white, and brown. I wanted people from different backgrounds and different places who could tell me what it meant when they were vilified, who could tell me what it meant when their jobs were destroyed, who could tell me what it meant when years and years of vital research that they were involved in were just overnight shredded and censored and disappeared into information black holes by the new government. And so I spent the first half of 2025 interviewing these people again and again and again. I’d phone them every few days. I’d find out how their lives were going on. I’d find out what new things had happened. I found out when they were fired, when they were rehired, when they were fired again. And I told the stories of these 11 lives as they were broken apart by Trump, by Musk, by Doge. And that’s what the book’s about.

[00:05:56] Jeff Schechtman: And one of the things that is so remarkable about so many of them is that they had concern not just for themselves and their families and what they would be going through and the personal consequences to them, but they were also concerned about the personal consequences of their job and the work they were doing for the government. There was one USAID worker that you talked to who was literally crying over the consequences.

[00:06:21] Sasha Abramsky: Yeah, I mean, this is a woman called Tali Linde, and she plays a very prominent role in the book. She was quite senior within USAID. She’d lived all over the world. She spoke many languages. She’d been involved in promoting democracy movements overseas. She’d worked with women at risk of trafficking. She’d done a whole bunch of really important work over the years. And she knew that she and her colleagues were doing work that was literally lifesaving, because USAID was distributing vaccinations. It was distributing medications to bring kids back from the brink of starvation. It was intervening in diseases that had pandemic potential, like Ebola or Mpox. It was distributing AIDS and HIV vaccine medications. It was doing work that had a quantifiable outcome. We know that what USAID was doing was saving millions of lives a year. There’s a whole bunch of data going back decades on this. And Musk comes in, in charge of Doge, and with Trump’s blessing, proceeds to shred USAID completely illegally. This is a constitutionally approved government agency. And they literally, in the space of two months, destroyed the entire agency, basically eviscerated all the supply networks around the world that kept those medications and vaccinations and disaster interventions flowing, and then stepped back to admire their handiwork. And what their handiwork meant was that hundreds of thousands of people in the first months of the Trump administration would die completely needlessly of preventable diseases, of starvation, just things that they should not be dying of. And Tallie Lynd was talking to me, and this is a woman who spent decades in public service. And now her pension had been shredded, her income had been shredded. She’d been basically declared an enemy of the people by Trump and by Musk. And you’re right, she started talking to me and she started crying. And she started talking not just about what it meant to her, but about what it meant to those children who were no longer getting these 25-cent packages of what’s called plumpy nut that helps prevent starvation. And she was crying about what it meant when people were no longer getting basic medications for tuberculosis, for HIV, all these diseases that America was on the front lines combating. And now Trump and Musk have said, that’s not in the American national interest. It doesn’t generate a profit. That’s quite literally what they were saying, that feeding poor children in poor countries has no cash payback for the United States. And it’s this extraordinary rollback of any sense of morality, any sense that America has a decent role to play in the world. And it’s a replacing of that with an entirely transactional approach to the world. We will do something for you if you do something for us. We will help you if you scratch our back. We will make your lives a bit easier if you provide kickbacks to the oligarchs and the new American elites. And that is a disgraceful calculus. And time and again, as I was reporting my book, that’s the calculus I found. Environmental work that was absolutely vital suddenly being put on hold. Public health work that was saving countless lives in the United States being demonized and the people who worked in those agencies being fired. Workers who were working to provide protections for low-income consumers suddenly finding their work was no longer valued, and they were being put on administrative leave. I mean, this is absolutely dystopian stuff. And I did think, when you were saying earlier about how I felt this compulsion to tell the story, I really, really felt that this was one of the most important stories of our lifetimes. And it was a story that too easily was going to get lost in all the white noise because Trump was throwing up so much nonsense, so much inflammatory statements and so on. But it was a story that couldn’t get lost. And that’s why I told the story in American Carnage.

[00:10:10] Jeff Schechtman: It is also a story that goes beyond transactional because it was the culmination of what we have been hearing for almost 50 years with respect to government and those that work in government. We can go back to Grover Norquist in the 1980s talking about wanting to shrink the size of government so that it could go down the drain of a bathtub.

[00:10:32] Sasha Abramsky: Yeah, I mean, I remember I was a teenager in the 1980s and I was studying politics, actually, and I remember reading Grover Norquist’s statement and thinking this is appalling and this is going to have all kinds of bad consequences. What I don’t think I could have imagined was that if you fast forward 40 years or 35 years from when Norquist was talking, you would get to a situation where Norquist looks moderate and that the people who succeeded Norquist would literally take a chainsaw to government. You had this completely obscene spectacle of Elon Musk, who is and was the world’s richest man, has many, many hundreds of billions of dollars behind him. In fact, I did a back of the envelope calculation. I worked out that Elon Musk could have paid the entire federal payroll and all the benefits for a year and still been left with $100 billion. But Elon Musk gets up on a stage with a chainsaw and literally does a dance revving the chainsaw and saying that he was taking a chainsaw to government and that he was destroying agencies. And he specifically talked about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps prevent low-income people from getting scammed by big corporations. And he specifically talked about USAID, which, as I said, helps prevent children die of starvation. And he glorified in taking a chainsaw to those agencies. Now, the thing is, when you take a chainsaw to agencies, yes, you dismantle the services those agencies provide, but you also destroy the income streams of hundreds of thousands of families. You mentioned the number 148,000. Depends how you measure it. Some of the numbers are higher than that, quite a lot higher. Some of the numbers are lower. But somewhere in the region of a few hundred thousand workers and their children and their broader families and their extended communities found themselves on the wrong end of the doge chainsaw. And that meant real people losing income. It meant children falling into income insecurity and poverty. It meant communities and all the businesses that go with vibrant communities suddenly under stress. And for some demographics, especially African-American women, who are very highly represented in federal employment, it meant a stunning increase in national joblessness. And we’re seeing all of that now. Trump talks about the affordability crisis being a scam. Well, it’s not a scam. The affordability crisis is very real. But the other part of the economic crisis is more and more people now are struggling to find decent paying jobs because so many jobs were destroyed by the federal cuts at speed and without thinking what it would do to the broader economy.

[00:13:10] Jeff Schechtman: I think it’s important to point out also that these weren’t, and you alluded to this before, these weren’t just workers in Washington, D.C., but really workers in government throughout the country. Absolutely.

[00:13:23] Sasha Abramsky: I mean, look, one of the stories I talk about in the book is a woman called Natasha Miles. And she was a climate change specialist. She measured emissions, methane and CO2 emissions. And she’d worked at a university for years. She eventually is hired on by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And she’s in her 50s. She packs up her house on the East Coast, and she drives west to the Boulder, Colorado, NOAA office that she’s been assigned to. She has her dog with her. She has all her equipment with her. She has her bags of clothing and everything else. She drives for five days. And an hour outside Boulder, she gets an email saying her job has been terminated that afternoon because it no longer meets administration priorities. And she’s in shock. And then what makes her go into even greater shock is her healthcare access is denied. And this is a woman with a series of chronic conditions. And suddenly, she finds that not only does she have no income, but she has no access to health insurance. Now, if that was the private sector, you’d look at that and you’d say, what an awful company to work for. But this isn’t the private sector. This is the United States government. And the United States government suddenly was behaving the way that Donald Trump behaved when he refused to pay contractors in building projects that he was involved in in the 1980s and 1990s. He sort of quite proudly said, well, sometimes I don’t pay my contractors. Well, if that’s how the US government behaves, if it’s no longer a reliable partner to its own employees, if it can fire somebody with two hours notice and then take away their health benefits, why on earth would the best and the brightest want to go anywhere near government service in the future? And this is one of the things I’m wrestling with in the book American Carnage. When you take down that social compact in the way that Trump a must did, not only do you destroy government today, but you destroy the possibility of good, responsive government services tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. And that’s going to be the legacy that we’re going to be living with for a long, long time in this country, that when you destroy with the kind of glee that Trump and Musk have destroyed, it takes an awfully long time to rebuild.

[00:15:44] Jeff Schechtman: There was also a tremendous amount, and you talk about this with respect to so many of these workers, a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge that went out the door that is basically irreplaceable. That’s right.

[00:15:57] Sasha Abramsky: I mean, look, you have specialist pilots who are doing very difficult environmental readings from the air. You have firefighters, you have public health specialists who have all this knowledge about particular diseases and particular ways of communicating to the public about those diseases. You have occupational safety workers. One of the women I wrote about was in NIOSH, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. You have people who have spent years and years and years building up specialized knowledge and years and years and years communicating that specialized knowledge to the general public, and now they’re gone. And that web, that infrastructure of knowledge doesn’t get rebuilt very easily because some of those people are going to go to the private sector. Some of them are going to go to local and state government sectors. Some of them are going to go overseas because there are many other countries around the world delighted to take on people with the kind of specialized skills that the American government is shedding at the moment. They’ll go to universities overseas. They’ll go to government agencies overseas. When you break down the American government’s compact with those workers, they’re not going to hang around because some of these people have skills that are irreplaceable. And so you’re absolutely right. When you do this, you break down the webs of knowledge that we need as a country to prosper.

[00:17:16] Jeff Schechtman: Many of these employees became friends with each other through this crisis, this kind of trauma bonding that you talk about. What was that like?

[00:17:25] Sasha Abramsky: You know, I find that fascinating. And again, I talk to people and they say, well, look, we’re on these Facebook sites and we’re meeting up or we’re having picnic lunches. We’re doing all these things to reaffirm sense as a community. One of the people I spoke to was a woman called Kelsey Hendricks, and she was blind. She worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, not as a scientist, but as a contract specialist. She helped bring in the scientists and sign all the paperwork and everything else. And she said to me, look, we take an oath and the oath is that we’re going to defend and protect and we’re going to represent the American people. And that doesn’t stop just because this administration is behaving so shoddily. And she said, look, we all believe we have a mission and we are all going to fight to protect that. And so you see this all around the country. You see these sort of pop-up groups on Facebook, on Reddit, you know, all these different methodologies of staying in touch with each other and reaffirming each other. And that was one of the sort of more uplifting parts of the story as I was writing it, is that when you try and break down community, if you’re Donald Trump or you’re Elon Musk, who explicitly say that empathy is a bad thing, Elon Musk at one point tweeted that empathy leads to civilizational death. Well, if you have that dog-eat-dog vision of the world, this incredibly soulless vision that the only thing worth anything is money, you are going to generate pushback. And we’re seeing that very creative pushback, not just in the federal government, we’re seeing it all over the country. We’re seeing clergy members on the front lines against ICE. We’re seeing all these creative campaigns. We’re seeing artists coming out, musicians coming out to find ways to express community and solidarity in the face of an administration that wants to break down any sense of community and any sense of solidarity. And I think the longer this sort of authoritarian project goes on, the more we’re going to see effective forms of counter-organizing, whether you want to call it resistance, whether you want to call it just the reestablishment of community, we’re going to see people working out ways on the ground to reinforce values that they believe are important. And so the federal workers that I was talking to, they were trying desperately to reaffirm those values, but I think it transcends those workers. And it goes way out into the community that whether you’re left-wing, whether you’re right-wing, whether you’re political, whether you’re apolitical, an increasing number of people are just realizing that the public face that Trump must represent is not a public face that most Americans want as their ambassadors to the rest of the world.

[00:20:04] Jeff Schechtman: What was the sense of helplessness among these people as they were fired and given the way they were fired, which you mentioned before, the sense of wanting to be able to do something, wanting to maybe go through the courts, go through Congress, there was really no one there to help them.

[00:20:22] Sasha Abramsky: Well, that’s right. I mean, you know, I spoke to federal workers and that’s exactly what they were doing. They were looking for legal redress. They were looking for political redress. And certainly they weren’t getting political redress from Congress because the GOP majority in Congress wanted nothing to do with these federal workers. They longed onto the Trump project and they were perfectly happy going along with Doge. So they weren’t going to get the political redress. They were getting some judicial redress. So what was happening was the lower courts were saying, you know what, you got to slow down here. You can’t suddenly destroy an agency that Congress created. You can’t fire all but a skeleton staff and therefore leave them incapable of doing work that Congress has mandated. So the lower courts would step in and say, you’ve got to reinstate these people. And then some of them would get temporarily reinstated. But what would happen is they’d get a very sort of churlish, ungraceful letter from their agency headquarters saying, well, the courts have said we have to reinstate you. We disagree with the courts, but we’re going to reinstate you. However, you can’t work. And so what would happen is you’d have people who were being rehired. So they were getting a temporary income stream, but they were being told they couldn’t go into their office. They were being told they couldn’t access their work emails. They were being told they couldn’t have any meetings to do with their work. So there was a fire service worker who in the middle of fire season, he’s brought back because the courts say you have to bring him back, but he’s not allowed to engage with the farmers in Kansas and in Colorado who he’s working with to try and prevent fires. There was an IRS worker I met, a very junior IRS worker who was a telephone operator. He was on the interface between the public and the government. People have a tax problem. They’d phone. He’d be one of the people who picked up the phone and he’d try and talk them through it. So he was rehired because the courts said he had to be rehired, but he was placed on administrative leave. So he couldn’t actually do any telephone work. Meanwhile, the telephone lines are getting longer and longer the wait times are getting longer and longer because so few people are there to provide answers to frustrated taxpayers. So you had this sort of absolute sense of dysfunction where even when the courts tried to intervene, Trump’s administration and the Doge people just weren’t letting the workers back in to do their jobs. And then it would go to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court, as has been its want throughout the entire Trump presidency, would turn around and say, we have access to hidden legal interpretations that no other judges in the country have access to. All the lower courts are wrong. Of course, Trump and his team can fire people and the firings will go ahead again. So you’d have this whiplash where they’d be fired, they’d be rehired, they’d be fired again. And that does produce a sense of helplessness and a sense of anger. And several of the people I spoke to, I mean, the only way I can describe it is they were in trauma. Some of them said, I’m taking medications that are usually used for military veterans with PTSD. That’s extraordinary that the federal government could deliberately go out of its way to render life so miserable for its own employees that they would end up in mental health crisis. It’s a completely extraordinary breakdown of anything resembling a social compact.

[00:23:30] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about how Doge actually worked, the mechanics of it. How did it actually operate? How were these people notified and terminated? And who was really doing it? I mean, Musk was at the center of it, but certainly there were also a lot of foot soldiers.

[00:23:46] Sasha Abramsky: Yeah. I mean, the foot soldiers are the more important people in a way. Musk sets the tone, and the tone is this sort of tech bros, you storm in and you break everything as quickly as possible. And then you hope that the pieces aren’t too painful when you tread on them. But the foot soldiers were generally young techies, graduates from universities, from very high profile universities, but they were very young. They were sometimes even still teenagers. They used very offensive online monikers. One of them who got a lot of attention was called Big Balls. So they had these sort of absurdist names and these absurdist personas, but they were backed up by the full might of the state. So they would go in with their laptops, and they would basically hack into federal information systems. Now, traditionally, information is compartmentalized. You need different levels of security clearance, different levels of training to get access to these different portals because they contain every bit of personal information of virtually everybody in the United States, income, tax payments, immigration status, social security number, what kind of healthcare they have. All that data is in these different government agencies. And the Doge people came in and they bulldozed all the walls that separated the information one from the other. So they had access to very centralized information. And they then started using these huge datasets that they were creating to try and work out which employees had the least legal protection. And usually, if you’re an employee with less than a year or two of federal employment, you’re what’s called a probationary worker. So you don’t have to be given months of notice. You don’t have to be given months of severance pay. You can basically be told, you know what? We don’t need you. You’re out. And so they would go in and they’d identify all the probationary workers, even if they were people who were very, very senior, but had changed jobs recently, and therefore were considered a probationary worker in their new job. And they would basically then hand out lists of people who were fireable to the agency heads. And then they would give them a quota. They’d say, well, we need to get rid of one-eighth or one-fifth of your workers. Do it. And so these agency heads would then have the unenviable job of basically decimating their own workforces. And it wasn’t based on performance, even though the letters that would go out oftentimes said you were being fired for poor performance. It wasn’t being based on performance. It was literally being based on a quota that Doge and the Doge foot soldiers had come up with. And this stuff was absolutely outside the constitutional structure. Doge had never been approved by Congress. The agencies that they were dismantling had been approved by Congress. And the agency’s work that they were stopping had also been approved by Congress. So they were essentially daring Congress to step in and say, you know what? You can’t do this. This isn’t how American government works. And Congress didn’t. The Senate didn’t, and the House didn’t. And the longer Congress remained silent, the longer it remained quiescent, the more empowered Trump and Musk got. And so by the spring, three, four months into this experiment, they realized they were essentially immune from being reined in, that they could do whatever they wanted, that they would have some pushback from the lower courts, but the Supreme Court would largely side with them, and they would have no pushback from the Republicans in Congress. And so they basically went ahead and they bulldozed large parts of the government. And by the summer, one in eight federal workers had lost their jobs or had been sort of pushed into retirement or taken Doge’s, quote unquote, fork in the road, where they’d been urged to take this offer where they could stay on for a few months, get paid while they were looking for other work, and then leave federal employment. Now, one in eight workers, that’s the largest rollback of the federal government since World War II. And the thing is, it doesn’t stop there, because these waves of firings are continuing. And it’s not happening in equal measure across the board. If you work for ICE, or you work for DHS, or you work for any of the security apparatus parts of the government, you’re afloat in money. Your agency is getting more hires every day. But if you work in public health, if you work in the environmental agencies, if you work in foreign service, if you work in USAID, if you work in consumer protection offices, those were being targeted and dismantled at speed. And so that’s how Doge operated. It targeted the kinds of government agencies that MAGA didn’t like, and it ruthlessly culled the employees at those agencies.

[00:28:05] Jeff Schechtman: ROBERT KONIGS Talk a little bit about what the employees did. They sent out resumes, they looked for jobs, but there was this sense of panic in so many respects.

[00:28:13] Sasha Abramsky: MARK HESLOP Yeah. I mean, look, most Americans live, if not paycheck to paycheck, they live with marginal financial cushion. So they may be able to go a month without a job, and then they start having problems. We saw this when the federal government shut down. You had hundreds of thousands of federal workers who missed two paychecks. And you saw the impact. People were turning up at food pantries. People were having desperately to take second jobs. You had TSA workers doing second jobs as Uber drivers, that sort of thing. So what happened to these federal workers is they suddenly realized they urgently needed to get income streams. And so they put their resumes out there. But the thing was, there were hundreds of thousands of federal workers all over the country in the exact same situation, all flooding the job market at the same time. So you might have hundreds of people chasing a state or local government job that had roughly the same skill set needed as the federal job that had been lost. And so you’re right. Some people found new jobs quite quickly. Other people sent out literally hundreds of resumes, applied for hundreds of jobs, and got crickets in response. And they got more and more agitated, more and more depressed. Again, I talked to 11 people for six months, and a goodly number of those 11 people told me they were on mental health medications for depression and anxiety. And that tells you something.

[00:29:33] Jeff Schechtman: How many people of all of these employees, roughly, or if even any, were Trump supporters early on, were supportive of some of the things that he campaigned on?

[00:29:46] Sasha Abramsky: Yeah. I mean, that’s interesting because Trump’s whole thing is there’s this deep state that’s uniformly liberal and uniformly opposed to MAGA ideology, and therefore we’re going to call it a deep state. That’s not true. I mean, yes, if you polled federal workers, you’d probably find that a majority of them oppose MAGA, but you’ll find a surprisingly large number actually voted for MAGA. And certainly some of the people that I interviewed had some sympathies with elements of the MAGA movement. They might not have liked the whole thing, might not have liked everything in that package, but they certainly had sympathies with some of the messaging. And certainly some of the people I interviewed had family members who were very assertive MAGA supporters and actually told their relatives, yeah, MAGA’s right, you should get a more productive job in the private sector. So to me, that was fascinating because any story should have layers. And if I had just found 11 workers who all share the exact same political ideology and all have family members who share the exact same political ideology, it would have been kind of a two-dimensional story. But because they were people who did reflect the political complexity of America, it becomes a three-dimensional story. They become much less easy to caricature. Their stories become much more real and in some ways much more painful. These are just ordinary Americans with a diversity of political views trying to make ends meet and doing a job that they believed was socially valuable, and they’re running into Elon Musk’s chainsaw. And that’s a fate that I think is unjustified. I think it’s cruel. I think the federal government went out of its way to humiliate people. Russell Vogt, who’s the architect of Project 25 and now a very senior member in the government, he was recorded in the run-up to the election saying in a private meeting that the aim was to put federal workers in trauma so that every day when they went to work, they wouldn’t want to go to work. Well, if you give people with that kind of mindset the power to implement that vision, very, very bad things happen. And so you did. We as a society chose to elect people who then put into positions of power trauma inflictors, people who genuinely liked putting other people in trauma. And the stories of the 11 workers that I follow, that is the story of a deliberate infliction of pain on other human beings.

[00:32:15] Jeff Schechtman: There’s also the sense, and I think people forget about this, that Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again, that it’s not as simple as just turning on the faucet or the next administration that comes in perhaps rehiring all these people. These people have scattered. I think that’s right.

[00:32:32] Sasha Abramsky: Look, I mean, if you or I were treated the way that those workers were treated by DOJ, we would be looking for other forms of income. And that’s what happened. People don’t want to wait around. They don’t want to wait around on the off chance that six months or nine months later, a court’s going to say, you know what? Your agency shouldn’t have been dismantled. They don’t want to wait around on the off chance that two years or four years from now, the political pendulum shifts again and an administration comes in that has more respect for public service. That’s not how people function. People have immediate income needs. They have pride of work. They want to be in a work environment where they are respected and not humiliated. And so you’re absolutely right. When those people leave and take with them the expertise, you can’t really put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Look, USAID had a 60-year infrastructure behind it. It was created under John Kennedy. It had 60 years of building relationships with health workers and agencies around the world, some of them in countries that are extremely difficult to access, extremely inhospitable, very, very poor, and often war-torn. Well, if you shred all of that infrastructure, if you fire the contractors in those countries, if you refuse to honor contracts that the government has already signed and refuse to pay agencies for work already done, those people will never want to work with you again. And in the case of USAID, what will happen is over time, other countries, especially China, will fill that vacuum. And all that soft power that America used to generate goodwill for America will dissipate. And all that soft power will go to China or whatever other countries fill the public health void in poorer parts of the world. It’s a crazy strategy. It’s one of the most short-term strategies you could possibly design. It saves a few billion dollars in the short term. In the long run, it will cost far, far more. If there’s a public health emergency that could have been nipped in the bud early on by USAID, but then becomes the next global pandemic because USAID isn’t there, that won’t cost us a few billion dollars. That will cost us, as did COVID, hundreds of billions through trillions of dollars. And all of that could be avoidable if we were thinking long-term instead of just looking for short-term advantage and short-term humiliation rituals against agencies that, for whatever reasons, MAGA had chosen to put in its sights.

[00:35:02] Jeff Schechtman: Coming back to the human side of it also, there’s the sense of these government workers being demonized. And this has been going on for years. We talked about the comments from Grover Norquist a while ago. But right-wing media has been demonizing government workers for a long time. Yeah, and it’s not just right-wing media.

[00:35:20] Sasha Abramsky: I mean, Ronald Reagan rode to power, at least in part, by beating up on public sector workers and on the notion that the public sector can do good. Now, look, the public sector, like any other part of the economy, can be bloated. It can be inefficient. It can have functions that are duplicated. It can have money that is wasted. I don’t think anybody should say, because we’re criticizing what MAGA did, therefore there were no improvements to be made in the status quo. There were improvements. You can always find ways to introduce new technology to make government more efficient. You can always find ways to rein in costs. You can always find ways to get a better deal for taxpayers. And any government, whether they’re Republican, Democrat, or anything else, should be looking at that and working out ways to do it. But look, this really wasn’t about efficiency. Dodes came in and said, well, we’re going to make government more efficient. You don’t make government more efficient by putting hundreds of thousands of people on administrative leave where you have to pay them for six months to sit on their hands and do nothing. And this was told to me again and again and again. Tallie Lynn said to me, I don’t understand this. I have a job at USAID where I could be saving lives, and instead I’m being paid and told I cannot do any work. How does that make sense for US taxpayers? And you could go down any one of the 11 people that I was highlighting in my book, and the same story would hold, that they were being fired in a way that wasn’t saving money, or they were being put on administrative leave in a way that wasn’t saving money. This was ideological. This was about dismantling parts of the government that MAGA did not like. It had nothing to do with making government run more effectively. It had nothing to do with making services be distributed more smoothly. It had everything to do with political payback against agencies that were seen to be too liberal.

[00:37:18] Jeff Schechtman: Finally, talk about what you think the long-term consequences of this will be in terms of government and also in terms of all these individuals. You know, let me talk about the individuals first.

[00:37:29] Sasha Abramsky: I think some will land on their feet, and some already have landed on their feet. They sort of successfully turned a corner. They have new jobs. They have new careers. Some of them have gone back to graduate school, whatever it may be. Others are struggling mightily, and what I worry about is that, you know, when you have hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were disrupted as profoundly and suddenly as was the case with these men and women, that an awful lot of them are going to fall through the cracks, and they’re going to become the forgotten people. They’re going to be people who once had a good career doing what they regarded as valuable work, and now they don’t, and now they get by on either income that pays a fraction of what they used to earn, or they can’t find any jobs at all. And I worry deeply that an awful lot of fired federal employees are going to struggle for the rest of their careers to make up in the lost income and the lost security for what happened in 2025. So that’s those individuals, and I feel deeply, deeply saddened for their experiences. But the more general issue, you know, what is going to happen in the long run? The Trump administration is destroying an understanding of how government functions that goes back 100 years, and in some cases, more than 100 years. If you look at what the Supreme Court, and you talked about this at the introduction to the podcast, you look at what the Supreme Court is about to do in terms of expanding the presidential ability to fire board members from independent agencies. Well, that personalizes government in a way that we haven’t seen since the 1920s. If you look at some of the attacks on regulatory structures, including in public health, that goes back even further. That undermines forms of government that have existed since Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency. If you look at the Trump effort to undermine birthright citizenship, well, birthright citizenship has been a core tenet of the modern American story since just after the American Civil War. So that goes back 150, 160 years. So cumulatively, what we’re looking back, what we’re looking at is a rollback of the modern understanding of American government, a rollback that takes us back in many ways to the 19th century. Well, we’re in the middle of the 21st century. Most other democracies are embracing systems of government that are fit for the 21st century. And America under Donald Trump in this nebulous campaign to, quote unquote, make America great again, we’re not making America great again. We’re making America 19th century again. But we’re not a 19th century country. We’re a 21st century country. We have all of the complexity of a 21st century multi-ethnic society. And the idea that you could take America back, that you can suddenly strip America of all of the contributions immigrants make, that you can strip America of the fundamental concept of birthright citizenship, that you can rewrite American history to not talk about the contributions made by women, by African-Americans, by the LGBTQ community, the idea that you can just strip all of these communities of their part in the American story, that is going to have a profoundly destructive impact on this country, not just for the next two, three, four years. This is going to have a huge impact on this country for the rest of our lives. And we are all, anyone with a decent moral compass, we are all going to be spending the next many, many years wrestling with how to undo this toxic legacy.

[00:41:02] Jeff Schechtman: Sasha Abramsky, his book is American Carnage, how Trump, Musk, and Doge butchered the U.S. government. Sasha, it is always a pleasure. I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Jeff, it was a joy. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.