At least part of the Trumpworld insistence that government needed to be slashed to pieces at the altar of “efficiency” rested on the idea, stewed in the too-online brains of a cadre of incurious children, that federal employees didn’t actually do very much. There was a baked-in belief, unshakeable, that billions of dollars were flowing to a million-strong army of loafers and layabouts, pulling down six-figure taxpayer-bilking salaries in return for just about nothing. Combine that with the true-believer ideals of the Russell Voughts out there and the I-literally-need-all-the-money regulatory and investigatory takedown ethos of Elon Musk and his friends (such as they are), and you get these first DOGE-driven months of the administration and the orgy of devastating federal agency dismantling.
Only, along with the administration’s undying penchant for losing badly in court, at some point in recent weeks it seems some — some —of those agencies and the appointees running them have started to realize that the largely arbitrarily fired federal workers actually had some function after all. The Washington Post reported from across a number of agencies on Friday regarding some semi-frenzied attempts to claw back some of the workers they have either fired or allowed to leave via buyouts or early retirement offers, a ham-fisted, very-late recognition that the government does, in fact, do some useful things.
They have done some of this already, of course, including when they realized bird flu and the safety of the nuclear arsenal are issues worth addressing. But since then a number of agencies have gone through further reductions in force that in some cases have closed entire offices or gutted them down to functional paralysis, while the people in charge have had a little time to observe how things might start to break. From FDA offices working on drug patent extensions to the National Weather Service monitoring tornado outbreaks, the regular functions of government have broken through in some tiny way to the people with power — not so much that they want to actually undo the scale of the firings, but to a point where some people have been asked (or ordered, somehow) back and others have been offered reassignment to fill massive holes in important places.
Fifty steps backward, mild tap dance forward or sideways — its not enough, obviously, to preserve the functions at risk. The assaults on science, cancer research, environmental monitoring and regulation, and so on — all will continue apace, only with a hopefully growing twinge of unease among the MAGAscenti that maybe they might have pulled the wrong wire out of the wall. This bit of backtracking occurs not only after that first wave of RIFs, but also after the deadline for what was supposed to be a second RIF plan from every federal agency — a deadline that passed in April without much noise, given the cacophany from various judges, Trump-appointed and otherwise, that a lot of what DOGE and agency heads have been up to is illegal as hell.
There is a “dog that caught the car” vibe to this, if the dog was infused with a deep-seated belief that none of the parts of the engine actually did anything, and that it would just be fun as hell to rip them all out. As the car slows to a crawl, and hisses steam and dribbles oil, and warning lights go off, the abashed hound tentatively sticks a toe in one leaking hole, and then another, and then another, wondering what happens next.
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