Chapter 9: America Ungoverned

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Chapter 9: America Ungoverned

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate
intensity. —W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

On a blistering April morning in 2025, Elizabeth Aniskevich stood outside a community center in Washington, DC, filling out yet another job application. Just two months previously, she was an attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with what she thought would be a lifetime career in public service. Now, at thirty-nine, she’s watching her emergency savings dwindle as she struggles to make mortgage payments on her DC apartment.

“I was completely shocked,” she told a reporter for CNBC, describing the day she received her termination notice. “I didn’t expect it to unfold this way. There’s no information about what’s going on with my benefits, or what I need to do with unemployment.”1

Across town, Sarah Boim, a thirty-eight-year-old former employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, is facing a similar nightmare. “Your career is ripped away from you, with no money to move forward,” she explained. Her mental health has deteriorated so severely that her therapist insisted she immediately see a psychiatrist for anti­depressant medication. “I have bipolar. It’ll mess up my life if I have an episode. So we’re just trying to be really careful. I’m hearing stuff like that across the agency.”2

These stories are replicated thousands of times across America as the second Trump administration wages an unprecedented war on the federal workforce and, in the process, a war on the very concept of professional, competent governance. As I and multiple experts on fascism have warned for years, this is what happens when an authoritarian mindset takes control of the levers of power: institutions are hollowed out, expertise is denigrated, and ordinary Americans pay the price.

The Great Unraveling 2.0

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he wasted no time implementing what his former strategist Steve Bannon had called the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”3 This wasn’t just campaign rhetoric; it was a deliberate plan to dismantle the federal government’s capacity to function on behalf of the people, leaving only its supports and subsidies for giant corporations and the wealthy.

The instrument of this destruction is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by billionaire Elon Musk, created through an executive order on inauguration day, January 20, 2025.4 Within weeks, DOGE had deployed teams of tech industry recruits—many in their teens and twenties with no government experience or security clearances—to federal agencies, where they began demanding access to sensitive personnel and financial data and directing mass firings.

The sheer scale of the purge is staggering. According to the Office of Personnel Management, over 200,000 federal workers had been laid off between the time Trump took office and early May 2025 (as I’m writing this), and approximately 75,000 federal employees have been forced to accept “deferred resignations” or buyout plans.5 In some agencies, the cuts are even deeper. The Education Department alone is eliminating nearly 50 percent of its workforce, more than 1,300 positions through reductions in force, plus another 600 through “voluntary” separations.6

This isn’t a normal political transition or a routine government reorganization. It’s instead a systematic effort to cripple the American government’s ability to protect citizens, enforce laws, and deliver essential services.

The Human Cost

For federal workers caught in this purge, the consequences are devastating. In Philadelphia, dozens gathered in the basement of the Queen Memorial Library for what organizers call a “Federal Employee Transition Workshop.” Some had been fired only to be yanked back or told they could be yanked back. Others had been placed on “administrative leave” with no explanation. Several reported being terminated for supposed “performance reasons” despite glowing evaluations, and now can’t prove their competence to potential employers because they’ve been locked out of their files.7

“They want us gone,” laments a government IT specialist, “but they’re making it so hard to get away.”8

The impact extends far beyond the affected employees. A fifty-four-year-old suicide prevention case manager with the Department of Veterans Affairs—who voted for Trump in 2024—now carries guilt over his vote as he watches the administration’s assault on his colleagues. “It’s not about the layoffs,” he says. “It’s about a dehumanization of who we are and what we do. . . . We don’t do it for the applause. We do it to serve our country and serve our community. You get into public service not for the money but because you want to be part of something greater than yourself.”9

A federal manager and Marine Corps veteran described the paralyzing fear that gripped his agency. “People are afraid to make a move that could result in an email dismissal,” he says. “It’s heartbreaking. . . . I have been trained to be a leader, and Trump and Musk are not allowing me to do my job. It’s micromanaging at the highest level.”10

What’s particularly insidious about the Trump-DOGE approach is how it appears designed to maximize chaos and suffering. As Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, said before the election: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”11

They’re succeeding. One Department of Defense employee, a man who served his country with two tours in Iraq, told NBC News that his post-traumatic stress disorder was triggered to the point that he called a suicide hotline, then visited an emergency room at a veterans’ hospital.12 In the months since then, the suicide hotline lost much of its funding to Trump’s cuts.

Expertise under Attack

This assault on the federal workforce isn’t just causing personal tragedies; it’s systematically purging the expertise needed for effective governance. On March 12, 2025, Trump’s EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced what the agency called the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” targeting more than two dozen environmental rules protecting the environment for elimination or weakening.13

Among the targets are rules limiting pollution from vehicles and power plants, regulations on soot and mercury emissions, and the “good neighbor rule” that regulates downwind air pollution. Most significantly, the EPA is preparing to reconsider the scientific findings on the dangers of climate pollution that have served as the basis for federal climate regulations, a move that would strip the EPA of its authority to manage greenhouse gas emissions at all.14

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, these rollbacks “will leave the nation sicker and our air, water and soil dangerously contaminated” while “sacrificing human health for the benefit of private industry.”15

The anti-science approach extends beyond the EPA. Trump’s administration has laid off hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and removed mentions of climate change from public websites. The administration has also issued executive orders with language that could block enforcement of state and local laws that restrict production or use of fossil fuels.16

A Government in Chaos

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the administration’s destructive approach is the fate of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), America’s primary international humanitarian organization. In early February 2025, USAID’s website went dark, employees were barred entry to their headquarters, and all direct-hire personnel were placed on administrative leave.17

On March 19, 2025, US District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that DOGE’s dismantling of USAID likely violated the Constitution, writing that the destruction of the agency harmed the public interest by depriving elected lawmakers of their “constitutional authority to decide whether, when and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”18 But by then, international aid programs had already been suspended, creating humanitarian crises around the world.

Beyond direct firings, the administration has taken a more insidious approach to dismantling agencies. According to documents obtained by the Washington Post, DOGE developed step-by-step plans for carrying out Trump’s order to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from the federal government and over six months intends to expand that campaign dramatically to target staff who are not in DEI roles but perform functions that DOGE’s young workers determine are related to DEI.19

This leaves federal workers in a terrifying limbo. Katherine Freeman, who worked as an administrative assistant for the CDC specializing in tuberculosis, received a mass email saying she had been fired because of her performance. She had been at the agency for just ten months.20

Legal Challenges Mount

Multiple federal courts have found these mass firings illegal. US District Judge James Bredar ruled in a case brought by nineteen states and the District of Columbia that the firings amount to a “large-scale reduction in force” subject to specific rules, including giving advance notice to states affected by the layoffs.21

On March 14, 2025, Judge Bredar ordered eighteen federal agencies to reinstate probationary workers fired through what he called “illegal RIFs” (reductions in force), covering probationary employees nationwide.22

US District Judge John Bates characterized DOGE’s work as “opaque” when he ordered an official to testify in a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Shockingly, it was the first time anybody involved with DOGE was required to answer questions under oath from an attorney outside the government.23

Openly defying many of these legal challenges, the Trump administration continues to push forward with its agenda. The White House response to these court orders has been defiant, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declaring that “a single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch.”24

The DOGE Paradox

While Musk initially claimed DOGE would cut $2 trillion from federal spending—­­­a figure even higher than the entire discretionary spending budget of the United States—he has repeatedly revised this target downward, eventually settling on $150 billion in April 2025.25

Even these reduced figures are highly questionable. According to NPR, DOGE’s moves to cancel contracts, end leases, and push agencies to reduce headcount “barely dent the government’s balance sheet.” As of March 2025, for every dollar the federal government had spent since the start of the fiscal year, DOGE claimed to have saved about four cents.26

The disconnect between DOGE’s stated goals and actual operations has led many to question its true purpose. Veteran Republican budget experts have said DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts appear “driven more by an ideological assault on federal agencies long hated by conservatives than a good-faith effort to save taxpayer dollars.”27

Bill Hoagland, a former Republican staffer and director of the Senate Budget Committee for more than twenty years, told Reuters, “The playbook has not been for the dollar savings, but more for the philosophical and ideological differences conservatives have with the work these agencies do.”28

Adding to the contradictions, while Musk and his team demand budget cuts across government, funding for DOGE itself has soared to nearly $40 million as of April 2025, according to records from the Office of Management and Budget reviewed by ProPublica.29

Why It Matters

This is how democracies die; not in a single dramatic moment, but through the slow, methodical dismantling of the institutions that make governance possible. What we’re witnessing isn’t mere political disagreement or partisan policy shifts; it’s a fundamental attack on the capacity of our government to function at all.

As I’ve written (and ranted on the radio) for decades, the corporate right has long dreamed of dismantling the regulatory state created during the 1930s’ New Deal and expanded during the 1960s’ Great Society. They’ve wanted to cripple government’s ability to protect workers, consumers, and the environment from corporate exploitation ever since David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on a platform of ending virtually all federal agencies except the military and the courts. Now, under Trump and DOGE, they’re achieving large parts of this vision with frightening speed.

The consequences fall hardest on ordinary Americans who depend on a functioning government. When the EPA can’t enforce clean air and water standards, communities suffer. When FEMA lacks the resources to respond to disasters, lives are lost. When the CDC loses key scientific expertise, public health is endangered.

But the deeper threat is to democracy itself. When a president can effectively nullify laws passed by Congress by refusing to implement them or by deliberately breaking the agencies charged with enforcement, the constitutional separation of powers is threatened. When career civil servants dedicated to following the law are replaced with political loyalists dedicated only to following orders, the rule of law itself is at risk, as well as the competence of government.

Sarah Boim, a former CDC employee who says her mental health has been affected by losing her job, put it best. Reflecting on the chaos unleashed by DOGE, she told a reporter for NBC News: “Taking a sledgehammer approach and having an unelected billionaire in my email is just insane. What are his qualifications for doing this? The government is not a startup; we have been in business since 1776.”30

The battle over America’s governance isn’t about “big government” versus “small government.” It’s about functional government versus dysfunctional government, about whether we’ll have a government of laws or a government of men, about whether we will remain a democracy or slide into authoritarianism.

Because when governance fails, people suffer. And that’s a truth that transcends politics.