Surveying the Damage

The Trump administration's slash-and-burn mentality is destroying the institutions that benefit every American’s life.

We’re now several months into the second term of America’s only convicted felon President — a man whose primary motivation for running for a second term was to keep himself out of prison. But a secondary motivation has revealed itself — a desire to destroy institutions and norms with no apparent goal other than to flex his power.

That demolition of norms is chilling enough on its own. But it also manifested itself in the destruction of long-standing American institutions, federal agencies, and entire departments of the federal government.

Volumes could be written about each of the institutions being destroyed. The best I can manage in a Substack post is more of a survey course, or rather just a high-level description of a survey course, covering the main targets of this administration’s destruction.

Over the course of the 2024 election campaign, it became increasing clear that one of the primary goals of Trump’s administration is the dismantling of our government. He convinced the low-information voters in his base that somehow their would be vastly improved if he and his team systematically were to dismantle the very functions of our federal government that keep this nation afloat.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The way that you make any system better is not by removing the people who know best how that system functions. But that’s exactly what Elon Musk proposed during the 2024 campaign — gutting the institutional knowledge of the departments and agencies that keep the nation running, under the disproven premise of reducing the federal debt and the deficit.

Trump and Musk (along with Vivek Ramaswamy, before he became a persona non grata) perpetuated the belief that our government somehow contained $2 trillion worth of “bloat” and that we could cut jobs and functions without any significant impact.

Elon Musk’s 130-day employment has now come to an end. He has posted his self-congratulatory farewell tweet. But Musk’s $2 trillion in promised savings has dwindled down to the $150-$160 billion range. MuskWatch’s DOGE Tracker has only been able to verify $16.3 billion in cuts to date.

DOGE would get a failing grade as a middle school civics project. It has been long on uninformed brain-farts and short on specifics. DOGE’s activities so far, in the few short months they’ve been in existence, have been widely criticized as being both inefficient (ironically enough) and obstructive.

Musk may be fading out of the picture, like Homer Simpson disappearing into the shrubbery, but the damage that he and his DOGE bros have done is monumental.

The activities of DOGE — this fabricated unofficial “department” of the federal government — were hardly the only damage that was being done. In some ways, the outrageousness of DOGE and their chainsaw-wielding leader merely provided distraction from all of the other destruction that was underway.

Here’s a compendium of some of the damage:

• Voice of America — The Voice of America, which has been a beacon of democracy around the world since 1942, has been completely undermined by the Trump administration. Trump appointed Kari Lake — best known for her dual election denials of the 2020 presidential election and her own failed run for the Senate — as the head of VOA. In short order, she got rid of all the staff and replaced them with propagandists from the One America News network (OAN), an outlet that is extreme even by right-wing standards.

• USAID — USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) has been dismantled, although this action by DOGE has been entangled in multiple lawsuits. The Supreme Court has ruled that approximately $2 billion in outstanding payments must be paid to countries that would have otherwise received them. However, the damage to the structure of USAID is done, leaving millions of beneficiaries of United States’ “soft power” in the lurch. Children in developing countries are more likely to contract AIDS as the result of the dissolution of PEPFAR. Early prevention efforts of epidemics and pandemics have ground to a halt.

• Department of Education — Trump and the Republicans nominated and confirmed Linda McMahon, a professional wrestling maven with no experience in education, to be the Secretary of Education. But, in Trump’s mind, her massive campaign contributions are far more important than any qualifications. She’s running the Department of Education like she’s taken one too many folding chairs to the side of her head, willingly cutting resources and destroying decades-old successful programs and initiatives. The Department is now mired in multiple lawsuits in attempts to salvage what can be saved.

• Department of Transportation — The primary qualification of Sean Duffy, Trump’s appointee as the Secretary of Transportation, seems to be his ability to shift blame for his own failures onto others — most especially, onto Democrats. In a few short months, this former Fox News talking head managed to fire air traffic controllers in an already dangerously understaffed air traffic control system, only to try to rehire them and to encourage those who weren’t fired to delay their retirements. That endless bumbling is a hallmark of Trump’s second term, so he fits right in.

• Department of Justice — Trump and his Attorney General (Trump’s Florida crony Pam Bondi) have gotten rid of many of the nation’s career prosecutors who have been on the front line of prosecuting terrorism cases, people who are aware of the threats to national security. They’re replacing them with loyalists who won’t question Trump’s authority. Trump has completely abuse his pardon power, going so far as to marginalize the DOJ’s Pardon Office and issuing pardons to those convicted felons who stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of votes in the 2020 election. To add insult to injury, he has appointed Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News personality with more experience drinking box wine than she has on the bench, as acting U.S. Attorney in D.C.

• Department of Defense — Speaking of dipsomaniacal Fox News personalities, Trump and the Republicans also nominated and confirmed another Fox News bloviator, white supremacist, and utterly unqualified boozehound as Secretary of Defense. He’s been tossing aside the nation’s top generals as if they were discarded Kleenex instead of experienced strategists whose vast experience, simply because the Commander in Chief has denigrated and devalued them. No management experience whatsoever? Sure! Let’s hire that guy to head the department that has 3.4 million employees.

• U.S. Intelligence — The fact that the leader of the free world fails to read his daily intelligence report (the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB) was widely known during Trump’s first term. That alone should terrify anyone who cares about the nation’s security. Add to that the fact that Trump appointed a Putin apologist — Tulsi Gabbard — as the Director of National Intelligence, a role that oversees multiple intelligences agencies. There are reports that Gabbard may be taking a Mary Poppins approach to the nation’s intelligence, switching the PDB to a video format similar to a Fox News report to coerce Trump into ingesting at least some critical daily intelligence info. I suppose we should give her credit for trying.

• Homeland Security — Where do we even begin? With the self-promoting puppy-killing Instagram model wannabe who likes to cosplay with weapons of war pointed at her colleague’s head? Perhaps with her FEMA director who didn’t know that the United States has a hurricane season? Since Inauguration Day, there have been “workforce reductions” at USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), but increases in high visibility raids that are as flawed as they are cruel. Maybe implementing ICE raids whose focus is not capturing criminal immigrants but rather exacting revenge on cities who didn’t support Trump is OK with the MAGA crowd, but it’s inhumane, it’s not effective, and it’s not OK with the majority of Americans, both Republican and Democrat.

• Science and Health — We’ve got a crackpot vaccine denier who likes to swim in raw sewage as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. We’ve already seen major medical and research projects halted at the CDC and NIH, resulting in undermining vital disease prevention. Top scientists are fleeing to countries where their research won’t be capriciously halted. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has had similar cuts, including cuts to the National Weather Service.

This collection of horrors is just a sampling of the damage that’s being done in our name and with our tax dollars. All of the chaos, the buffoonery, the determined incompetence would be knee-slappingly funny if the consequences weren’t so dire.

In a post-Trump/post-MAGA era, some of the institutions being trashed may be able to be reconstituted in one form or another, once voters begin to grasp just how much is being taken away from them. But the institutional knowledge is not so easily reassembled once those who hold that knowledge have moved onto other jobs. It will take years — generations, perhaps — to repair the damage that’s been done in just over four months.

Even more difficult to rebuild will be our reputation and trust among our allies.

Lest you think the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse justifies some or all of this damage, the U.S. Government already had a structure in place to address waste, fraud, and abuse — the Government Accountability Office (GAO). In fact, the phrase “waste, fraud, and abuse” that Trump likes to bandy about exists in government parlance because of the GAO. Are they 100% effective? No. But they’ve been extremely effective for more than 100 years.

With a few notable exceptions, Democrats have remained pretty close-mouthed since the elections. There still doesn’t seem to be any kind of cohesive strategy to impede the continuing dissolution of the various functions of government that are on the chopping block. The approach seems to be, well, let Trump and the MAGA Republicans completely screw things up and that’ll be enough to convince the voting public to throw the bums out. They’ve tacitly approved Trump’s monumental incompetence as a selling point for Democrats.

But much of the damage, should it continue unchecked until elections bring it to a halt, may not be able to be repaired. The time for Democrats to put the brakes on is now.