As Musk runs amok, it's best to play the long game
Demonstrators protest the mass firing of 1,000 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees in front of the CDC headquarters in Atlanta on Tuesday. Credit: AP/Arvin Temkar
Get a grip, folks.
That’s the best advice I can give — to both sides — as the nation cheers or condemns President Donald Trump’s efforts to remake our federal government.
Politics is rarely about the short game. One always needs to look at how things develop over the long term. And, reality check — we’re only one month into this administration.
It’s easy for partisans left and right to get caught up in the flood-the-zone action in Washington, especially the actions of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and what one side describes as the damage being wrought — as measured in frozen funds, shuttered programs, and terminated employees.
That’s not to say Musk and his minions haven’t caused unnecessary harm. But such a world-is-ending view myopically misses the pushback already underway.
This was never going to go smoothly. Resistance was inevitable. There was never any hint this would be like the 1990s when President Bill Clinton undertook a similar shrinkage of the federal government.
In March 1993, Clinton began working with Congress on a six-month process called the National Performance Review. Clinton implemented its hundreds of recommendations gradually, so as not to disrupt essential services as the headcount was reduced. Over his two terms, the federal workforce was trimmed by some 400,000 people, a 20% cut.
Nothing in that paragraph depicts what’s happening now.
These firings and freezes seem aimed at a bottom-line result and a purge of presumed enemies with little regard for collateral damage. And so, protests from various corners led to quick reversals on layoffs in the National Park Service and the National Nuclear Security Administration, struggles to bring back staff working to stop the avian flu that has devastated chicken farms and spiked egg prices, and tortured explanations for the forced departures of 400 people at the Federal Aviation Administration amid a spate of airplane crashes. Not to mention revelations that half of $16 billion in Musk-claimed savings were attributed to an $8 billion immigration-related contract that actually was worth $8 million.
At a town-hall meeting Thursday in Roswell, Georgia, in a district Trump carried by 22 points in November, an overflow crowd angrily protested DOGE’s cuts and criticized Republican Rep. Rich McCormick for “doing us a disservice,” as one attendee put it, for supporting Musk’s efforts. If history is a guide, that meeting will not be an anomaly.
On Trump’s Constitution-flouting efforts to expand presidential power, Republican Rep. Troy Balderson, from an R+18 district in Ohio, channeled an uneasy and growing undercurrent in GOP circles when he told a business luncheon that the president’s executive orders were “getting out of control.” In another arena, more than 70 lawsuits have been filed against different actions of the administration. Their adjudication in the courts also will take time.
And last week’s polls show more people disapprove of Trump than approve of him, a reversal from most previous polls, with 57% in one survey saying that the president has exceeded his authority. And Americans by 2-1 margins disapprove of Musk and his actions.
The worst part of this is that if Trump and Musk’s ham-handed zeal goes completely and maliciously awry, it could set back the cause of government reform that desperately needs to happen. It you want a leaner, nimbler, more effective government, as all of us should, you should want a solid process to produce that result. The current process is doomed to conflict and failure.
As this plays out, remember that what’s happening now won’t be what’s happening in a month or two, never mind 24 months when Trump hits the halfway point of his term. Politics and governing are like evolution. You don’t end up where you start, but how you get there makes all the difference.
Columnist Michael Dobie’s opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
