Letters from an American - August 27, 2025

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

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August 27, 2025. The image of National Guard troops, some of them from as far away as Louisiana and Mississippi, in Washington, D.C., spreading mulch around the cherry trees at the tidal basin and picking up trash, illustrates that President Donald J. Trump's insistence that he needed troops to crack down on violent crime and the nation's capital, was always a cover for an authoritarian takeover. As Kate Riga and Amine Yugil noted in Talking Points memo today, earlier this spring, Trump and Congressional Republicans did all they could to weaken Washington, D.C. In March, Congress passed a resolution to fund the government temporarily while also freezing all

federal spending. That included the District of Columbia, whose budget has to be approved by Congress, although the monies involved come from local taxes, not federal funds. Because those budget monies are local and not federal, according to Campbell Robertson of the New York Times, the Washington, D.C. budget is routinely exempted from federal spending freezes. But the House did not carve it out this time, leaving the city with a shortfall of $1.1 billion. dollars. The Senate unanimously approved a bill to fix the error, letting the city continue to operate under its current budget, but the House never took it up. Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and local officials found a workaround to restore some funding, but have had to freeze

hiring and cut contracts, grants, and expenditures across the city's agencies. Cuts to city services have made it easier for Trump and his loyalists to insist the city is being poorly taken care of, although violent crime is dropping there, not rising, and the Department of Justice's own numbers show it is at a 30-year low. Now, with troops stationed in the city, Trump and his MAGA loyalists

are demonstrating that they control the federal capital. Today, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the administration will also take over Union Station in Washington, D.C., from which Amtrak and the city's commuter rail lines run, saying such a takeover was part of Trump's beautification program. Amtrak took control of the station in July 2024, and the bipartisan infrastructure law of the Biden era provided $22 billion to Amtrak to modernize trains and stations. The administration cut a $120 million federal grant to Amtrak in April. Taking control of Union Station will put the administration in charge of key transportation lines into and out of the city.

It will also create a federal presence in an area where veterans have been protesting. The freezing of DC's budget is a different process from the dramatic cuts the Trump administration has made across the federal government, although the effects of the two are similar. As Tara Kopp of the Washington Post noted today, today, custodial work, like that being done by the National Guard troops, normally would have been performed by National Park Service employees. But that service was already short-staffed when the administration slashed through the federal workforce.

The Park Service used to have 200 people assigned to the thousands of acres of gardens and trees in the Capitol. Now it has 20. A Park Service official told cop, it's everybody, the masons, the maintenance workers, the the groundskeepers, the plumbers. Every shop is short. The Trump administration inherited decades of Republican rhetoric insisting the federal government was bloated and inefficient. It set out immediately to gut the civil service through hiring freezes, reductions in force, and impoundment of funds. In an interview with Eileen Sullivan of the New York Times on Thursday, August 21st,

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Cooper said that by the end of December 2025, there will be 300,000 fewer federal workers than there were in January. Sullivan notes that this is the largest single-year reduction in civilian federal employment since World War II. But even before these cuts, the federal workforce had not kept pace with the growth of the nation. The workforce when Trump took office in 2025 was about, about 2.4 million people, roughly the same number of government workers the nation had in 1969. As Bill Chapel of NPR reported in March, in 1969, the U.S. population was about 202.5 million. Now it is about 341.1 million. The U.S. public workforce was about 14.9% of

overall employment, significantly lower than our 37 peer nation. in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where public sector employment averages at 18.1%. In Canada, that number is 19.4%. Chappell also noted that an OECD report showed more than 90% of U.S. civil servants believed it was important for their work to serve the public good. The old Republican argument for getting rid of civil servants

was that private contractors would be more efficient, and so in place of civil servants, the U.S. has relied on private contractors since the 1990s. While the U.S. spent about $270 billion on federal workers' salaries before the 2025 cuts, it spent $478 billion on government contractors. Public policy scholar Elizabeth Linos explained that even before the recent cuts, the U.S. had something like three times as many contractors delivering the work of government as it had civil servants. The Trump administration's drastic cuts were almost certainly designed

to speed up the shift to private contractors. Under the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doggy, cut jobs willy-nilly, apparently under the impression that replacing people with AI contracts and consolidating databases would make civil servants redundant. But like the D.C. budget freeze, the cuts have weakened the nation and make it more susceptible to an authoritarian takeover. Yesterday, news broke that a whistleblower, identified as Social Security Administration Chief Data Officer Charles Borges, claims that a former senior doggy official put a copy of a key social security database on a server that was vulnerable to hacking. The doggy employee copied the names, birthdays, and social security numbers of more than 300 million

Americans to an unsecure cloud server accessible to other former doggy employees. Borges that the copy constitutes violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety. He also said that as of late June, there were no verified audit or oversight mechanisms in place to oversee where Doggy was sharing that data, or what it was using the data for. The agency assessed that a breach of the database would be catastrophic for Social Security beneficiaries, making them susceptible to identity theft, the loss of health care and nutrition benefits, and so on.

Last week, as the Trump administration prepared to fire nearly 90% of the workforce of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, virtually all pending matters flagged by bank examiners were simply closed without action. Layla A. Jones reported last week that while the administration insisted it was targeting bias at NPR and PBS when it defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, the $1.1 billion in cuts means that the CPB can no longer provide public broadcasting stations with severe weather alerts. CPB administered the Next Generation Warning System, in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to issue alerts and information over radio and television stations, many of which are in rural America and can continue to operate when other systems fail.

Yesterday, 182 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, wrote to Congress to warn that one-third of FEMA's full-time staff have separated from the agency this year, eroding institutional knowledge and relationships, even as FEMA employees have been reassigned to U.S. immigration and customs enforcement. or ice. The administration has cut funds for FEMA, has removed both public and internal information related to climate change, and has not appointed a qualified FEMA administrator, as the law requires. In this document, which they called the Katrina Declaration in memory of the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast almost exactly 20 years ago, they warned that the

the administration was making it impossible for FEMA to help Americans survive hurricanes, floods, fires, and other disasters. FEMA's mission to provide critical support is being obstructed by leadership who not only question the agency's existence, but place uninformed cost-cutting above serving the American people, and the communities our oath compels us to serve. 36 people signed their name to the document, 155 did not put their names down out of concern the administration would target them in retaliation for speaking out. They were right. All of those who used their names received emails Tuesday night saying they had been placed on administrative leave. Tonight, Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Lauren Weber of the Washington Post reported a battle at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC.

When recently confirmed director Susan Monares refused to agree to change coronavirus vaccine guidelines without consulting advisors, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged her to resign. Menares refused and called Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican of Louisiana, who was instrumental in securing Kennedy's confirmation and who pushed back against him. Her involvement of the senator apparently infuriated Kennedy. and the department simply announced on social media that Menares was no longer the CDC director. Hours later, Menares's lawyers responded

that she had neither resigned nor been fired, accused Kennedy of weaponizing public health for political gain, and said that his purge of health officials put millions of American lives at risk. This is not about one official, they wrote. It is about the systemic dismantling dismantling of public health institutions, the silencing of experts, and the dangerous politicization

of science. The attack on Dr. Menares is a warning to every American. Our evidence-based systems are being undermined from within. The White House then formally fired Menares, saying she was not aligned with the president's agenda of making America healthy again. The attacks on Menares came as administrative firings, budget cuts, and policies prompted the resignations this week of the CDC's chief medical officer, the director of its infectious disease center, the head of its center for immunization and infectious diseases, and the director of the Office of Public Health data. One described Menares as hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader. On August 20th, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and former Deputy Secretary of State William Burns

thanked America's fired public servants for serving their country with honor and told them they deserved better than the gleeful indignity inflicted on them by this administration. The current process of cutting the government is not about reform, he wrote, but about retribution. It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants, making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power. Deploying National Guard soldiers away from their families and sending them to watch them to watch, Washington, D.C., in the heat of August to respond to an emergency, only to put them to work spreading

mulch and picking up trash, certainly seems to fit the idea of inflicting indignity to break the nobility of public service for the nation. The firefighters at work combating a wildfire in the state of Washington likely also felt the indignity inflicted by the government. Today, when ICE agents showed up and made made them line up so the agents could check their IDs. The agents arrested two firefighters, and when a member of the crew asked for the chance to say goodbye, the agents responded, you need to get the fuck out of here. I'm going to make you leave.

One firefighter said, you risked your life out here to save the community. This is how they treat us. In his resignation letter today, Director of the CDC's National Center for Ineastern, immunization and respiratory diseases, Dimetri Daskalakis, set an example for those refusing to be cowed. The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning, he wrote. My grandfather, whom I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.

It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.