The NPR Politics Podcast - How DOGE Cuts Are Impacting Federal Workers

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Proposals from DOGE, Elon Musk's entity tasked with making the federal government more "efficient," have resulted in lawsuits, pushback from other federal agencies, and a lot of uncertainty for the millions of people who work for the federal government. We look at what's happened & what's to come. This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, and correspondents Shannon Bond & Chris Arnold.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Technologist Paul Garcia is using AI to create photos of people's most precious memories. How her mother was dressed, the haircut that she remembered. We generated tens of images and then she saw two images that was like, that was it. Ideas about the future of memory. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. This is Steve from Rockwell Center, New York. I'm in my roomette on the Amtrak Silver Meteor, heading from New York to Miami. Oh, fancy. This podcast was recorded at 11 36 a.m. on Wednesday, February 26. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will be cruising the Caribbean

on the big nude boat. Enjoy the show. That's gotta be a long train ride. New York to Florida? I do love an overnight train though. It is. More overnight train journeys. If you can lay down on the train, then it's just like next level. That's almost luxury. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And today, the latest on the Trump administration's continuing efforts to remake the federal government. Doge, the entity that Elon Musk has been the

face of, is just one aspect of these changes. And how Doge wants to reshape the federal workforce has been steeped in controversy and court battles. And NPR correspondents Shannon Bond and Chris Arnold have been focusing on all of this and join me now. Hello to you both. Hey Sue. Hey Sue. Chris, let's start with you. There are more than two million federal employees doing all different kinds of jobs all over the country and even the world. And you talked to just a couple of them, people who work at national parks who have been impacted by what Doge

is doing. Tell us about them. Yeah, right. A lot of these workers who've been fired are what are called probationary workers. And that can sound at first like, oh, well, maybe they got hired six months ago. So maybe it's not that big a deal. But in many cases, it's not that. You could have worked someplace for five, six, seven, 10 years, and then you get a promotion and you're in a new job because you were doing a good job, you're a good worker, and now you're in a probationary period in that new job. So these folks were in that category.

And I talked to Eileen and James Kramer and they worked at a national park in Alaska. It's called Lake Clark National Park. These guys have both gotten promotions recently. Everything seemed good. And then they get these letters saying, you know what, you're doing a lousy job and so you're fired today. No details, no reason.

And it just looked like a formally letter with their names filled in. And here's Eileen and James. That was really, I think the hardest part about it was that they were saying we were underperforming, which isn't true. They obviously didn't look at our personnel file because we have evidence showing that we're great performers and we've exceeded expectations and we've received performance

awards. I got a regional award specifically in efficiency last year, so it's a little bit ironic to me that I'm being terminated as part of this government efficiency initiative. Chris, I think this is really interesting for a couple of reasons. I'm glad you made that point that not all probationary workers are first job out of college types. But also, personal records are legal documents. If you have a record of strong performance reviews, of awards for excellence,

and the excuse your boss gives you is for failure to perform, that seems like it might open up even more of a legal avenue that maybe you were fired under false pretenses. And I mean, that's what's happening right now. I mean, there are lawyers just gathering these up, you know, and being like, here's the letter,

it's the same as the other thousand letters. And when you actually look at the personnel file, this person got this commendation. And also, they're talking and it turns out their own supervisor was like, I don't want to fire this person. I had no choice. So. And so, Chris, what exactly is happening with these lawsuits

now? Well, there's one in federal court in San Francisco against the Office of Personnel Management, which apparently, the lawsuit alleges, a lot of these letters just came from OPM and then kind of went through the agencies, but it wasn't even these agencies saying, we want to fire these people.

So, but it also zooms in on this idea, like you were talking about, like, well, you can't just lie and say these people did their jobs badly and use that as a justification to immediately terminate them. There was just another kind of related case, things resolved in the last couple of days involving the US Office of Special Counsel,

and a few workers were put back to work or will be in a couple of days. So, you know, the courts really might come back and say, you know what guys, like this just wasn't done right. Like these federal workers have rights and you cannot fire them this way. I think by, at this point, a lot of our listeners know what guys, like this just wasn't done right. Like these federal workers have rights and you cannot fire them this way. I think by, at this point, a lot of our listeners know what OPM is, but we should just note

it's the Office of Personnel and Management, which essentially serves as like the HR for the federal government. And I think pushback is maybe thematically what we're seeing more of here, Shannon, especially when it comes to how Musk has been operating. And by that, I I mean there was this federal government-wide email sent out at his directive

asking all federal employees to do a five bulleted point list of what they had accomplished that week to sort of justify their existence and it didn't end up that simple. So Musk posted about this on X on Saturday said everyone's gonna to receive this email. And by the way, if you don't respond, we're going to take that as a resignation, which is sort of kind of a stunning thing to announce by this person who he is a special government employee.

The White House has said he's not running anything. He's not running any of these agencies. He's not running the Office of Personnel Management. He's not even running the Doge office that he has sort of established in the White House. Technically. Technically. Technically, we'll get into that. But then this government-wide email comes out from the Office of Personnel Management

asking people to respond to this. Well, no, it did not have the ultimatum about not responding. And immediately we just saw like utter confusion and chaos across federal agencies. Workers are being like, am I supposed to respond to this? Like some of them are like, I work on classified material know, and it said don't put any classified information in, but like, a lot of people were quite nervous about, like, what is gonna be done with this, how do I respond? Agencies start, in some cases, saying, yes, this is fine,

go ahead and respond. Other agencies, including the State Department, the Defense Department, Homeland Security, are like, absolutely not, do not send this in. And, you know, that is some of the first real backlash we've gotten against Musk by people in the cabinet, cabinet-level secretaries, saying, hold on. We run these agencies.

This is our workforce. We get to control and manage what they're doing. And you can't just sort of order people to do this. But it does raise all these questions. I mean, many of the workers I were talking to were saying, who's in charge here? Is it the agency, and then in some cases, is telling me first to respond, then telling

me not to respond, you know, with supervisors or giving people conflicting information. You have Musk continuing to say on X, if people don't respond, they're going to be fired. You have OPM first coming out and saying, actually, this is voluntary, then putting out another memo being like, well, it's up to the agencies to decide if it's voluntary or not. Like, just again, like, people are just like, who is in charge? Who is making the decisions here? And I think we're going to see to what degree do some of these political appointees who have been Senate confirmed to their positions, how are they going to continue to assert their power over Musk?

And it seems to me that the timing of this is not coincidental because Musk started taking these actions as soon as Donald Trump was inaugurated into office. But these cabinet secretaries are now being sworn in, the cabinet's being fully actualized, and it shouldn't perhaps come as a surprise that the people that are supposed to have ownership over these agencies and its workforce are maybe looking to Musk and saying like, not necessarily that they oppose the end goal, which is reducing spending, reducing the size of the workforce, but saying like, I want to make these decisions, not this guy. Right. And like, also maybe I know best, right?

So like an example here is like the Department of Energy, right? Which as we reported on, you know, when these sort of initial probationary layoffs or firings happened, you know, cut a bunch of workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration. You know, these are people who work with nuclear warheads and then had to rehireire them, right? Because actually they're like, oh no, we can't actually fire these people, like we need these people. They're very much in the position now, right? I think there's a bit of like, you know, the actual functionality of these agencies, they do have work to do and they need to make sure that if they are going to trim down, they trim, you know, not trimming people who actually need to be doing some of this work. And yes,

I think some of this is about like ego and sort of turf battles over like who ultimately is a decider here. Like, you know, these are all people, many of them, you know, themselves have business backgrounds, right? They're coming in saying like, I want to be in charge here. And like, you know, I'm not going to just like let Elon Musk tell me what to do. But it's been quite interesting because I think a lot of people were sort of speculating, you know, is it Musk and Trump who are going to have a fallout? Like what's going to happen here? And actually, I think some of the first battles we're seeing is between Musk and these cabinet secretaries.

Okay, we got to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. This message comes from Wise, the app for doing things in other currencies, sending or spending money abroad. Hidden fees may be taking a cut. With Wise, you can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market exchange rate. Visit wise.com. TNCs apply. And we're back. And Shannon, I want to talk about the process, the way this stuff has been happening, because I think it's important to understand. Because one of the inside the Beltway conversations

is that, you know, if every agency or department wanted to do a reduction in force or reduction in spending, there's a way to do it. And that it's happened in the past. Republicans will note to the fact that Bill Clinton did this when he was president. But the way that this is happening is not the way that government typically functions. But it is in a lot of ways reminiscent of how Elon Musk has run his companies. Yeah, that's right. I mean, some of this is like literally the exact playbook, right? And we knew that with the fork in the road email, right? Offering for government workers to resign, he sent an email with the same subject line

to Twitter employees, again, asking them to resign after he bought that company. Similarly, this idea of like reporting in five things you accomplished last week, that is something he has implemented at his companies. Even the title of that email, what did you do last week? That is something that he had famously texted to the then CEO of Twitter, like when he was basically

making the decision to buy the company and try to kick out current management. And we're seeing again and he's bringing this playbook in from his businesses that I think to his mind has been successful in the past, right? And I think what that tells us very much is, and we've talked about this before, right? He must sees the government as not really any different from a corporation.

He's talked about this. He's called it America Incorporated, and it needs to have a corporate restructuring. And he's very much going about it the way you would if you were the pretty independently powerful CEO of a large company where you can say, yeah, I'm going to fire White Swastika people. I mean, this has also played out in the same way at Twitter where Twitter fired people and then had to rehire them, right? Because they actually found out some of them were doing jobs that the company needed. But part of the reason we're seeing kind of so much confusion and disruption and pushback

is that the problem is fundamentally the government is not a corporation. And so, yes, if you were going to do large-scale reductions in force, like there are actual legal channels you need to follow. There are requirements over things like preference to people who have veteran status or people with disabilities. Like, there are things that exist in the government world that may not exist in the corporate world. And I think that's where we're seeing so many of these clashes.

But it is really kind of this very differing kind of view of what the purpose of government is and really different value system, I think, that we're seeing Musk bring in that I think is causing just so much of this like confusion and drama and like honestly heartache for a lot of the workers that we're talking to. There's also this murkiness too where on the one hand, Elon Musk is very clearly in charge here or at least making critical decisions. But the government and the administration at the same time this week is trying to say, no, technically, he's not the administrator of Doge. Well, and I think like that's a big difference between the private sector too, right?

I mean, if Musk buys Twitter, which became X, I mean, yeah, he's in charge. He can fire half the people. The parallel with the government like stops there, right? It makes me think I used to cover Silicon Valley and you'd see guys who made gajillions of dollars and then they're like I want to solve public education and they would try to wade in and then they'd realize like oh my god no I'm dealing with the unions and I don't have like a room full of really smart grads from Stanford like making this one thing, I'm dealing with 100 things, and they're all way more complicated.

And it's like, it kind of reminds me of that. You know, it's like, it's just turning into this absolute swamp of tangled intention, where, you know, anything he tries to do, the way he would do it, say when he took over Twitter, is just gonna spark lawsuits. I think that's all true, and I think what's also really important to think about is in

the meantime, like Sue, as you said, I mean, he is clearly effectively running this, right? Like he says this email is going to go out, the email goes out. He says people are going to get fired. You know, the agencies say, well, maybe not. But like, I don't know, he and then Trump also says if people don't respond, they're going to get fired. So, you know, who are you trusting? And I think a lot of the folks that I've been speaking to, the federal workers who are at the receiving end of this are saying, I don't know, but I kind of can't risk my job at this point. I mean, they're also all preparing to be laid off anyway.

But they're saying, at the end of the day, yes, there are all these kind of legal questions and that will play out, but it will, as Chris says, take months. And in the meantime, it is effectively Musk calling the shots here. Who is the person that the government is saying is in charge and what do you know about her? Right. So this has come after actually quite a bit of mystery through a lawsuit where the court was asking the government over and over again because they said, well, Musk is not in charge of the US Doge service, which is part of the office of the president that has

been renamed from the US Digital Service. And they were like, okay, great, who is? And then the government lawyers were like, well, we don't know. We can't tell you. This dragged on for a couple days, which kind of, you know, pretty unprecedented to just not be able to say who is actually running this. I'm sure judges love that. Yeah. As you can imagine, the judge was not amused. So the White House has announced that Amy Gleason is,

in fact, the acting administrator of the Doge service. She is somebody who is a veteran of the US Digital Service. She's a former healthcare investment executive. We don't know a lot about her. We don't really know a lot about what her actual kind of acting role is. What does it mean, again, for her to be the acting administrator when clearly, effectively, Musk is calling the shots here? But there is a name now, and I'm sure that that will raise a whole new set of court challenges

over what are the directives that Musk is issuing, where does that maybe trample on her territory. But again, at the end of the day, the office of the president and the White House, which is what the DOJ service is under, is separate from these agencies. Yes, the president can issue executive orders saying, calling on agencies to prepare for reductions in force, which it has done. The White House itself, like, can't just go and fire people at agencies. OPM can't go and fire people at agencies. Like, the agencies themselves are doing this.

And so that's, again, where, like, the kind of what is the chain of command here, you know, I think is murky and is why this is being opened up to all of this questioning, you know, legally and just, you know, practically by the people having to carry out this mission. This is not a short-term story. This is a long-term story. This might even be a story for the rest of the Trump administration. But I will ask you both this. Is there something specifically or what should people be watching or listening for the sort of where do we go from here question? I mean, I think seeing how this plays out with federal workers and whether the courts are willing to say, you didn't follow the rules and you can't just summarily fire tens of

thousands of people and send out all these letters that essentially lie about things. Like that's just not okay. And you got to hire them all back and let's do this like grownups. And if that's able to work, I think that would be really interesting. And I don't know if that's what's gonna happen. Could you say the reverse is also true, Chris? If the courts say, you know what? The president can do this, Elon Musk can do this.

That's also would be a pretty profound impact. Well, yeah, I mean, absolutely. Either way that goes, I mean, there's just, there's a lot hanging on that for so many, so many federal workers, obviously. I think the thing I would say is, what additional pushback is there from inside the government, and especially at the cabinet level? We know that Musk is going to be sitting in on Trump's cabinet meeting today.

We'd love to be flying along that room, what the dynamic is like, because again, I think it's been really notable, particularly that some of the most powerful cabinet secretaries, the head of agencies that are very critical to national security, are the ones who have kind of come out most aggressively in sort of marking their own territory here. And again, like you said, it's not that these folks are not on board with the idea of cutting spending and reducing the workforce. But I think Marco Rubio is going to have a very hard time if he is not the one as Secretary of State who is deeply involved in setting US foreign policy and, like, you know, Musk is trying to get involved there.

So I think those sort of turf battles and then how those like resonate through the way the agencies are actually run is going to be the thing we're watching out for. Shannon and Chris, thank you so much for bringing your expertise and reporting to the podcast today. Absolutely. Thanks, Sue. All right, we're going to leave it there, but we'll be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Susan Davis.

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