Trump is trying to rehire federal workers after learning what they do
Turns out we need the nuclear guys and the bird flu people and the folks who help planes land.
Hi, readers. Welcome to another week in which Trump mostly played golf while Elon Musk and his child army indiscriminately fired hundreds of thousands of federal workers who provided essential public services. Only this week, Trump and Musk are finally starting to see some some consequences of their reckless slash-and-burn of the government, and Republicans are starting to wake up to the fact that it’s not just the “libs” who are being owned—quite literally—by fascist billionaires right now.
In the past few days, Trump’s administration has been scrambling to rehire some federal workers that “DOGE” had mass fired—citing fake performance issues—because they realized that those workers are actually critical to public safety and national security. Sources told CNN, for instance, that when Trump officials eliminated more than 300 staffers last week at the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of a mass Energy Department layoff, the officials did not seem to have any clue that these people oversee America’s nuclear weapons. Upon being told by Congress what these particular federal workers do, how high their security clearances are and how stupid and scary it would be to fire them, Trump’s administration panicked and worked through the weekend to reinstate all but 25 of them.
The Department of Agriculture is also trying to rehire some of the people working on responding to the bird flu outbreak, whom Musk fired in what is now dubbed the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Considering that the mass death of chickens due to bird flu is causing egg prices to skyrocket—and Trump ran on lowering the price of eggs—it’s a pretty bad look for his administration to actively try to exacerbate that situation and take eggs off of shelves entirely.
And while Trump hasn’t yet tried to rehire the folks that help planes land right side up, an FAA employee warned Rolling Stone regarding the mass firing of air safety staff, which left four people to do the job of 15 on one state’s obstacles impact team, “The danger to the national airspace can’t be understated. This is a very real threat to the American flying public.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s disapproval rating spiked from 41 to 51% this week as Americans started to realize they’re about to lose a lot of things they took for granted, like clean national parks and social security and mail that arrives on time. And Republicans in Congress openly started to panic about Trump and Musk hurting people in their own states who voted for Trump. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said she’s been “aggressively” working the Environmental Protection Agency to unfreeze grants for green school buses that are manufactured in West Virginia. Sen. Lisa Murkowski complained on X about federal workers being fired in Alaska.
“Many of these abrupt terminations will do more harm than good, stunting opportunities in Alaska and leaving holes in our communities,” she wrote. “We will be less prepared to manage summer wildfires if we can’t support those on the front lines. Our tourism economy will be damaged if we don’t maintain our world-class national parks and forests.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy is worried about the impact that mass FBI firings will have on Louisiana. “I am all for efficiency and ultimately downsizing the federal government, but firing large numbers of new FBI agents is not the way to achieve this,” he wrote. “Louisiana specifically benefits from newly hired FBI agents.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville admitted that he realizes he’s going to have to beg Trump for money for Alabama. “If we have to lobby for, ‘Hey wait a minute, what about the bridge in Birmingham?’ or, ‘There’s a bridge in Mobile’ or whatever, I think that could be very possible,” he told reporters.
As Adam Serwer pointed out, there seem to be a lot of Trump voters who thought that re-electing him was going to hurt the kind of people they hated—faceless government “bureaucrats” in D.C., woke liberals, undocumented immigrants. They didn’t consider the fact that they, too, are going to be left out to dry by a government that provides no public services and is rigged only to make billionaires richer.
While Trump does not seem to care much about anything but playing golf and getting revenge on his enemies this time around, he remains a malignant narcissist who’s obsessed with being well-liked and admired. If there’s any sliver of hope I can glean from the public turning against him—which hopefully starts to happen in much bigger, more noticeable numbers as planes fall out of the sky—it’s that Trump may start to read the tea leaves, sour on Musk, and ease up on the total destruction for long enough to give Democrats a chance to win the midterms. And Republicans may get frustrated and worried enough for their own jobs that they start peeling off and voting with Dems to obstruct Elon’s nation-ending rampage.
But I gotta say guys—it’s really not looking good. And even if RFK Jr. takes away everyone’s anti-depressants, we can’t afford to stop caring and paying attention.