President Trump’s government-demolition efforts continue, including mass layoffs at numerous agencies as part of a long-expected purge of the federal workforce. So far, most of the layoffs have targeted probationary employees, who have less protection than longtime federal workers. The full impact of Trump and DOGE’s “force reductions” remains to be seen. Below are updates, analysis, and commentary over the holiday weekend as the shock waves spread.
“Move fast and break things” could literally break the IRS’s antiquated IT system, warns former Treasury official Lily Batchelder:
I led the Treasury Office of Tax Policy and have spoken to a number of former career and political appointees at Treasury and IRS. None can recall a political appointee ever having access to this database. They are deeply concerned about the risks to taxpayer privacy, the integrity of the tax system, and filing season operations.
The IDRS is one of the most comprehensive databases the IRS has. As the story says, it includes PINs, SSNs, and allows viewers to enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices and collection documents. This is highly sensitive and personal information.
The IRS IT system is also extremely antiquated, portions of it relying on coding language from the 70s. While work to modernize this technology is essential and ongoing, it has to be done very carefully by people with deep knowledge of the systems and coding languages. Former IRS employees have told me minor coding changes could break the system in ways that would not be true if its architecture were more modern. The consequences could be massive, including disrupting the filing season during which ~100M Americans receive their tax refunds.
The District Court judge held a rare hearing on a federal holiday today, but as Politico reports, she made it clear she didn’t think the state attorney generals had enough evidence to justify their request for a temporary restraining order against Elon Musk and DOGE:
[Chutkan] agreed that Musk’s operations through the “Department of Government Efficiency” were taking place in troubling secrecy. And she acknowledged that DOGE is operating so swiftly that it is difficult to reach quick conclusions about the legality of its moves.
“DOGE appears to be moving in no sort of predictable and orderly fashion and plaintiffs are obviously scrambling to find out what’s next,” Chutkan said during an hourlong hearing held via video conference on the federal holiday. “I don’t know if that’s deliberate or not.”
But the judge said granting the temporary restraining order sought as part of a lawsuit brought by Democratic attorneys general required much clearer evidence that DOGE’s actions were causing grave, permanent damage. Instead, she said, states had relied primarily on news reports that speculated about the risks of Musk and DOGE’s actions, some of which she said could potentially be remedied in further litigation.
“I’m not seeing it so far. … It’s sort of like a prophylactic TRO and that’s not allowed,” Chutkan said, adding that she hoped to issue a ruling within 24 hours. “The courts can’t act based on media reports. We can’t do that.”
The union representing Federal Aviation Administration workers says nearly 300 probationary FAA employees were fired over the weekend by the Trump administration. Per NBC News:
“This decision did not consider the staffing needs of the FAA, which is already challenged by understaffing,” David Spero, the national president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, AFL-CIO, said in a statement. “Staffing decisions should be based on an individual agency’s mission-critical needs. To do otherwise is dangerous when it comes to public safety. And it is especially unconscionable in the aftermath of three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month.”
A union spokesperson said “close to 300” of its members received termination notices over the weekend, and those affected worked as maintenance mechanics, aeronautical information specialists, environmental protection specialists, aviation safety assistants as well as management and program assistants.
Transportation secretary Sean Duffy announced in a Sunday night X post that SpaceX employees are going to the FAA Air Traffic Control command center on Monday “to get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.”
He also used some MAGA red meat to suggest this wasn’t any kowtow to Musk: “Because I know the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon’s team is getting special access, let me make clear that the [FAA] regularly gives tours of the command center to both media and companies.”
Reuters reports:
[U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan] did not say why she ordered the hearing, but on Friday she heard arguments by 13 Democratic state attorneys general for a temporary restraining order that would bar Musk’s DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, team from accessing information systems at several government agencies including the departments of Labor, Education, Health and Human Services, Energy, Transportation, Commerce, and the Office of Personnel Management.
The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to lift a district court order that temporarily reinstated Office of Special Counsel head Hampton Dellinger, who filed a lawsuit against the administration claiming his firing by the administration was illegal. An appeals court on Saturday left the ruling in place, so now the Trump Justice Department is escalating, claiming that the district court “preventing [Trump] from exercising these powers thus inflicts the gravest of injuries on the Executive Branch and the separation of powers.”
Musk’s agents are now trying to get into a system at the IRS that contains extensive personal information about every American taxpayer, the Washington Post reports:
Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is considering a memorandum of understanding that would give officials from DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency — broad access to tax-agency systems, property and datasets. Among them is the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which enables tax agency employees to access IRS accounts — including personal identification numbers — and bank information. It also lets them enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices, collection documents and other records.
According to a draft of the memorandum obtained by The Washington Post, DOGE software engineer Gavin Kliger is set to work at the IRS for 120 days, though the tax agency and the White House can renew his deployment for the same duration. His primary goal at the IRS is to provide engineering assistance and IT modernization consulting.
No, this isn’t something political appointees typically get access to:
The tax agency’s systems are widely considered antiquated — many were built using computer coding language from the 1960s — and overhauling the agency’s IT is in line with DOGE’s mandate to modernize government technology. IRS contractors are generally provided system access to repair or maintain IDRS and similar data systems.
But it’s highly unusual to grant political appointees access to personal taxpayer data, or even programs adjacent to that data, experts say. IRS commissioners traditionally do not have IDRS access. The same goes for the national taxpayer advocate, the agency’s internal consumer watchdog, according to Nina Olson, who served in the role from 2001 to 2019.
At the American Prospect, David Dayen writes that Trump and Musk’s political firings “are a version of the ancient hordes who put heads of the leadership on pikes for the villagers to see”:
[T]he firings aren’t necessarily about those who have been laid off, but those who are left behind. Get out of line and you’ll join your colleagues on the unemployment line. “Out of line” could mean disobeying illegal orders to cancel spending appropriated by Congress, or rat on your fellow workers. It could mean getting crosswise of Musk and his DOGE team in any possible direction. It’s essentially a reign of terror in the federal workforce, a demand for fealty to the king.
The government’s output over the next four years as a result is going to be abysmal. Government is routinely criticized for being too deliberate, too outmanned, too inattentive. Now it’s going to be more outmanned and more inattentive, and the things it will do quickly will be frequently wrong, and reversed after the damage is done. On top of that, workers will be demoralized and angry, unmotivated and paralyzed in the face of crisis, for fear of putting their head up and getting noticed.
There are some private-sector businesses like this, which move fast and break things and rule by fear. When they screw up, their websites crash for a few days. When government screws up, people die.
Notes Nick Robins-Early at The Guardian:
While DOGE begins to make deep cuts throughout the government, Musk and those acting on his behalf have called for implementing new artificial intelligence systems in federal agencies and completely overhauling American weapons programs. As humanitarian aid groups reel from Musk’s cuts, tech and defense firms are seeing a chance to integrate themselves deeper into the new Trump administration’s agenda.
Musk’s plans have already excited Silicon Valley mainstays such as Palantir, whose executives praised Doge on an earnings call last week and talked about how the disruption by the billionaire’s strike squad was good for the company. Palantir already has won hundreds of millions of dollars in US military contracts in recent years for AI-related projects. …
Other CEOs and tech executives have similarly praised Musk and told investors that Doge’s plans represent an opportunity for their companies. Brian Armstrong, CEO of the multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, lauded Doge last week for its “great progress” and suggested putting government expenditures on blockchain technology. Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman spoke favorably of the effort on recent earnings calls, while the Predator drone-maker General Atomics Aeronautical Systems wrote a letter directly to Musk last month asking him to speed up the way the Pentagon handles defense contracts.
Seems like a bad idea. Reports Politico:
Laboratories in a national network of 58 facilities responding to the spread of bird flu were notified Friday that 25 percent of the staff in a central program office coordinating their work were fired in the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal employees.
USDA’s National Animal Health Laboratory Network program office has a staff of only 14 people, but it plays a major role in responding to animal disease outbreaks. It’s responsible for data management, ensuring that labs across the country are conducting the same tests and following similar protocols to accurately and effectively track animal diseases.
The labs that make up the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians were informed that testing and other responses to the H5N1 outbreak would be slower after the layoff, said Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.
The acting U.S. archivist is gone, as are several other top officials, per the Washington Post:
A source familiar with the situation said that the acting archivist, William J. Bosanko, and the agency’s inspector general, Brett M. Baker, decided to retire and that several other senior officials resigned after Trump officials made it clear they wanted to remove the agency’s leadership team and install loyalists. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
Bosanko’s weeklong tenure is the shortest in the history of the agency.
The AP reports:
On Friday, 13 judges who had yet to be sworn in and five assistant chief immigration judges were dismissed without notice, said Matthew Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents federal workers. Two other judges were fired under similar circumstances in the last week.
It was unclear whether they would be replaced. The US Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review, which runs the courts and oversees its roughly 700 judges, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Immigration courts are backlogged with more than 3.7m cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, and it takes years to decide asylum cases.
NBC News reports on the Trump administration’s botched efforts to rehire them:
National Nuclear Security Administration officials on Friday attempted to notify some employees who had been let go the day before that they are now due to be reinstated — but they struggled to find them because they didn’t have their new contact information.
In an email sent to employees at NNSA and obtained by NBC News, officials wrote, “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
The individuals the letter refers to had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts.
NNSA, which is within the Department of Energy and oversees the nation’s nuclear stockpile, cannot reach these employees directly and is now asking recipients of the email, “Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails.”
It’s Presidents’ Day weekend, and the current president is embracing his inner monarch:
The Washington Post reports on just some of the immediate-term effects caused by the Trump administration’s purge:
In an Energy Department subagency that helps provide power, staff who handled homeowners’ electricity bills were fired, employees said, potentially leaving no one to take the money that keeps their lights on. In one state, all but two of the employees who helmed an Agriculture Department program assisting poor rural communities were fired. And in a tiny Wyoming town, a Forest Service office that has spent decades providing support to hikers, Christmas tree permits to residents and firewood for the elderly has been forced to shutter, a staffer said. …
Meanwhile, some federal employees who moved across the country to take positions in D.C., suddenly jobless, say they are unable to pay their rent and unable to afford a move back home. Others are struggling to figure out how they’ll afford their children’s college tuition or care for elderly parents. Many — newly fired or worried about being next — are frantically submitting applications for as many open jobs as they can find. Still others are mourning the decades-long careers in the federal government they hoped to have.
The Internal Revenue Service reportedly plans to lay off thousands of probationary workers next week, amid ongoing GOP efforts to claw back the Biden administration’s large-scale investments in the agency. As the Associated Press notes, it’s not at all clear what that will mean for the agency as it handles Americans’ tax returns. IRS employees working on the 2025 tax season were not eligible for the Trump administration’s “fork in the road” buyout offer, but nobody seems to know yet how eliminating probationary employees will impact tax-season efforts. The Washington Post reports that as many as 9,000 IRS employees may get the ax, and that the layoffs are likely to target tax collection. Elon Musk’s DOGE team is heavily involved in the plans, as well.
As Ed Kilgore explains:
[D]on’t be too fooled by the smoke and mirrors of DOGE technological virtuosity in doing its job. At bottom, it’s the same approach to the federal budget that knuckle-dragging conservative ideologues have adopted at least since the Reagan administration. Like his low-tech predecessors, Musk regards even good government as inherently wasteful, which in turn makes efforts to improve what taxpayers get for their money a waste of time. What DOGE is doing could in theory be good, bad or just mindless. But it’s mostly a blast from the past rather than any sort of cutting-edge “reform.”
