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The Devastating Impacts of Trump's War on Workers: A Personal Dispatch
Before all this started, life was pretty good for families like mine, who live here and depend on the federal government for work.
Apr 03, 2025
The second administration of President Donald J. Trump has already started working its special magic across the Washington, D.C. capital region. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) have fired tens of thousands of federal workers, with more to come. Those who have lost their jobs include people who find housing and other support for veterans struggling with mental illness. They include civil servants who maintained safeguards to prevent our nuclear weapons from becoming dirty bombs. They include healthcare researchers developing treatments for cancer and other killer diseases; workers who ensured that low-income, homeless, and rural students were able to get an education; agricultural researchers who opened up international markets to American farmers; and too many others to mention here.
My neighborhood, located on farmland about 40 miles outside Washington, D.C., is among those wracked by this administration’s shakeup of the government workforce. An estimated 20% of our country’s federal workers make their homes right here in Maryland and in nearby Virginia within reach of the capital. And that doesn’t count the tens of thousands of us who work in (or adjacent to) federal agencies as contractors. All those workers have also been subjected to the same back-to-work requirements, anti-DEI policies, and (depending on their roles) job insecurity, as their government colleagues.
To see how this administration’s attack on federal workers penetrates everyday life, look no further than the lives of children in local public schools.
President Trump, his unelected right-hand man and billionaire businessman Elon Musk, and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) began wreaking havoc on government agencies in late January with a poorly formatted, emotionally worded PDF that some in the civil service initially mistook for a phishing email. That “fork in the road” document offered workers a chance to take eight months of severance pay, or else face the possibility of simply losing their jobs — a possibility that turned out to be all too real for those who risked staying and continuing to serve.
I hope that red state voters are happy.
My Own Deep State
Before all this started, life was pretty good for families like mine, who live here and depend on the federal government for work. Of course, I have to admit that, by many measures, we are privileged in so many ways: A White, upper-middle-class, dual-income (for now) family, with healthy kids, cats, and even a raucous flock of chickens. And as of yet, many families like mine are still fine. But for how long?
I think the wholesomeness of life in my area of Maryland owes much to the diverse cultures represented in our communities. You don’t need to look hard to find someone who can tell you about customs, food, norms, and rituals in places as far away as Afghanistan, China, El Salvador, Ukraine, and elsewhere. (Maryland has long offered broad protections to refugees and asylum seekers.) Until recently, the military and the civil service also cast wide nets in their recruitment and anti-discriminatory hiring practices, coming up with some of the best of the best in every field, regardless of national origin.
To the cultural anthropologist in me, this diversity offers remarkable wealth. You can drive a few minutes from my house and get the crispest Peruvian chicken, the most fragrant Salvadoran pupusas, the tenderest Afghan kabobs. Kids growing up here have a chance to understand the world and international affairs in an up-close-and-personal way. My kids grasp just why democracy and peace are so important, because they know other kids whose families fled authoritarian dictators. They also get why hanging out with people who are different from you is both challenging and rewarding.
Another aspect of life here in the capital region that I value is the high-quality services accessible to many, if not (unfortunately) all — from well-funded Medicaid and Medicare health clinics, to nearby Veterans Administration and military hospitals, to cutting-edge treatments at the National Institutes of Health for sickle cell anemia and cancer, including for those around the country who can’t afford to travel here on their own dime. Until recently, at least.
I think you’d find it hard to fault our federal government for not providing for those in its backyard, at least in my county, which is admittedly the wealthiest in Maryland. Schoolchildren visit science and art museums for free. There are outdoor marvels like national monuments, sprawling botanical gardens, and hiking trails that, at least until recently, have been remarkably well maintained. Whatever you make of those who have made careers running our government, I see how federal facilities and their workers have made my community safer, more exciting to live in, and more beautiful.
In the age of Trump, I fear it’s goodbye to all that, not to speak of a Department of Education. (Who needs education after all?)
Elon Musk, DOGE, and Mass Firings
Unfortunately, just a little more than two months after Donald Trump entered the White House for the second time, that beauty is diminishing. Already, the D.C. area and its suburbs are bearing the economic brunt of his and Elon Musk’s cuts because federal jobs form the backbone of the local economy. Since military veterans make up about a third of the federal workforce, they have been disproportionately affected by DOGE’s slashing of jobs, with at least 6,000 veterans nationally losing their employment, including in this area.
The federal workforce is more racially diverse than the private sector, meaning that those firings will impact minorities particularly strongly. In addition, as most of us already know, DOGE has been targeting the federal staff responsible for enforcing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which people of color and women are more likely to say are important to ensure that they succeed in the workplace. And that’s without even mentioning the way DEI programs allow women who are being sexually harassed or Black employees facing racial slurs to seek redress. People implementing DEI programs are also responsible for ensuring that nursing parents get safe, clean places to pump breastmilk, while protecting many of us — White men included — whose extenuating circumstances (eldercare at home, difficulties entering buildings due to disabilities) would otherwise make work senselessly harder, if not inconceivable.
And make no mistake, DOGE’s firings have nothing to do with efficiency. If the Trump administration cared about that, it wouldn’t have launched itself by firing the inspector generals who were charged with identifying projects responsible for tens of billions of dollars in waste and fraud.
At best, I suspect such cuts reflect real resentment over problems our government does indeed need to address (like why insufficient stable and well-paid jobs exist in large pockets of this country), and consequently, the need for our leaders to create the appearance of “getting things done.” At worst, they reflect a deep spitefulness and Musk’s desire to line his pockets, as every good profiteer does in times of conflict (though I don’t think he ever expected the stock value of his line of cars to fall through the floor).
Back to a Military Lifestyle
Let me describe a few of the costs of Trump’s war on the home front on federal workers. The lucky ones in my community, like us, are those who still have their jobs. But nearly everyone with a federal job now has to commute daily to his or her office in order to meet Musk’s return-to-work requirements. Telework is a privilege that most white-collar workers across this country got to enjoy in the Covid years and thereafter, though civil servants and military personnel have strict requirements to prove they are indeed working. Moreover, research suggests that, surprisingly enough, people who work from home are often more productive, due to fewer distractions and more time made available without lengthy commutes.
Under the new return-to-work mandate, folks I know in the broader Maryland-Virginia area around Washington now often have to commute hours on a daily basis in punishing traffic or decide to try to move closer to their work. Former military families like mine may have thought that the days of long separations from their loved ones, due to deployments and 16- to 18-hour work shifts, were a thing of the past. Now, however, our family has less time to help with the kids’ homework, less time for me to earn a sorely needed living, and (again for me, alone with kids into the evening) more housework and childcare. (I can’t help but think that this last aspect was part of Musk’s whole point.) Stress, exhaustion, and their close relative — loneliness — now permeate our lives and those of so many others. Even health problems that emerged when our family was actively engaged in military service have resurfaced.
As many who have served in the military can attest, it’s hard to quantify the stress of living at the whims of abusive commanders who see needless suffering as a feature, not a detriment, of military service. And now such attitudes are being transferred to civilian life. Consider, for example, Trump’s appointee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who has said that he actually wants federal workers to be “in trauma.” I consider that hazing on a national scale.
During our military service, for some in my family and community, there was at least a sense of contributing to a wider purpose: serving a government that pledged allegiance to the American people rather than to one man.
As we deal with the fallout of DOGE policies, I can only imagine the kinds of wait times that military health facilities are going to have with a gutted government in the second age of America’s very own You Know Who.
“A Protest a Day Keeps the Fascists Away!”
To see how this administration’s attack on federal workers penetrates everyday life, look no further than the lives of children in local public schools. Typically, for military kids and many others, school provides a respite from the uncertainties of messy family life. Schools also provide regular meals, uninterrupted adult attention, a predictable schedule — sometimes even healthcare. At my kids’ elementary school, which is still fantastically resourced and run, they are starting to hear from their friends about parents who have lost their jobs and are dealing with spiking food prices and an abysmal local job market. Meanwhile, beloved classmates from immigrant families are preparing to leave the country for fear of harassment, separation from other family members, or worse.
The problem with cruelty as a governing strategy is that it spreads like wildfire among the nation’s loneliest– even the youngest ones. Recently, my older child started coming home from school sick to his stomach because a peer had told him that Trump was a role model for “making America great again” through his deportations of immigrants — and his two best friends both happen to be foreign-born kids of color. Even when a kid repeatedly claims that immigrants commit crimes and spread disease, it’s difficult for a school counselor to intervene, given that those racial slurs come directly from the highest office in our land.
Since public school can offer exposure to just such grim sentiments, I’m not surprised that schoolchildren like mine have come out with some of the most courageous statements against the Trump administration’s malice. Take, for example, the middle schoolers at a military post in Stuttgart, Germany, who staged a walkout to protest Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s DEI purge of books and curricula related to race, gender, and sexuality, or the online record of a 12 year-old protesting to support his mom, fired from the Department of Education.
My son recently came home from a rough day of standing up to the little urchin harassing him and his friends, and started to craft his own political posters, as he imagined one day running for office. He then put them on his window facing the world beyond our house. One of them reads, “Make America Great Again,” with two lines through it. Underneath, he wrote, “Make America Better Than Great. We All Belong.” And underneath that, in small red letters: “Help us.”
Fellow progressives who are searching for strong leaders: How about instead helping ensure that more of us lead from where we are by speaking out! In our national culture, infused with Trump’s cult of personality, it’s easy to forget that we Americans are the government. The real waste and fraud happens when we miss opportunities to stand up for each other, or when, out of fear, we nod and smile at injustice.
Young kids who call out hate, injustice, and hypocrisy should be role models for the rest of us. They have everything to lose. They can’t look for a new job, move to Canada, or hire a lawyer. All they have is the truth (unless some adult is feeding them grown-up Trumpian poison) and they hold the truth dear.
More people speaking out will make it harder for Musk and Trump to destroy institutions that did many things so well most Americans didn’t even realize they were behind the scenes. As Democratic Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin said recently at a teach-in I attended: “A protest a day keeps the fascists away!”
In the meantime, please consider what I’ve shared about my community as a sort of canary-in-the-coal-mine warning that, unless more people — including you and your neighbors — speak out, too, we can expect the end of American democracy.
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Trump Mass Firing of Federal Workers Is a Very Local Issue, Warns Watchdog
"What Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren't telling you is that under the banner of DOGE they are gutting Americans' jobs and eliminating their essential services all across the country," said one critic.
Mar 07, 2025
While mass layoffs of federal workers and draconian cost-cutting by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency may seem like a distant issue to many Americans, a leading influence-monitoring watchdog warned Thursday that the Trump administration's sweeping cuts "are coming to your city services next."
"President Donald Trump and Elon Musk haven't just been taking a chainsaw through federal departments in Washington, D.C. Their crusade against regular Americans, and the services they depend on, has found its latest target: public servants directly serving in communities across the country," Accountable.US said in a statement.
The group noted that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) "has taken aim at workers across the country who are providing critical services ranging from veterans' care, administration of Social Security benefits, public health, forest service management, and more."
"That's because at least 80% of all federal workers live outside of the Beltway, with federal field offices facing cuts which will lead to degraded services in communities in every state," Accountable.US added. "Already, Americans are feeling the impact of office closures and the elimination of jobs."
For example, in Pennsylvania, DOGE is closing Rural Housing Service, Internal Revenue Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service field offices that employ and serve local residents. In Michigan, hundreds of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration workers have been laid off. In Nevada, federal office building maintenance staffers in Las Vegas and Reno have been let go. The list goes on and on.
"What Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren't telling you is that under the banner of DOGE they are gutting Americans' jobs and eliminating their essential services all across the country," Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk
said Thursday.
"From veterans' services to Social Security benefits, the administration is recklessly playing politics with benefits Americans depend on," Carrk continued. "It's all in service of paying for tax cuts which will benefit Trump, Musk, and their wealthy friends' pocketbooks, but push regular Americans further behind."
On Friday, Carrk further called the Trump-Musk cuts "a slap in the face to workers across the country, who get up everyday and serve others in their community."
"The fact these unnecessary job cuts are in service of paying for tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, makes it all the more despicable," he added.
In many cases, people who enthusiastically voted for Trump have been fired, including disabled Air Force veteran Nathan Hooven, who was terminated last month from his job at a Virginia medical center for veterans. As Common Dreamsreported Wednesday, up to 83,000 Department of Veterans Affairs jobs are on the Trump-Musk chopping block.
"I think a lot of other veterans voted the same way, and we have been betrayed," Hooven toldThe Associated Press Wednesday. "I feel like my life and the lives of so many like me, so many that have sacrificed so much for this country, are being destroyed."
Despite efforts like the "New York Wants You" campaign to hire laid off federal workers, finding new employment can be a tremendous challenge, especially for older workers and people with disabilities. There are approximately 3 million federal employees, more than 50% of whom are age 45 or older.
"Federal workers all across the country are starting to look, and it's impacting people everywhere," Cory Stahle, an economist at the job search platform Indeed, toldThe New York Times Friday. "It's hard to think this isn't going to stress test the labor market in the coming months."
The Trump-Musk purge has many targeted workers shaking their heads in disbelief.
"Why are government employees suddenly the enemy?" Timothy Nicolazzi, a program analyst at the Department of Housing and Urban Development facing the loss of his job, told the Louisville Courier Journal Friday.
"A lot of us took these positions because we wanted to continue serving our country in a different capacity," the veteran added. "We just keep asking why, why is this happening to us? When did we become the enemy? When did serving our country become the wrong thing to do?"
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Privatizer Pete Hegseth Is Bad for Military Families and Veterans
Most media reports ignore that Hegseth was a leading advocate for turning veterans care over to private doctors and hospitals.
Dec 02, 2024
Much media coverage of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Secretary of Defense has focused, understandably, on controversial things he has said or done, along with his complete lack of administrative experience relevant to running a federal government department with a $920 billion budget and a workforce of three million.
But anyone in charge of the Pentagon also gets to oversee the Military Health System (MHS), which provides either private health insurance coverage or direct care for over 9.5 million service members, military retirees, and their families. As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin noted in a recent DOD National Defense Strategy report, the MHS mission is to ensure that active duty personnel and their dependents are well-served by a skilled cadre of “medical personnel in uniform,” who number nearly 170,000.
Hegseth served as an ROTC-trained Army officer deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay and is a longtime critic of “government healthcare,” claiming that it “doesn’t work.” So if Hegseth succeeds Austin, Pentagon officials trying to end a failed experiment with MHA privatization may find themselves ordered to march backward.
Rather than being upgraded and improved, the DOD’s network of military hospitals and clinics would remain under-resourced. And more of the MHA’s $61 billion annual budget would be spent on private insurance coverage that has failed to meet the needs of many service members and their dependents, particularly in rural areas.
A White House Advisor
During the first Trump Administration, Hegseth was a White House advisor who pushed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to expand care outsourcing for nine million former service members. Trump’s first VA Secretary, a hold-over from Barack Obama’s administration, dragged his feet on implementing this ill-advised policy.
As a result, Dr. David Shulkin, an experienced hospital system administrator in the private and public sectors, was fired by Trump in 2018 after keeping him around for over a year. In his memoir, It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Serve Your Country, Shulkin blames his downfall on Hegseth, who “never worked at the VA, knew nothing about managing a healthcare system, and had little understanding of the clinical and financial impact of the policies he was advocating.”
Hegseth does have a background as “a capable midgrade officer” who earned two Ivy League degrees and Bronze Stars, plus media experience ranging from writing for the Princeton Tory, a conservative undergraduate publication, to opining about military and veterans’ affairs on Fox & Friends Weekend where he’s a host. In any other Republican administration, this resume would qualify him as a Pentagon press secretary.
That Hegseth has instead risen to a cabinet pick is a testament to the continuing impact of the Koch Brothers-backed Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). After a failed bid to become the GOP nominee in a 2002 Republican primary race for a U.S. Senate seat in his native Minnesota, Hegseth became CVA’s first CEO and a leading advocate for turning veterans care over to private doctors and hospitals.
CVA was an astroturf upstart in veterans’ affairs and an outlier in pushing VA privatization. Traditional Veterans Services Organizations (VSOs)—like Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, or Vietnam Veterans of America—represent millions of veterans. Their members pay dues and elect their leaders. They have local chapters and national conventions. They have roots in the community and provide valuable services to individual veterans who need help filing disability claims for service-related conditions, which qualifies them for VA care.
VSO lobbying victories include the passage of the PACT Act of 2022. This legislation made VA benefits and related medical coverage easier to obtain for nearly a million veterans, including many whose health was damaged due to burn pit exposure during post-9/11 wars in the Middle East. (Hegseth initially applauded and then criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a flip-flop characteristic of his career. As Iraq war veteran and VoteVets co-founder Jon Soltz says about him, “I have been debating Pete Hegseth for years, and I can’t tell you what he stands for other than himself and his own ambition.”
An Astro-Turf Group
With few actual dues-payers, no VSO-style membership service programs, and a political agenda bankrolled by libertarian billionaires, CVA helped pass few bills that benefited the nation’s 19 million veterans. Instead, during the Obama era, the media-savvy group became a battering ram against tax-payer-funded healthcare in any form, a longtime bête noir of the Kochs.
Hegseth became their most visible and effective mouthpiece in a wide-ranging campaign to discredit VA care and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In 2013, CVA ran video ads warning, in Hegseth’s words, that all Americans would soon “face long wait times, endless bureaucracy, and poor service” if Congress expanded health care access by subsidizing private insurance coverage. The result, he claimed, would be billions of dollars wasted on “a nationalized health care plan that will bring the same bureaucratic dysfunction to the larger U.S. healthcare market”–as if the VA were a model for “Obamacare,” which it certainly wasn’t.
A year later, this propaganda offensive, closely coordinated with right-wing Republicans on Capitol Hill, claimed the scalp of retired four-star General Eric Shinseki, the Vietnam veteran who was Barack Obama’s first VA Secretary. Shinseki became the fall guy for a localized scandal involving misconduct by a few VA hospital managers in Phoenix. Their doctoring of data on medical appointment wait times—to earn bonus payments—led to CVA-amplified false claims that 40 Phoenix area vets had died due to delayed care. The result was that mainstream media packed journalism at its worst, and there was growing pressure for more out-sourcing of VA care despite its higher quality, lower cost, and greater accessibility than private alternatives.
On Capitol Hill, bi-partisan majorities passed the VA Choice Act of 2014 and, four years later, the VA MISSION Act. Both opened the floodgates for increasingly costly and disastrous privatization of the nation’s most extensive public healthcare system. CVA helped engineer the passage of each measure. After stepping down as CEO of Concerned Veterans of America ten years ago and becoming a Fox News commentator, Hegseth continued to advise President Trump on veterans’ affairs; other CVA alums served in official positions at the White House or VA headquarters in Washington.
Hegseth’s return to the conservative media eco-system of his college years has paid handsome rewards; he has become a multi-millionaire (despite two divorces) as a Fox & Friends talking head, paid speaker, and bestselling author of The War on Warriors, a critique of what he calls a "woke military." Like other high-paid former military officers, his benefit package in the private sector leaves Hegseth unlikely ever to need the VA, federally subsidized insurance coverage obtained through the ACA, or, when he retires, Medicare coverage. If confirmed, his pay as DOD Secretary will be a mere $246,000 per year, but with lucrative “revolving door” opportunities in the future, when and if he transitions back to the private sector from the Pentagon.
Pentagon Cost Savings?
Meanwhile, enlisted personnel and veterans from poor and working-class backgrounds bear the brunt of failed CVA-backed experiments with the privatization of the Military Health System and the VA. Under Trump and Biden, the DOD was flush with money for military aid, expensive new weapons systems, and base maintenance worldwide. Nevertheless, the Pentagon cut healthcare delivery costs for its workforce, retirees, and dependents.
Military hospitals were closed, staff positions cut, and several hundred thousand more patients were shifted to TRICARE, a federally funded form of private insurance. Newcomers to the private sector soon reported having greater difficulty getting timely medical appointments or accessing care in areas of the country with a shortage of primary care providers and specialists.
The Pentagon found that contracting out left its hospitals and clinics “chronically understaffed” and less able to “deliver timely care to beneficiaries or ensure sufficient workload to maintain and sustain critical skills. After reassessing the situation, the DOD launched an effort to “re-attract” patients back to the MHS. As studies have shown, in-house care produces better outcomes at lower cost, with fewer racial disparities—an essential advantage for a patient population of nearly 40 percent non-white.
If Hegseth becomes DOD Secretary by recess appointment or Senate confirmation, he will undoubtedly stop bringing TRICARE beneficiaries back into the MHS. He will also halt efforts to rebuild the DOD’s in-house healthcare delivery capacity.
And Hegseth will not be the only ideological foe of “government healthcare” in a high-level Trump Administration position. His fellow cabinet nominee, former Congressman Doug Collins, an Iraq War veteran from Georgia, will be eager to pick up where Robert Wilkie, Trump’s second VA secretary, left off with his privatization efforts in 2021. And, with the biggest impact, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity picked by Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, will further undermine traditional Medicare by replacing it with for-profit Medicare Advantage plans, on a more universal basis.
On all three fronts, these Trump appointees will weaken the public provision of healthcare that currently benefits more than 80 million people, making expanding such programs even more difficult.
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