The DC Air Disaster Is a Flashing Warning Sign About DOGE
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern Slate
On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the ongoing attack on federal workers and its dire consequences. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: I want to start with one of the big through lines of the last two weeks, which is the systematic campaign to fire, reassign, put on administrative leave, frighten, offer bogus buyouts to, and otherwise simply terrorize federal workers. These demands to narc on your DEIA colleagues, and to somehow perform fealty to this administration or scram—they’re coming from every direction, and it’s coming in the midst of an on-again, off-again funding freeze. Could you talk about what’s happening in your hometown and to federal entities all around the country?
Mark Joseph Stern: It’s pretty hard to overstate the atmosphere of fear, confusion, and dread here in D.C. Trump is taking truly unprecedented moves, in conjunction with Elon Musk, to purge so much of the federal workforce. That includes people at the top—like the illegal firings of independent watchdogs, as well as appointees to the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But we’ve also seen mass firings or suspensions of civil servants at the Justice Department, the FBI, the State Department, USAID, and more.
And I just want to reiterate, Dahlia, that these are not political appointees. These are nonpartisan career employees who are protected against arbitrary or partisan removal under federal law. Congress has expressly barred Trump and his cronies from targeting these individuals, yet they’re doing it anyway. And they’re receiving very minimal pushback, including basically no pushback at all from congressional Republicans. Trump is just declaring that he is a dictator with absolute control over the entire federal workforce. And he has laid the groundwork to go even further with his so-called Schedule F executive order, which seeks to reclassify more than 50,000 civil servants as political appointees who could be coerced into doing MAGA’s bidding or be fired at will.
Beyond that, you mentioned the phony buyout that every federal employee has received. They should not take it—it’s not obviously legal; Congress has not appropriated the funds, and the details remain very unclear. But the obvious goal is to demoralize federal workers across the board. The offer came with this very alarming language suggesting that there were about to be huge purges, firings, and reassignment. Basically the language was: Take the opportunity now to have a life jacket or else we’re just going to throw you right overboard.
I want to stay on Elon Musk for a minute, because he has clearly expanded his wheelhouse beyond the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. He and his allies have effectively taken over the Office of Personnel Management—the federal government’s HR department—to make life miserable every day for civil servants. They’re now demanding access to sensitive payment systems at the Treasury Department that control the flow of $6 trillion, including federal salaries, Medicare, and Social Security. And they seem to be preparing for a mass firing of more than 200,000 members of the federal workforce.
I just want to say it again: Nobody elected Elon Musk, but I guess he and some A.I. chatbots are now running the entire federal government?
He’s running the playbook that he ran on Twitter when he gutted it, right? He’s taking total control, moving fast and breaking everything, and just assuming somebody else can clean up the damage later. But the federal government is not a private company. It cannot be run or gutted like a private company without horrific consequences down the line.
Let me give you a perfect example of why I think Musk’s approach is so dangerous. As everybody knows, there was a plane crash in D.C. on Wednesday. A helicopter collided with a passenger plane and almost 70 people died. When this collision occurred, the Federal Aviation Administration was leaderless. Why? Musk had Trump fire the former FAA leader as soon as he got into office, because the former leader had investigated and fined one of Musk’s companies, Starlink. This was a sheer vengeance firing. This was not about competence or even truly about political affiliation. Elon Musk was just mad at this guy for investigating his company and wanted him gone on Day 1.
Because of that, the FAA was leaderless during the biggest aviation disaster in this country since 2001. The agency had to scramble to figure out how it was going to respond to this without anyone at the top. And by the way, the day after the crash, FAA employees—including air traffic controllers, who are already badly short-staffed—got an email encouraging them to resign and find work in the private sector.
This is not a game. Federal workers are not just pawns you can move around the board and reassign and purge without massive collateral damage to the entire country and its citizens. The FAA is just one example of many. All these agencies in charge of federal law enforcement, protecting the homeland, distributing lifesaving aid—they’re frozen, paralyzed, not only because they’re leaderless, but because the civil servants who run them have been put on leave or fired illegally.
These workers are not in it for the money or the glory. Musk keeps maligning and slandering civil servants as these beady-eyed bureaucrats in the deep state trying to thwart the will of the people. He could not be more wrong. These workers don’t get paid a lot. They don’t get a huge amount of praise. They just work day in, day out to make the government function. When these agencies are kneecapped, the government doesn’t work anymore. And that doesn’t mean Musk is shaving off a few billion in savings here or there. It means that when a plane crashes, there’s no one to take the reins at an agency responsible for air safety in this country. The situation is more dire than most people realize. And I fear it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets any better.
I want to offer two thoughts in response. First, in some sense, the silver lining of this funding freeze and horrific bullying of federal workers is that it has made the government visible to a lot of people who were apt to say, Oh, government sucks. I don’t want to pay my parking tickets. And I think the FAA disaster proved that air traffic controllers, of all people, shouldn’t be forced to figure out if they have to leave the government, or if someone is screwing around with their salaries. This is a reign of terror over people on whom all of our lives depend every day.
The other thing I want to say is that the single most despicable response to this crash is to blame inferior “DEIA hires.” And I just want folks to buckle in, because that is going to be the answer, right? That was Trump’s answer, and that’s Pete Hegseth’s claim about the military. That will be the claim about the FAA. And I just want to say that it is the single most gutless and tyrannical statement, to say, without any information, that everything that happens under Trump’s watch is the fault of decades of DEIA hiring. It’s contemptible. And get used to it, because that’s where they’ll lay the blame.
Absolutely, and I think the Trump administration set the stage for this with another assault on the federal workforce—banning all mentions of DEIA throughout the government, canceling all contracts and programs that involve DEIA, firing or suspending every person who was doing this work for the federal government, forcing employees to snitch on colleagues who are still allegedly doing DEIA work undercover.
The inevitable consequence here is that all people who aren’t straight, white men are going to be put under a cloud of suspicion now. If something bad happens and there’s a Black woman in charge of the agency, she will be called a DEIA hire, she will be blamed, and her head will roll. Racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ people at federal agencies across the board will be deemed “DEIA hires” until proved otherwise. They are assumed to be lesser than and they will be degraded and demoralized until they are fired or harassed and coerced into leaving. And these workers are integral to the functioning of the government. When they are gone, we will be the ones to feel the pain.