The Department of Government Efficiency has a broad mandate from President Donald Trump to slash federal jobs that it sees as a waste of taxpayer money. But Elon Musk’s DOGE, staffed with people who have little experience in federal government, keeps cutting too deep — even by its slash-and-burn standards.
Last Friday, U.S. Department of Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins announced an “aggressive plan to optimize its workforce by eliminating positions that are no longer necessary,” adding that she welcomed “DOGE’s efforts at USDA.” By Tuesday, there was an update to that enthusiastic acceptance of Musk’s purge. The U.S. Department of Agriculture stated that it accidentally fired “several” employees who were working on containing the H5N1 bird-flu outbreak that is making eggs extremely expensive and alarming Americans about a potential next pandemic. “We are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters,” the statement read.
Some of the largest cuts so far have come at the Department of Energy, with roughly 1,000 jobs axed there just last week. Particularly hit hard within DOE was the National Nuclear Security Administration, the subagency tasked with keeping the nation’s nuclear-weapons stockpile safe and stopping the illegal trade of nuclear material abroad. Of the 1,800 people working at its D.C. office, 300 were fired last Thursday by email and were immediately escorted from the building. But in an all-staff meeting on Friday, the agency announced it was trying to rehire a number of fired staffers who dealt with national security secrets. They ran into an immediate problem: In an email sent out to employees, the agency admitted that it did “not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
Thousands more layoffs are expected to hit the federal government in the coming weeks, so who knows which other experts will be caught in the culling, then be asked to return. But at least DOGE is delivering on its unelected leader’s promise to cut federal waste — like an $8 billion contract to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that it slashed earlier this week. Unfortunately for Musk, the New York Times found that the cost of that contract was a lot less — like $7.982 billion less — than the stated savings. Someone at DOGE had confused an $8 billion contract with a contract that was actually $8 million.
