Insiders reveal how Elon's firings will lead to countless disasters

Diseased crops, international emergencies, rural poverty... it'll all get worse

Welcome to a Sunday evening edition of Progress Report.

It’s been a hell of a few days, hearing from so many dedicated public servants who have such dire warnings for the country. Also, I brought my toddler to a kid’s birthday party at a gymnastics place in Bed-Stuy, which was also disorienting.

Tonight’s newsletter is about how Elon Musk’s mass illegal federal firings are actually going down and what experts fear will transpire down the line.

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The Federal Firings Paving the Way to Oblivion

“It happened. A ton of my colleagues have just been Thanos snapped out of their jobs.”

The message came through late in the afternoon, right on the cusp of 5:00 pm, confirming the cruel endgame that the Department of Health and Human Services employee who sent it to me had been dreading for weeks. In this case, bracing for impact did little to soften the blow, so it was still devastating for this HHS employee to learn that their coworkers — public servants with exemplary records — had been unceremoniously fired at the whim of the world’s richest man and his interns.

Even worse was the subsequent email indicating they too were being illegally fired, despite being beyond probationary status and boasting performance reviews that disproved the rote invented criticisms listed in the separation letter. Now they must wait the holiday weekend — President’s Day, no less — to learn whether they have any chance of getting their job back.

Down the line, it’ll be community health that suffers, because for all the rhetoric about government waste, Elon Musk and the DOGE initiative are targeting the parts of the government that serve working people and the public good.

I’ve spent most of the past few days messaging back and forth with dozens and dozens of federal employees from an array of government agencies, experiencing the chaos of the civil service’s own Valentine’s Day Massacre in real time. Some workers have dramatic stories with cataclysmic warnings; others are getting screwed personally in ways that defy logic. Some of them reached out to me online, others were referred to me by friends or old colleagues, and still others were sent to me by friends of friends. Everyone knows federal workers, even if they don’t know it.

What’s become clear is that the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ethos has made its way to DC, where breaking things comes with life and death consequences for millions of people. Even so, Musk, who often takes that ethos to the extreme at his own companies, is now taking a scythe to an infinitely complicated organization that he neither understands nor cares about.

Sick Babies, Diseased Crops, International Invasions, and Veterans Thrown Overboard

Last week, shortly before the Trump administration closed the deadline to accept the legally dubious deferred resignation buyout offers, Musk’s DOGE team moved on to the next phase of its plan to obliterate public services: Mass firings that targeted “probationary” workers, or federal employees with less than one or two years at their current department.

Managers and department heads were told to submit lists of employees and their service time to the Trump administration, which began rolling out the firings on Wednesday. The firings accelerated on Friday, in group calls and emails to thousands of probationary workers — as well as longer-tenured employees who had been told that they had nothing to worry about.

Rushed out offices and shut out of emails, the fired employees were worried about their fates — an outsized number of disabled veterans were terminated, and I spoke to one woman who was fired from the NIH at eight months pregnant — but just as distraught at the potential consequences for the public. Those who survived the cuts wondered how they would possibly get all their department’s work done with so few colleagues left, well aware that hobbling their efforts was one of the administration’s goals.

And based on conversations and other news reports, there will be no shortage of critical government functions hobbled from this first wave of firings, with downstream effects that touch all areas of the economy and day-to-day life. Here’s a CDC worker explaining how babies will suffer from the firings:

“I work in a branch whose sole purpose is to support the states’ ability to perform newborn screening - something that is done in every state for every baby within the first few hours of their lives to identify life-threatening disorders that require immediate treatment,” they told me. “These firings, spending and hiring freezes, and communication blackouts are going to destroy our ability to help states ensure their screening tests are working properly.”

This, from such a pro-life administration.

There were significant firings at regional offices of the USDA, especially in rural development. Multiple people I spoke with lost jobs that helped low-income seniors obtain the grants and loans needed to upgrade their often-dilapidated homes, some of which didn’t even have running water.

Scientific research was hit hard, threatening to halt progress on critical medical, environmental, and agricultural developments. The USDA also lost a significant number of scientists, including at the department that researches diseases that kill wheat crop. The Cereal Lab, as it’s known, lost four head scientists as well as other staffers, which will bring its work to a screeching halt.

One person connected to the lab explained the rippling disaster this could cause by slowing the “flywheel” of science:

It will first impact the plant breeders in both university and industry, as they'll no longer have the disease surveillance intelligence or the variety screening services we provide.

Then it will impact the farmers who will have fewer disease resistant varieties of these crops to choose from and will need to spray fungicides much more often. In a worst case scenario the hyper-virulent varieties of this disease could potentially cause complete crop failure across continents.

Then finally it will impact consumers at the grocery store as everything made with these crops will dramatically increase in price.

More responsibility will now fall on the local partner research university, which is likely to lose money in one way or another as well. There simply isn’t a private alternative, my source explained, because it’s the kind of work that takes years and years to develop and does not have any hugely profitable upside.

The damage being done to rural communities and red states was a recurring subject.

A worker who was fired alongside half their colleagues at a regional Federal Transit Administration office said that they’d previously been restricted from helping grant winners to access critical funds for approved infrastructure projects. Now, with half the office wiped out, the projects could sit in limbo, investments in the tens of millions of dollars not disbursed and sitting idle.

“These attacks on federal agencies will disproportionately impact red states,” they said. “My office primarily awards grant money to red states. In many cases, the federal share of their funding for public transportation is more than 50% as these states simply do not have the wealthy tax base that blue states like California and New York benefit from. Even aside from funding, the fact that states will not be allowed to receive federal guidance or get approval for certain projects will have a significant impact on the ability of state and local DOTs to function.”

Lack of funding will suit corporate leaders just fine when it comes to the mass firings at the EPA, where regional lawyers for the Superfund program were fired. With reduced legal capacity, there will be fewer lawsuits against major polluters, which in turn will make it far more difficult for impacted communities to get the clean-up projects they need. For all of DOGE’s haphazard cuts — the nuclear weapons workers got a reprieve — environmental justice was on the chopping block from the start.

The list rolls on. Civil engineers in the military are now faced with smaller staffs to handle facilities with thousands of additional employees due to the return-to-office orders. Every National Park Service job offer has been paused or fully rescinded. The US Army Corps of Engineers is trying to convince employees to go to Guantanamo Bay without offering any details. And the Department of Defense is putting other nations at risk.

There is the issue of our partner nations. I work on a contract that is technically paid for by another country because we provide services to partner nations. Without my team’s support, partner nations would not be able to defend themselves. We have a "standard level of service" that is provided by the US government, then the partner can hire more people if they want more.

If we are not allowed to rehire people who are fired, our partners will not be getting what they pay for, contracts will not be completed, the sovereignty of smaller nations will come into question as larger nations will see they are not getting the same level of support. I have high level meetings with my partner that are being cancelled. They are getting nervous. They have the potential to be invaded and the USG is failing them.

This may also be by design, considering the message that the administration delivered in Europe over the past week. Who needs democracy?

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