Government is good, actually

America has officially entered its “finding out” stage. As the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency take a chainsaw to the federal government, self-identified Trump supporters are now begging for mercy from the administration they helped elect. Whether it’s farmers in the midwest discovering that programs they relied upon no longer exist or Venezuelans realizing that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric also applies to them, the metaphorical face-eating leopards are dining out in style right now. 

These sorts of Schadenfreude-laden anecdotes will surely multiply in the weeks to come, as Trump supporters discover their jobs, schools, and local businesses weren’t as safe from his purge as they imagined. But it’s the damage that Trump and Musk are doing to the entire country with their wholesale attack on the federal government that’s really worth watching right now — and learning from, if you live in Canada. 

Not that it matters, but the number of federal employees in America actually peaked in 1990, and is now well below that level as a percentage of the population. The vast majority of government spending, meanwhile, happens in areas like social security, medicaid, and the military. Instead, though, Musk’s crack team of young coders have targeted more mundane areas of government like education, health and human services, and the Environmental Protection Agency. They’re also targeting agencies and organizations like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and National Labor Relations Board that have active investigations into Musk’s companies. Funny, that. 

They claim to have saved $55 billion already, mostly by canceling leases, subscriptions to news and information sources like Bloomberg, and diversity-oriented programs and grants within government. As it turns out, though, many of these supposed savings don’t exist. Some were overstated by a factor of 1,000, as with a DEI-related contract for the Department of Homeland Services, while others were flagrant misunderstandings of how federal contracts work and ought to be accounted for. As one eagle-eyed social media user noted, “the savings they are claiming are not annual savings, but rather hypothetical savings if we spent every unobligated penny.”

That’s not the only banana peel they’re stepping on. Musk has also repeatedly amplified self-evidently bogus claims about “fraud” within the government, which seems to really mean programs or policies he doesn’t like or support. His more specific claim that there are millions of dead people collecting social security checks has been repeatedly debunked — and mocked — as a failure on his part to understand what the data is actually saying. James Surowiecki, the editor of the Yale Review and a former economics correspondent for the New Yorker, described it as “absurd, corrosive nonsense” on social media. “To believe that tens of millions of those benefits are going to dead people, you'd have to believe that 15-30% of all Social Security checks are fraudulent. More than that, you'd have to ignore math.”

But, of course, Musk’s supporters on social media — and, crucially, the White House — are more than happy to believe anything he says. And if his recent comments are any indication, he’s only just getting started. “At this point,” he said last week, “I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR. It’s not even close.”

We’re still waiting on the receipts there. In the meantime, the Trump administration is continuing its shotgun-blast approach to governing, firing probationary employees across government — including the terminally understaffed Federal Aviation Agency and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which has since tried to re-hire the employees they fired. It even fired some of the officials working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak right as it threatens to spiral out of control and into another pandemic. A majority of Americans may be fine with the idea of defunding the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), even if it costs lives in other countries. I doubt they’ll feel quite so cavalier about decisions that cost lives in their own.

Musk’s bet here is that the United States government is no different than Twitter, where he came in and laid off thousands of employees without immediately collapsing the business in the process. Never mind, for the moment, that those layoffs have created a social media product that’s more dangerous and less reliable than before, or that advertisers have largely fled the platform as a result of the rise in hate and misinformation on it. He bought it, and he has the right to break it. 

His massive donations to Trump could easily be seen as an attempt to buy the country — and a successful one so far. With $4.5 trillion in new tax cuts being proposed by House Republicans that will disproportionately benefit the wealthy and corporations, Musk’s $277 million investment in Trump will pay for itself many times over. That’s before factoring in the subsidies that will inevitably continue to flow to his companies, or the scrutiny and oversight it will avoid. 

But if Musk and DOGE break key aspects of the federal government in the process, he won’t pay the price. Instead, it will be many millions of Americans who will lose access to the things they’ve taken for granted, whether that’s clean water, a functioning electricity grid or a social security payment. In some respects, that will be a useful lesson for people in other parts of the world. But it’s surely not one most Americans thought they were signing up to teach when they voted for Trump in November. 

Canadians should be paying close attention to all of this, and not just because of the potential risk of blowback. We also have a politician in Pierre Poilievre who has repeatedly talked about the importance of shrinking government and “unleashing” the private sector. Americans are about to learn just how important their federal government and its much-maligned employees really are to their lives and livelihoods. We must avoid making the same mistake.