commentary & editorials Tara Devlin
Every functioning society runs on a functioning bureaucracy, and every American who has ever called the IRS, applied for Social Security, or watched FEMA roll into a disaster zone knows it.
Citizens of the so-called “greatest country on Earth” should expect the phone to be answered on the first ring by a competent, well-paid public servant who actually wants to help them. These should be highly sought-after jobs with living wages, benefits, and pensions, staffed by people proud to serve their fellow Americans. Instead, with Republicans in power, we get a hollowed-out workforce, demoralized employees, and a government deliberately engineered to fail so the right wing can point at the wreckage and claim government doesn’t work.
Tara Devlin hosts the unapologetically liberal “Tarabuster” on the Progressive Voices app & Youtube. Liberals created America & made the working class the middle class. We have to save the Grand Experiment – again. We stick together we win!
Destruction is the Republican Policy
For example, Russell Vought, a Project 2025 true believer who has held various positions in Trump’s cabinet of freaks and curiosities, declared he wanted
bureaucrats to be “traumatically affected” and to “not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
That’s a pretty disgusting way to think of our fellow Americans. As the villains – but that’s what Republicans do. Not so they can make democratic government better – but so they can hobble it, hollow it out and destroy it.
For all of his “blue collar billionaire” nonsense, Trump has always treated workers as hosts to suck profit from and discard, going back to his decades as the disco-prowling con man stiffing contractors who lacked the money or political connections to fight back.
The receipts from Trump’s second maladministration are damning
Elon Musk’s DOGE debacle was a chaotic, sociopathic purge that drove well over 300,000 federal employees out of their jobs, carried out with the contempt and emotional intelligence of a bratty toddler trashing someone else’s sandcastle.
Instead of stopping “waste, fraud and abuse,” Musk has spent the last year being publicly humiliated by his own incompetence, as DOGE has cost the American people tens of billions of dollars in wasted spending, higher fees, and gutted programs that actually saved taxpayers money.
Some Receipts of Destruction
- 350 nuclear security workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration fired, then 322 frantically rehired within twenty-four hours after someone finally noticed they guard America’s nuclear weapons stockpile at Pantex.
- The entire USDA bird-flu response team fired in the middle of a bird-flu outbreak, then begged back days later, with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins admitting “there have been mistakes made”
- Roughly 7,315 IRS workers fired in the middle of tax filing season, then 7,000 ordered reinstated by a federal court the day before the April 15 deadline
- Weather forecasters cut at the National Weather Service as hurricane season approached, FEMA disaster responders dumped by Kristi Noem in January, FAA safety staff axed after multiple deadly crashes, GSA employees who manage every federal building in the country shown the door, and EPA scientists whose job is keeping poison out of your kid’s drinking water tossed out
- Roughly 25,000 fired workers rehired by March 2026, with eighteen agencies under court orders to reinstate more than 24,000 employees after Judge William Alsup ruled in the AFGE case that the firings were “based on a lie”
- Roughly $135 billion in costs to taxpayers this fiscal year in paid leave, lost productivity, severance, rehiring, and back pay, per the Partnership for Public Service, swamping every dollar Musk pretended to save
- Twenty-eight of DOGE’s top forty savings claims are flat-out fabrications and the thirteen largest claims all incorrect, including a $7.9 billion “termination” of two Defense Department contracts that were never actually canceled.
None of those numbers capture the human price these ghouls extracted from the workforce on the way through. Workers got fired by mass email at midnight or endured the NAZI-Admiring self-appointed Bro King of Earth king call them fraudsters and parasites on Twitter.
Americans, whose only “crime” was that they had to work for a living, saw their mental health collapse under the deliberate psychological warfare resulting in suicides, broken marriages, cancelled mortgages, and the careers they had built over decades summarily flushed down the toilet for the sake of right wing ideology.
Though, I’m sure Russell Vought became giddy actualizing all the trauma he said he wanted to inflict.
Republican Abuse of Workers Keeps Coming
In 2025, Musk’s DOGE eviscerated 25% of the IRS workforce then forced fifteen hundred IT and HR employees into frontline filing duties they were never hired for, with only sixty-five percent passing the training exam on the first try.
Now, those workers are being told their old jobs are gone, so their reassignments are being extended again — and if they are unhappy they can go work elsewhere.
The General Services Administration is down nearly forty percent and the Environmental Protection Agency is being told to plug the holes with AI, because nothing protects the air your children breathe like a chatbot.
On top of it all, Trump’s new budget proposes to shed another 140,000 employees, shrinking the federal workforce to its smallest share since the 1930s.For those who still have jobs, Trump is reducing take-home pay
Within weeks of taking office, Trump rescinded the Biden executive order that set a $17.75-an-hour minimum wage for federal contractors, dropping it to $13.30.
For recreational services workers, Trump reduced their to the $7.25 hourly federal minimum wage,
He also revoked Biden’s “Investing in America and Investing in American Workers” Executive Order, reducing the wages of federal contractors as well as reducing who gets to qualify for overtime in the first place.
Trump rescinded Biden’s “Investing in America and Investing in American Workers” and contractor minimum‑wage orders, removing a 17.75‑dollar wage floor for many federal contract workers and weakening pro‑worker standards. A Trump‑appointed judge then struck down Biden’s overtime rule that would have made about 4 million more salaried workers eligible for time‑and‑a‑half by raising the threshold to roughly 58,600 dollars, after Trump’s Labor Department had already abandoned Obama’s earlier overtime expansion.
The “no tax on overtime” con is the perfect example of how Republicans operate
The talking point is that Traitor Trump heroically eliminated tax on overtime pay.
The reality is that Trump’s “Big Ugly Bill” lets workers deduct only the “extra half” of time-and-a-half pay, caps the deduction at $12,500, phases it out above $150,000, expires in 2028, excludes independent contractors and gig workers, and applies only to non-exempt W-2 employees whose overtime was already federally protected.
So, first Trump first kills the Biden rule that would have made millions more workers eligible for overtime, then he offers a small, time-limited deduction on a tiny sliver of the overtime that survives — and the Trumpanzees cheer like he handed them a winning lottery ticket.
The record is clear. Republicans want workers, public and private, living more precariously, scrambling paycheck to paycheck or worse, and too exhausted and afraid to complain about it.
When they talk about “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal workforce, they’re talking about Americans having the kind of services citizens of a functioning society rightly expect and deserve.
A functioning democracy requires a fully staffed, respected civil service and a labor force that shares in the prosperity it creates while dutifully serving their country, community and fellow Americans.
We, the People should demand nothing less.
First, we must decide whether we’re citizens in a republic that serves us, or marks in a rigged casino run by a criminal who has never met a worker he did not want to cheat