On his first day in office, President Donald Trump enacted a slew of executive orders. One sought to establish the President’s Department of Government Efficiency under the proclaimed purpose of “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” 

Even before his inauguration, Trump announced that Elon Musk would head DOGE and oversee government spending through it. Now that Musk has assumed his executive position, he’s led DOGE in regulating federal finances and the civil servant workforce through extreme measures extending far beyond DOGE’s specified purpose of optimizing government technology. 

Musk’s DOGE agenda has involved taking over the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, procuring access to the Treasury’s payment system — which sends money from the federal government — and eradicating the United States Agency for International Development, the U.S.’ primary international aid agency. 

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Additionally, the Trump administration has ruthlessly come for the jobs of many dedicated federal workers. 

In February, the White House’s deferred resignation offers caused over 75,000 workers to submit their resignations. Trump has also ordered lay-offs for nearly all probationary employees — workers who have been public servants for less than a year — who make up over 220,000 of the federal government workforce. These layoffs have resulted in staff reductions by the thousands for multiple government agencies, including the Department of Defense and the Internal Revenue Service.

Beyond these already-overarching terminations, the administration has also threatened the jobs of many remaining government employees. 

On Feb. 22, Musk shared on X that per Trump’s orders, “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Since that initial announcement, employees have received two emails demanding a list of their weekly accomplishments, and it seems such emails will continue moving forward.

While this isn’t the first time a U.S. presidential administration has implemented mass government cuts and layoffs, this is the first time that an administration has carried out budget and personnel cuts so suddenly and mercilessly. 

Musk has attempted to analogize DOGE’s actions with the policies of the Bill Clinton administration; however, the differences between these previous cuts and DOGE’s current ones are unignorable. 

As Nicholas Riccardi of AP News highlights, Clinton’s “Reinventing Government project was nearly the opposite of the abrupt, chaotic Musk effort … It was authorized by bipartisan congressional legislation, worked slowly over several years to identify inefficiencies and involved federal workers in re-envisioning their jobs.”

DOGE has treated its cuts and layoffs with no such thoughtful consideration. The agency’s initiatives have blindsided the federal legislature, weren’t staggered over time and haven’t allowed second chances for employees whose efficiency was deemed inadequate. 

This approach makes the Trump administration’s attitude toward government employees clear: public servants are merely cogs in the machine, only as valuable as their output in the American government corporation. 

The irony of this, of course, is that Trump and Musk are attempting to run the government like a company yet have consistently run their actual companies unsuccessfully.

Trump has had to declare bankruptcy on his companies six times, while Musk’s acquisition of X, formerly known as Twitter, caused the brand’s value to drop from $5.7 billion to $673 million in only two years. Moreover, Musk implemented an 80% headcount reduction for X in manners very similar to the way he’s now tackling reducing the federal workforce.

Such methods for terminating government employees from their jobs signify that the Trump administration is placing productivity above people — a slippery slope for our future that many notable dystopian writers have warned against.  

Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World” gives insight into the downfalls of such ideologies, with its World State focused on constant advancement. In it, characters become ostracized from the rest of society when they cannot meet the expectations imposed on them. The novel ultimately serves as a cautionary tale that governments that don’t show understanding toward their own people are destructive. 

By brutally firing thousands of public servants, Trump and Musk are nearing suspiciously close to this point of no return. The job losses caused by their policies don’t exist in a vacuum; these people are the crux of our government and our society as a whole, working in fields from cancer research to education.

As informed students and citizens, we must fiercely express our disapproval of such policies to our representatives and advocate for them to oppose DOGE’s cutthroat conduct. Even though the Trump administration is taking people off the government’s staffs, it cannot take away the people’s power.