In yesterday’s post, “The Trump Administration and Long-Term Damage,” Steven Taylor argued that media attention on the president’s poll numbers and speculation about upcoming elections ignores the real consequences of his actions in office. He cites those whose lives will be permanently altered by mass deportation and the abrupt shuttering of foreign aid programs as well as the lost confidence in our public health institutions and strained relationships with longstanding allies.
Two Washington Post pieces expand on that point. One that hits particularly close to home for me is the interactive feature “The year Trump broke the federal government.” It’s mostly anecdotal, but here are some highlights:
The United States’ 2.4 million federal employees were about to get caught up in a once-unthinkable overhaul of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy, carried out in less than a yearby one of the most polarizing presidents in American history.
Missions have shifted or shattered. Entire agencies were deleted. Nearly 300,000 employees were forced out of the federal workforce. The Trump administration froze or shut off billions of dollars in scientific research, gutted or eliminated offices and programs devoted to civil rights and diversity, rewrote the federal hiring system to reward loyalty to the president, and shrank Social Security while installing Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents in hundreds of new offices across the country.
More changes are coming: Trump officials are planning to cut tens of thousands of open positions from the Department of Veterans Affairs, downgrade performance ratings across the government, and replace the State Department’s traditional condemnation of torture and the persecution of minorities worldwide with scrutiny of abortion and youth gender transitioning in other countries.
[…]
Google searches for “federal workers return to office” spiked by 600 percent as soon as Trump ended remote work. Then instructions began to go out.
A Department of Health and Human Services staffer in the Southwest was given five days to move to D.C. A Defense Department worker had two months to report to an office in another state. In Pahrump, Nevada, a Bureau of Land Management employee received an email with the address of the nearest federal building: more than 70 miles away. Edward Brandon Beckham looked at his wife, dying of cancer in home hospice, and knew he couldn’t leave her to commute for three hours a day.
Workers turned a conference room in a Veterans Affairs office in California into desk space for six nurses. Veterans who called to confess thoughts of suicide could hear people speaking in the background. In the Southwest, a woman who conducted background investigations into federal applicants showed up to her new office to find she could hear every word of her co-workers’ conversations — and they could hear hers. She moved into a musty closet, closing the door.
[…]
Ten thousand health staff, including biomedical scientists and researchers who studied patient safety, lost their jobs. Senior leaders at the NIH received letters offering new posts in remote areas such as Alaska or Billings, Montana. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those who oversaw chronic disease, HIV and tuberculosis programs were reassigned to the Indian Health Service.
When Tony Schlaff arrived at the Health Resources and Services Administration, he was astonished to see hundreds of people queued up outside. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Everybody is going through a full screening,” the person standing next to him said. Schlaff filed into line and, alongside hundreds of colleagues, waited for nearly two hours, shivering in the frigid wind.
Once indoors, Schlaff watched employees walk through a TSA-style screening machine and undergo badge checks. Some walked back outside, tearful. After half an hour, he got close enough to hear what was happening: “You do not have access to the building,” one security guard told a woman whose badge failed to swipe, which is how she found out she’d been fired. “Leave. Go home.”
[…]
Ten thousand health staff, including biomedical scientists and researchers who studied patient safety, lost their jobs. Senior leaders at the NIH received letters offering new posts in remote areas such as Alaska or Billings, Montana. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those who oversaw chronic disease, HIV and tuberculosis programs were reassigned to the Indian Health Service.
When Tony Schlaff arrived at the Health Resources and Services Administration, he was astonished to see hundreds of people queued up outside. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Everybody is going through a full screening,” the person standing next to him said. Schlaff filed into line and, alongside hundreds of colleagues, waited for nearly two hours, shivering in the frigid wind.
Once indoors, Schlaff watched employees walk through a TSA-style screening machine and undergo badge checks. Some walked back outside, tearful. After half an hour, he got close enough to hear what was happening: “You do not have access to the building,” one security guard told a woman whose badge failed to swipe, which is how she found out she’d been fired. “Leave. Go home.”
[…]
Some agencies privately warned staff to expect deep spending cuts in 2026, reflecting Trump’s desired bare-bones budget. Following guidance from a top administration official to stop giving “everyone … an A,” the National Park Service decided to give 80 percent of staff middling performance reviews, which help determine promotions and bonuses. The National Weather Service lagged in hiring hundreds of promised replacement forecasters. And Veterans Affair made plans to slice away as many as 35,000 open jobs.
I’m sure many Trump supporters are happy about all this. But the point is that, should the voters decide we need a course correction in the next election, most of this can’t be undone. Like the East Wing of the White House, the destruction is permanent.
Ditto this: “Government’s historic role as trusted information source is under threat.”
The covid.gov website says covid-19 most likely originated in a Chinese lab, although scientists are in fact deeply divided over its origin. A widely read report posted on energy.gov/topics/climate concludes that humans’ impact on climate is relatively small, a finding sharply at odds with the scientific consensus.
On DHS.gov, the government informs Americans that nearly 2 million undocumented migrants have “self-deported” this year, an assertion that mystifies researchers. And cdc.gov/vaccine-safety dismisses the conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism as not “evidence-based.”
Researchers and activists increasingly fear that under the Trump administration, the U.S. government is abdicating its historic role as a clearinghouse for reliable information — a momentous shift for what has been the world’s foremost producer of widely accepted data for everyone including academic researchers, local governments and ordinary citizens.
[…]
The issue arose again Thursday when the Labor Department announced a surprisingly low inflation figure of 2.7 percent for November. Economists immediately noted quirks that could have artificially lowered the rate: prices were not gathered until the second half of November, when Thanksgiving discounts kicked in, and no increase was shown in housing costs, though they clearly went up.
[…]
Across the government, much information is simply no longer being collected.
The Department of Homeland Security for years had issued monthly reports on immigration statistics; the Trump administration stopped that practice in February. The law requires the administration to conduct an annual report on the federal workforce; officials did not deliver it this year. Dozens of climate change reports and data collections have been taken down across the government.
When information is produced, it may be in skeletal form. The Education Department is required by law to produce a yearly report on the condition of education in America, but the 2025 version omits key data and is “extremely truncated,” according to Rachel Dinkes, president of the Knowledge Alliance, a coalition of research education groups.
“Data is a flashlight that lets us see, and if we don’t have that light, we’re in the dark,” Dinkes said. “There is no other entity that can provide reliable, high quality timely data that the federal government provides. It’s unique to the federal role.”
[…]
It is hard to overstate the U.S. government’s importance as the world’s leading producer, collector and disseminator of trusted information on almost every topic, including population, employment and weather. The Constitution ordered the government to conduct a census every 10 years, and that role has only expanded as the U.S. has assumed global leadership.
“It touches every aspect of our lives,” said Denice Ross, former U.S. chief data scientist. “Federal data are like invisible infrastructure that we take for granted, like the internet or bridges. It’s fundamental to running a modern society, and we don’t even notice that it’s there.”
In the comments to Steven’s post, I noted Warren Buffett’s famous message to those who lead the companies Berkshire Hathaway owns: “We can afford to lose money — even a lot of money. But we cannot afford to lose reputation — even a shred of reputation.” We have lost more than a shred.
