Amid the current busy tax season, representatives of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived at the IRS and in a matter of days began the process of firing 6,700 employees at locations throughout the country. What could possibly go wrong?
As President Donald Trump’s front man, Musk’s fire first and ask questions later approach to purging the federal workforce has created havoc, jeopardized critical government functions, upended the lives of federal employees, likely incurred large financial liabilities for violating the law, and has been riddled with outright blunders. In short, DOGE is anything but a department of efficiency.
At the Department of Agriculture, for example, employees working to respond to the H5NI avian flu outbreak were mistakenly fired, forcing the department to rescind the termination letters. The same thing happened at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the organization responsible for overseeing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, where more than 300 employees were abruptly fired and then called back to work.
