A regular feature to the Chagrin Gateway Democrats from Lyn Newman

Unelected billionaire Elon Musk is taking a “chainsaw” to our government in the name of making it more efficient. In the past week, Musk and his DOGE task force have laid off thousands of federal workers in hundreds of agencies—apparently without bothering to find out if what they did was important. As a headline, this may look good to those who think the “Gov’mt” is the enemy. As a budget strategy, these layoffs are only a tiny part of the federal budget, but can do a lot of damage.

Why it matters: A lot of those laid off people did important things—like deal with nuclear safety and manage the current bird flu epidemic. When they realized who they fired, a lot of scrambling went on to find and re-hire some of those laid off workers. It will likely happen again when, for example, wildfire season starts and none of the National Park Service rangers are there to fight them. Apparently, DOGE started from the assumption that everyone who works for the government is a greedy, lazy, parasite who needs to be terminated. An actual thoughtful review of government efficiency would come to different conclusions. For example, do we really need to be subsidizing the highly profitable oil, gas and pharmaceutical companies? That is where real money could be saved.

What can we do about this: Call and write our congress people. Demand an actual review of government efficiency. Let’s cut the real money that we do not need to spend and allow actual hard working Americans to keep inspecting our food and keeping our nuclear weapons safe.

Lyn Newman can be found on Bluesky