DOGE Was Just Rehearsing for Much-Larger-Scale Federal Layoffs

We ain’t seen nothing yet! Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Federal employees and those who depend on the benefits and services they provide have been in shock from the moment the new Trump administration unleashed Elon Musk’s shadowy DOGE operatives to conduct guerrilla warfare on the “deep state.” Chaos and unpredictability have been the hallmarks of the DOGE reign of terror with Musk presuming enormous powers to judge and fire federal employees, deploying the high-speed destructive tactics he perfected in prior corporate takeovers, and with a vast troll army of X followers and MAGA activists hooting and cheering every move.

Now it appears Team Trump is moving to a larger and more systematic — if no less legally and politically problematic — effort to decimate those elements of the federal government regarded as unfriendly or irrelevant to the president’s radical plans, as Politico reports:

Federal agencies are being ordered to submit plans by mid-March for laying off employees in “large-scale reductions in force” — an escalation in President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal workforce.

“Pursuant to the President’s direction, agencies should focus on the maximum elimination of functions that are not statutorily mandated while driving the highest-quality, most efficient delivery of their statutorily-required functions,” according to the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management memo released on Wednesday.

While the federal government has seen a host of layoffs since Trump took office, this move takes the president’s agenda a step further. Most recent dismissals focused on probationary employees — generally federal workers in their jobs for one or two years — while reductions in force could target a wider range of workers. The memo directs agencies to submit these “agency RIF and reorganization plans” by March 13.

This latest offensive was set up by a February 11 Trump executive order that mainly drew attention as the first presidential authorization of DOGE’s raids. But it also instructed federal agencies to get ready for large-scale RIFs (“reductions in force”) unrelated to the administration’s initial policies, taking a hammer to programs and personnel engaged on such prohibited topics as DEI and climate change. The new push is aimed simply at generating big numbers of firings and spending cuts. How big will it be? Lawfare’s Nick Bednar suggests it could get rid of as many as 700,000 federal employees, which “would increase nationwide unemployment by about 0.5 percent” totally aside from the damage wrought by important work left undone.

The other significant thing about this initiative is that it’s being jointly supervised by Russ Vought’s Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management. The latter is DOGE’s beachhead in the federal government and its first big landing sight. It’s the entity that authorized the “voluntary retirement” gambit that was Musk’s first major action and sent out Musk’s “five bullet points” email ordering federal employers to justify their existence within 48 hours (subsequently countermanded by many agencies). Whatever happened earlier, Vought and Musk, arguably the two figures in the Trump administration most aggressively hostile to much of what the federal government currently does (other than “warfighting,” jailing immigrants, and rewarding Trump’s friends), are on the same page now and working closely together. That this latest push was discussed at a Trump Cabinet meeting attended by Musk is a signal that blowing up big parts of the federal workforce is indeed an administrationwide priority.

There are, as you can imagine, many legal, administrative, and political pitfalls surrounding these mass layoffs. The RIF process is invariably described as “arcane.” Deployed so massively, it would probably violate both collective-bargaining agreements and congressional policy mandates. Lawsuits are inevitable, and confusion is absolutely certain, particularly since congressional action on Trump’s budget proposals and on the spending authority due to expire on March 14 could change the facts on the ground enormously. Musk’s ability to sit in a meeting with agency heads without pulling out a chain saw may suggest his conduct is being regularized, but it’s entirely possible he will continue to freelance in order to please his many fans on X, most of whom would love to pillage the “deep state” mindlessly for the sheer nihilistic hell of it.

But while it’s not possible to fully contextualize the mass firings now underway in terms of their significance to Trump 2.0’s overall scheme of counterrevolutionary extremism, they will represent a wakeup call to those who thought this man just wanted to bring back a stable economy and spread peace throughout a troubled world.