In the moments before an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River on January 29, killing 67, an air-traffic controller at Reagan National Airport repeatedly alerted the helicopter to the presence of the jet. The Black Hawk pilots replied that they had the plane “in sight.” In the audio, there is an eerie, workaday calm to these exchanges. There is no panic; nothing seems amiss except, perhaps, the quickening pace. As the trajectories of the two aircrafts converge, the control tower instructs the helicopter to “pass behind” the jet. Seconds later, you can hear the controllers react to the collision: “Ooh! Oh my — ” The audio cuts out before the word God.
Since the crash, I’ve been haunted by this transmission: the sudden change from professional placidity to alarm, from control to helplessness. There is pathos in the panic. It’s the sound of people watching a disaster unfold that seconds earlier might have been prevented. We don’t know precisely why this collision happened. Experts have speculated about several factors: failed or faulty collision-alarm systems, night-vision goggles obstructing the pilots’ view, congested airspace, understaffing. What we do know is that a highly complex system of human and mechanical coordination broke down. Once it had, there was little to do but appeal to the Almighty.
By the next day, President Donald Trump and his allies had settled on a culprit: diversity, equity, and inclusion. As investigators sought basic facts about the accident, Trump, Vice-President J. D. Vance, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth blamed, without evidence, Federal Aviation Administration efforts to diversify the workforce. Of Obama’s FAA, Trump said, “They actually came out with a directive: too white.” This tendentious scapegoating was to be expected; it’s one of the unpleasant features of our era that we can often anticipate Trump’s logic, our minds infected by his dumb-fuck cruelty. But the brazenness was impressive. And through it, the administration pioneered a ready-made excuse for anything that goes horribly wrong under Trump’s watch. As bodies were pulled from the Potomac, as families grieved, the president shifted responsibility to minorities, women, and people with disabilities — all presumed to be incompetent.
In reality, both the crash and the White House’s excuse-making were instructive premonitions of disasters ahead. As Trump and his unelected billionaire benefactor Elon Musk take a sledgehammer to the federal bureaucracy, they’re operating on two key principles, tied together to maximize impunity: scapegoating and speed. It’s an approach that goes hand in hand with Steve Bannon’s old strategy for overwhelming the opposition: “flooding the zone.”
First, there is the calculated ideological sleight of hand. They will use DEI as an excuse to hollow out government capacity, then blame DEI for the fallout. It’s a plutocrat’s protection racket. Having already effectively shuttered usaid — Musk called it a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — Musk and Trump have turned their sights on the Department of Education, putting dozens of employees on administrative leave, citing DEI (although only a fraction of them are actually involved in diversity initiatives), and directing the department’s civil-rights office to prioritize antisemitism investigations over those into other forms of discrimination. The White House is reportedly considering an executive order to shut down the DOE altogether.
At the same time, and in every respect, the first weeks of Trump’s second term have been premised on velocity. The White House has taken a “Gatling gun approach to governance,” the New York Times reported. Executive orders and firings of top-level bureaucrats have come in the dozens at the DOJ, the FBI, the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and more. Musk — an unaccountable, anti-government radical — has been loosed into the bureaucratic works to root out “woke” ideology and inefficiencies, commandeering, with the help of a cadre of sleepless tech nerds, the Office of Personnel Management, gaining access to the Treasury’s vital payment system, and attempting to unilaterally defund disfavored federal programs, essentially usurping Congress’s power of the purse. Many of these efforts will face legal challenges. Whether the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will ratify Trump’s power grab is an open question; whether Trump would abide by an adverse ruling is another.
Musk’s role here is, as the Silicon Valley adage goes, to “move fast and break things.” He sees the government as a sclerotic and inefficient instrument, fettered by regulation and ideology. But in many government systems — including the Treasury payment system recently seized by Musk’s team of peach-fuzz prefects — inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. Nathan Tankus, an expert on the government’s fiscal plumbing, told The American Prospect that his “central terror” in regard to Musk is that he will look at “the redundancies which are the premise of mission-critical IT systems … and say look at this inefficiency.” In matters of state, inefficiency is the price we pay for consistency, for fail-safes and predictability. If the Treasury system goes haywire because one of Musk’s whiz kids messes with the code, we could see Social Security and disability checks interrupted, veterans deprived of health care, kids going hungry. We saw a preview of this sort of crisis on January 27, when an Office of Management and Budget memo (later rescinded) froze federal grant payments across the government, causing health-care officials to lose access to the Medicaid portal. The administration may or may not have intended this outcome, but a larger and longer malfunction, whether mistaken or engineered, could cost lives.
The Silicon Valley mind-set is also perilous for personnel policy. For tech leaders, people themselves are an impediment, an anachronism holding back our machine-led future. (If the overeducated middle strata can’t be disabused of their progressive notions, they can at least be replaced by AI.) But firing or forcing retirement on large portions of the federal workforce and waiting to see which systems falter in the breach — as Musk did when he took over Twitter — is not a risk the government can afford. You can’t rip the wiring out of the walls to map the circuitry. For many parts of the bureaucracy, including those that could use renovation, the mantra is the opposite of Silicon Valley’s: Move slowly and try not to break anything because human lives hang in the balance. According to an internal FAA report, staffing at Reagan’s air-traffic-control tower the night of the collision was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.” Per the Times, a single controller was handling an amount of work usually assigned to two. This is effectively the future Trump and Musk want. It is one in which many good people would be made to witness terrible, preventable catastrophes — while resorting to God’s mercy alone.
If and when this happens, DEI will once again be the alibi and then, again, the motive: a way to divert blame and an excuse for further sabotage. One wonders how long the public will abide this two-step. It’s a cliché that Trump cares less about governance than about its performance. For many of his supporters, he offers libidinal satisfactions in place of tangible rewards, and that’s enough. He floats free of reality, buoyed by vibes, with material consequences and politics bewilderingly delinked. The eggs may not be cheaper, but they taste better with a side of Schadenfreude.
The result is that Trump’s sinister maneuvers can seem simultaneously more and less significant than they are; one feels silly for panicking and complacent for assuming the worst won’t happen. But the rubber has not lost all contact with the road. Musk’s campaign against the bureaucracy will have concrete effects on the capacity of the government to do its job, and he knows it. That’s why he, the richest man in the world, has asked Americans to expect “temporary hardship.” Real things do happen. Planes can fall from the sky. The government is a perpetual disappointment machine, except when it’s something worse.
