While telling the Cabinet this week about his attack on the federal government, Elon Musk admitted, chuckling, that an Ebola-prevention effort was “one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly.” Previous administrations understood that helping foreign countries—for instance, by stopping the spread of a deadly hemorrhagic fever in Africa—protects Americans too. Yet that might not have dawned on Musk, who boasted earlier this month about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Although he claimed Wednesday to have restored the Ebola program, this appears not to be true.
Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency purport to be eradicating fraud and waste from federal spending. In reality, the effort rests on an assumption that most government employees are useless. The DOGE team shows no understanding of how much work and human expertise go into protecting Americans from infectious diseases, deadly accidents, natural disasters, and other catastrophes.
If a round of random and sweeping firings causes enough ruckus, DOGE might reverse course: Earlier this month, hundreds of employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which supervises the government’s atomic-weapons stockpile, received termination notices. The word nuclear spooked enough of the public that most of those layoffs were soon rescinded, but the agency then had to scramble to rehire employees, because they’d been locked out of their email accounts and no one had noted down their contact information.
Unchastened by that episode, the young technocrats at DOGE keep hacking away at essential agencies. More than any one cut, the accumulation of damage to the government is making the country less safe. Here are some of the other areas in which Musk and his team are blithely putting Americans’ well-being at risk:
Motor vehicles. DOGE has been firing federal employees on probationary status, which applies both to new hires and to people who were in the process of being promoted. These efforts will reportedly yield staff reductions of 4 percent at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which, among other duties, assesses the protective qualities of vehicles, tires, and other equipment, and orders recalls where warranted. (Including buyouts, the total workforce reduction could be about 10 percent.) Most people would surely want to see evidence of overstaffing before slashing the agency that oversees car seats. Perhaps not coincidentally, Musk has previously griped about the NHTSA, which has six pending investigations into his Tesla self-driving technology.
Air travel. Recent crashes and near misses at airports suggest that the American aviation system is under immense strain. The Trump administration claims that no air-traffic controllers were affected by hundreds of recent job reductions at the Federal Aviation Administration. But controllers aren’t the only government employees who keep passengers and crew safe. Among the terminated staff, Rolling Stone reported, were people who make sure pilots are medically cleared and also those who monitor whether flight routes account for obstruction, weather disruptions, and other hazards that could imperil a landing.
Weather forecasting. Maybe Americans should stay home unless the roads are dry and the skies are clear? Even those calculations could become more difficult. On Thursday, a round of cuts began at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which also includes the National Weather Service. If NOAA suffers a one-third cut in its budget, as rumored, the agency could be hard-pressed to protect the jobs of the people who fly into hurricanes and assess weather patterns across the United States.
Bird-flu containment. Ebola isn’t the only disease that federal employees were trying to prevent. DOGE fired, and then rushed to rehire, Agriculture Department employees who were involved with monitoring the devastating bird-flu outbreak. The pathogen has forced the slaughter of 160 million birds and has infected 70 Americans since last spring, killing one of them. Representative Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican and DOGE supporter, urged Musk’s agency to make cuts “narrowly tailored to preserve critical missions.”
Cybersecurity. DOGE has also set its sights on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security. The organization angered President Donald Trump’s supporters by monitoring foreign efforts to interfere in American elections. It spends most of its resources on protecting computer networks for vital infrastructure. That includes our water, electricity, and health-care payments.
As Trump, Musk, and DOGE have attacked the federal government, its employees have responded in a variety of ways. This week, 21 civil-service technologists who’d been assisting the DOGE effort resigned in an open letter, citing fears that the cuts would “compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.”
Others have responded earnestly to the Musk team’s deliberate insults. After Musk sent an email a week ago essentially ordering federal employees to prove their worth to his team, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy went on X and described several vital matters that her agency had addressed that week, including aviation-disaster investigations and discussions with law enforcement about drunk and drugged driving. And she expressed gratitude for NTSB employees’ “continued service to transportation safety and our Great Nation.” Homendy understands something that seems lost on Musk and DOGE: Emergency preparedness is built on a web of systems that depend on other systems, whose value becomes fully evident only when something goes badly wrong. Homendy was being diplomatic, but her message was clear: The public will miss us when we are gone.
The post The Many Ways Elon Musk and DOGE Are Endangering Americans appeared first on The Atlantic.
