Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump’s newly appointed architects of government “efficiency,” have laid out a radical plan that should alarm every American who relies on federal government services — which is to say, all of us. Their proposed campaign to dismantle the federal workforce isn’t just an attack on bureaucrats in Washington. It’s a direct threat to Social Security checks arriving on time, veterans receiving medical care and countless other essential services Americans depend on.
Their blueprint reads like a hostile corporate takeover rather than responsible governance: random mass firings based on Social Security numbers, forced relocations of entire agencies, and the elimination of remote work to drive out experienced staff. They’re betting that even if courts ultimately reject these tactics as illegal, the chaos and uncertainty will achieve their real goal of pushing dedicated civil servants to quit. Some have surely already decided to do so.
We’ve seen this playbook before. During his first term, Trump tried to convert thousands of career positions into political appointments through Schedule F, retaliated against officials who testified to Congress and systematically sidelined scientific expertise. The results were catastrophic during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the undermining of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention career officials led to confused public health messaging and preventable deaths.
But Trump’s second term will foment a far more violent swing of the pendulum. His team is explicitly counting on the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to rubber-stamp an unprecedented expansion of presidential power to fire federal workers at will. They call it the “constitutional option” — a radical theory that Article II gives presidents absolute authority over the federal workforce, democracy and law be damned.