On January 28, US president Donald Trump made federal government employees an offer that, at least theoretically, they could refuse: “If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce, we thank you for your service to your country and you will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal deferred resignation program.”

The offer included a generous severance package. Those accepting would continue to receive pay and benefits through September.

The employees could accept — and tens of thousands DID accept — the offer, apparently by simply replying “resign” to notification emails on or before February 6.

On February 6, a federal judge extended the deadline for several days.

Meanwhile, three unions representing government employees filed suit claiming the offer is “arbitrary and capricious” as well as illegal.

I’m no authority on the legalities here, but I can see why those unions prefer not to lose a bunch of dues-paying members.

Personally, I’m all in favor of the “buyout” — but only on one important condition: Those employees must not be replaced.

The federal government employs about three million people, not including military personnel (who presumably didn’t receive the buyout offer).

Given the limited scope and power of that government, according to its own Constitution, cutting the federal workforce by 90% would probably leave it still much fatter than it has any plausible reason to be.

Not that the federal government considers itself bound to obey that Constitution, of course. It discards the supposed “supreme law of the land” whenever it finds that law inconvenient.

But big, permanent cuts to that workforce size would reduce its ability to  “sen[d] hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance,” as the Declaration of Independence complained of King George III doing.

They would also reduce government spending, at least once the severance pay and benefits end.

And with unemployment levels continuing at historic lows, sending a bunch of people back to the productive sector might at least partially offset Donald Trump’s efforts to deport millions of workers.

OK, probably not enough to stop the big price increases his deportations, tariffs, and trade wars are about to hit our wallets with … but anything to take the edge off, right?

If the purpose and outcome of the buyout is a substantial reduction in the number of government employees, we’ll all be better off.

If the purpose of the buyout is just to replace “civil servants” with “Trump loyalists,” well, that’s a different story.

Once the dust settles, Congress should reduce future appropriations for federal employee payroll  and benefits to reflect the number and cost of the departing employees. Whether Trump purrs or howls will tell us what the purpose was.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Last November, when DOGE remained a gleam in president-elect Donald Trump’s eye,  its leader apparent promised, via a post to his favorite (because he owns it) social media platform, that “[a]ll actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency.”

On February 3 that same man — Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter — revealed (in the same format and on the same platform) the emptiness of the promise: “With regard to leakers: if in doubt, they are out.”

Meanwhile, over on Capitol Hill, Senators grilled Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, bulldozing her into a 180-degree turn from her former opposition to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Act, which allows the US regime to nose around in American’s communications without warrants in the name of surveilling foreigners.

They also tried to get Gabbard to renounce her prior support for a presidential pardon of American hero Edward Snowden, driven into exile for blowing the whistle on the US regime’s illegal surveillance schemes in 2013. Gabbard gave up less ground there, only going so far as to oppose FUTURE exposure of the regime’s crimes while she might be involved in the commission of those crimes.

Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation, also came out hard against a warrant requirement for Section 702 searches. Previously promoted as the solution to past administrations’  use of the FBI as a cudgel against their political opponents, he made it clear he plans to pick up that cudgel and wield it at least as vigorously, if not more so.

As on many other issues,  The Trump regime is already exposing itself as “new boss, same as (or maybe worse than) the old boss” on issues like government transparency, government surveillance, and government lawfare.

I find neither that, nor the excuses Trump’s supporters trot out for it — he’s “playing 6D chess” or “fighting fire with fire” or whatever — surprising.

While there are good reasons for actors both good and bad to consider Trump an especially dangerous politician, he is and always has been just a politician.

He spent 16 years running for president (starting with his failed bid for the Reform Party’s 2000 nomination) before winning the first time.

Over that period, he transformed himself from a life-long, standard-issue progressive Democrat into a more theatric version of right-wing faux-populist Pat Buchanan.

Not because his core philosophical beliefs changed — there’s really no evidence he ever had any core philosophical beliefs in the first place — but because he craved power.

When he gained power the first time, he used it for his own benefit and the benefit of his cronies, not for your benefit.

Now that he’s gained power again, he’s doing the same thing.

Just like every other president.

The unique danger of Trump is that million of Americans continue to believe, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that he’s somehow different. That gives him a freer hand to act exactly like his predecessors … only more so.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

With the end of January consigning Christmas decorations to cheerful memory, even if northern blizzards and hot-button issues stoked by the incoming Trump administration are less conducive to jollity, is it “time to cut the green tape”?  Lauren Smith thinks that such eco-bureaucracy is “Why Britain can’t build anything” (spiked, January 29).

Solar power is not in fact as much of a real-world threat to England as it was in the hands of Christopher Lee’s fanciful Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga.  Across the Atlantic, red-staters are the ones eager to snip red tape, even if the bounteously bearded fellow in a red hat gracing the Wall Street Journal editorial page was not Kris Kringle but Karl of Das Kapital, illustrating Jacob Berger’s case for why conservatives have more in common than they assume with the original Red (“Why MAGA Folks Should Read Marx,” January 23).

The prospect of a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” may provoke Green New Dealers, but the original New Deal’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had been promptly inducted into the “Society of Red Tape Cutters” created by Dr. Seuss for the staunchly leftist newspaper PM to laud “Boldness and Directness of purpose” in overcoming “petty bureaucratic detail.”

Even after Seuss became more associated with the amusements of what Dissent‘s Michael Kazin called “lovely nonsense with no discernible moral point” than pointed propagandizing, the lines were not so clearly drawn. In 1982, conservative columnist George Will gushed that “the space program is the greatest conceivable adventure; yet the government scants it.” Will leaves unnamed any particular “Philistine utilitarians” he has in mind who need to be swayed by “such marvels as nonstick frying pans” but must have had in mind the likes of Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who had infamously insisted that NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence “should be postponed for a few million light-years” (or at least “until right after the federal budget is balanced”).

In 1999, Garry Wills couldn’t understand why Americans would “want inefficient politicians to govern us” when “we do not want inefficient doctors to treat us, inefficient lawyers to represent us,” a year after Barry Goldwater’s New York Times obituary reminded readers that his “philosophy was never more simply put” than when he had declared that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient… for I propose to extend freedom.”

The “new, smaller government” promised in Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address was compromised by micromanagement as well as malpractice — as when proposing deeper involvement “in the workplace, in religious, charitable, and civic associations” or “to cut bureaucratic red tape so that schools and teachers have more flexibility for grassroots reform, and to hold them accountable for results” in ways that were inevitably top-down — and laid the ground for the seemingly endless conflicts and post-dotcom-boom busts of the twenty-first century. Disentangling voluntary cooperation from such astroturfing is necessary to break free from red (and green) tape.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “One Dog, Too DOGE, Red Tape, Green Tape” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, February 3, 2025