Government is a miracle

Why DOGE's attack on "waste" is really an attack on an entire century of progress

First, a programming note: We’re going Live!

Tomorrow — Thursday, February 27 — at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, join us on Substack Live with Gabriel Sherman, the writer of the new Trump biopic The Apprentice. Then on Friday, February 28, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk with Stephen Wertheim, the historian and theorist of America’s place in the world. To join us, download the Substack app and turn on notifications. You’ll get an alert when we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android device.

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An age of miracles…

…brought to you by…

…the government

By Brian Montopoli

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan summed up his political philosophy — and set the country on the path Elon Musk and his team of junior developers are speedrunning right now:

I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.

Reagan had by then given millions of Americans frustrated by major cultural change someone easy to blame: Uncle Sam. That was who was supposedly allowing those so-called “welfare queens” to live lavishly on your hard-earned dime. That was who was making your life harder and more confusing. And that was who needed to be stopped.

And that’s the argument that Donald Trump (and Elon Musk with DOGE, and Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget) are making now: forget about inequality, disinformation, gun violence — the country’s real problems are “waste,” “fraud,” and “abuse” by the federal government, eliminating those means “saving” the country, and almost anything can be justified in the effort.

The message still lands because people tend not to realize just how much their government does to make their lives better: from building roads to regulating commerce to a million other things we never have to think about, achieved with a whole lot of work by (or with the support of) government in the century-and-a-quarter since the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era. This is the PR problem faced by good government: When things work so well that we get used to them, we stop appreciating how lucky we are that they're there at all.

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Imagine how today’s world might look to someone who had gone to sleep a century ago — and then somehow woke up in today’s America. This Rip Van Winkle would, correctly enough, view ours as an age of miracles.

Think about it: We have easy access to a huge variety of fresh, safe, delicious food. We get clear and drinkable water piped into our homes. The entirety of human knowledge is literally at our fingertips. We don’t worry about most of the illnesses that used to kill more than 40 percent of children before the age of five. These are just a few of the once-unthinkable astonishments that we take for granted.

These wonders exist largely because of — yes — the government, which has played a central role in creating the elaborate and complex systems that make it all possible. Now, however, the Trump administration, wielding the blunt instrument of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, is putting many of these crucial systems at risk. And Americans may soon realize just how important the government has been to their daily lives.

Start with food safety. Last week, the head of the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division resigned, citing the firings of much of his staff — including people who work on the safety of infant formula. Meanwhile, the new administration is poised to ramp up deregulation and reduce oversight of the food industry. That will almost certainly lead to an increase in deadly outbreaks of foodborne illness — think of the listeria contamination in Boar’s Head deli meat that killed ten last year.

Next, consider our protections against infectious disease. The administration has laid off more than 1,000 people who work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which will hamper our response to bird flu and other emerging threats — any one of which could become the next pandemic. (Remember how that went last time around?)

Meanwhile, the anti-vaccine activist now leading the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says that as part of his campaign against real and imaginary threats to American public health, he’s going to “investigate” the vaccine program that has for the last half-century and more kept Americans and their children from dying due to diseases like measles. That is a first step, most who are familiar with his anti-vaccine career think, toward limiting or eliminating the availability of vaccines. And it doesn’t take much vaccine hesitancy to cause a crisis, as we’re seeing in the current Texas measles outbreak.

Whether they realize it or not, millions of Americans depend on the federal government to step in and help in the event of a natural disaster. Well, the administration is now working to effectively eliminate the office that oversees response to wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters. It has also fired many of the employees whose job it was to prevent nuclear disasters — including the top authority for all nuclear safety matters. As for the water that comes out of your tap? The administration just laid off hundreds of people from the Environmental Protection Agency, which works to ensure that we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink.

Speaking of miracles: For decades, we have felt safe in the knowledge that we can safely board airplanes to travel to distant lands, or just across the country to find a new job or visit family. But the Trump administration has fired hundreds of people at the Federal Aviation Administration whose job is to keep the skies safe. Since that decision, we have seen an alarming spate of plane crashes.

The list goes on and on. The National Park system — a flagship achievement of the Progressive Era — that gives Americans access to nature is now being seriously diminished, prompting staffers to hang an upside-down American flag — a distress signal — at Yosemite. These parks, one of America’s greatest achievements, are being kneecapped, purportedly for the sake of a minuscule reduction in the federal budget. The Trump regime has, by the way, also dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that has worked to prevent Americans from being swindled out of their hard-earned savings — an obstacle removed for Musk and other wealthy oligarchs.

Some of what we are losing will not be easy to measure. But over the long run, these losses could be even more devastating. The administration has fired thousands of people who worked at agencies that do research into how to fight diseases likely to kill us — including cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, slowing or stopping progress toward medical advances that save lives. (Republican Rep. Tom Cole, whose father died of Alzheimer's, has called that Alzheimer's center "critically important.")

The administration argues that all these firings are targeted cuts that eliminate waste. But that claim is most clearly belied by the fact that Elon Musk and his army of teenage DOGE employees have absolutely no idea what they are doing, or just don’t care. They are making sweeping cuts without any real understanding of the operation of these agencies — as illustrated by the fact that they’ve had to hastily rehire some crucial employees caught up in their broad, indiscriminate firings. None of what DOGE or Trump or Russell Vought are up to has much to do with fiscal responsibility, except in the most tangential and performative way.

Even if you put aside the cuts to research and services that are likely to hurt millions of Americans, kill who-knows-how-many from preventable illnesses, and further kick the can down the road on humanity’s inevitable reckoning with climate, a good chunk of what’s being cut is the country’s ability to pay for anything at all — and as a bunch of former IRS heads wrote the other day, you don’t get your finances in order by firing your accounts receivable department. They’re simply sacrificing any return on the investment we’ve all made in good government.

Trump’s “golden age” is, it turns out, just a gilded one. And we’ve seen that before: massive inequality, class warfare, the rolling back of the gains of Reconstruction — that’s the legacy of the Gilded Age, and returning to that is only good if you’re a robber baron.

Reagan had argued that the way to reign in government was by attacking “waste” — setting that — in bad faith — against an alternative, taxing regular folks more:

The progress we've made is a good start, but it's little more than a ripple in the river of waste, fraud, and abuse that's been rising for years. That's why it's clear the way to reduce the deficit is by strong economic growth and by reducing wasteful bloated government, not by raising taxes on you, the people.

Reagan’s heirs — and Musk is, whether he knows it or not, calling back to that conservative tradition — are responding to Americans’ anger over things like diminishing social mobility, deindustrialization, and the speed of social change by channeling that toward disdain for the government But that just papers over the problem, of course.

The things Musk is attacking aren’t bloat or waste — they are what makes American success possible in the first place. He should and does know — his businesses are dependent on federal research dollars and direct spending. The fortunes of the entire broligarchy — the people standing behind and poised to benefit from the privatization to come — are rooted in the fertile ground of federal research dollars.

Musk and his team either don’t understand or don’t want to understand the systems they are attacking. Consider their targeting of the “probationary” employees they fired across various agencies, mostly because there are fewer legal barriers to letting them go. “Probationary” employees, it turns out, are often longstanding employees who have been promoted — they’re “probationary” only in their new role. High achievers, the best and brightest in their fields. And now they’re looking for work.

The best-case scenario? The systems that enable modern American life may survive the Trump administration, if in a weakened state. The possibility of dying from contaminated food will increase but remains remote. Our access to crucial medical interventions will be diminished, but not be cut off. We may still be able to visit our national parks, with more trash and longer wait times. Our world of modern miracles endures, tarnished but intact. It could be a lot worse — and it might be.

We should realize what we are losing, and why. The systems that make modern life so remarkable are under attack. The march of progress that has steadily made life better is now being slowed. And for what? A relatively miniscule cut, if any, in federal spending, and a significant consolidation of oligarchic power — what Senator Chris Murphy has called the “most massive transfer of wealth and resources from poor people and the middle class to the billionaires and corporations in the history of this country.” The costs of this assault on our nation are already exponentially higher than any supposed savings we might get in exchange. And generations to come will pay those costs.

Indeed, what Trump and Musk have in mind goes beyond what Reagan imagined, and owes more to the way tax revolt crusader Grover Norquist (who wanted not just to wipe out the New Deal, but to return government to its supposed pre-Teddy Roosevelt scope, i.e., back to the Gilded Age) infamously put it in 2001:

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

America can’t afford to let that happen, so it’s time to learn to swim.

It’s going to take a long time to undo the damage, and depriving Elon Musk of his billions is only the beginning. Winning Democratic victories in 2026 and beyond is only the beginning. It’s going to take a transformation of how we see public goods — creating an understanding of just how valuable these things we build together as a country really are: solid gold, not gilt.

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Photo by Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images