Philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote, “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”
As President Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency get on with their business of trimming waste, fraud, abuse and graft from the federal budget — a business that is vitally important, given the government’s parlous financial outlook — they need to keep this in mind.
Less than two weeks in, DOGE teams poring over federal spending records are discovering all sorts of problems.
“Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress,” Musk reported Sunday.
Money from the US Agency for International Development and other agencies is going for organizations shipping illegal migrants to the United States or paying their expenses upon arrival — which then oppose, on “humanitarian” grounds, any effort to stem the flow.
Musk and hedge-funder Bill Ackman wrote that the government funded non-governmental organizations to get around laws that are supposed to keep taxpayer dollars out of party politics and dangerous scientific research.
USAID officials even tried to physically stop DOGE technicians from accessing the computers that contained information on payments, leading Musk to comment, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
Meanwhile Trump suspended payments to NGOs and nonprofits until a formal re-evaluation of the nature, purposes and legality of the spending is complete at each grant-making agency.
It’s a safe bet that once they’re re-evaluated, far fewer grants will be made.
That means an awful lot of NGO staffers and executives in Washington, DC, and vicinity will soon be out of a job — and if Trump slashes the federal bureaucracy, too, many more will be thrown into the DC employment marketplace in a year’s time.
If Hoffer is right, we must brace for a most unsettled social order in the months to come.
It’s impossible to overstate how many people’s careers and incomes — their “rice bowls,” in DC parlance — are on the receiving end of Trump’s reforms.
The people affected will not take this lying down.
We’ve already seen not-very-spontaneous demonstrations at USAID headquarters and the US Treasury building, death threats aimed at the DOGE team on Reddit and other sites, and hit pieces in Wired and The New York Times.
One complaint is that Musk’s team is “unelected,” which is silly: USAID, to say nothing of the many NGOs and nonprofits it supports, is unelected too.
More importantly, Trump explicitly ran on stripping the government down with Musk’s help — so Americans did in fact vote for this.
But people fight hard for their livelihoods, especially when they feel entitled to begin with. (Recall that when coal miners lost their jobs due to Obama-era environmental policies, these same DC types suggested they “learn to code.”)
Tech writer Jon Stokes tweeted he expects to see not just protests, but calls for the military to depose Trump and arrest Musk over all this.
I don’t see such calls gaining much traction against a president who won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, and whose policies — very much including slashing the size of the government and its spending — have broad public approval.
But it’s absolutely true that a lot of powerful people — or at least, a lot of people who are accustomed to being powerful — are going to see their livelihoods and positions shattered.
And they’re not going to go easily. To quote Gov. Le Petomane in “Blazing Saddles,” “Gentlemen, we’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs!”
So Trump and Musk need to have a plan. And I suspect they do, though unaccountably they haven’t shared it with me.
The first element has already emerged: They’ve offered federal employees a buyout proposal — eight months of pay and benefits, and the chance to be rehired in another federal role. That will soften the sting somewhat.
Those generous terms can’t be extended to NGO and nonprofit staffers, though.
That’s why we’ll likely see Musk insulate Trump against pushback by exposing the many atrocious examples of fraud, theft and absurd spending DOGE uncovers, to limit public sympathy.
Perhaps Trump could establish a few government “think tanks” to busy some of these people with preparing position papers no one will read.
Employing several thousand of them, even at fairly generous wages, would be chicken feed compared to what they’ve been wasting (and worse). And making the jobs competitive will keep them on good behavior.
Most importantly, Trump and Musk should keep their ears to the ground, to see what sort of sedition might be brewing among these soon-to-be-former elites.
Because something will be.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
