This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at growing resistance to Elon Musk’s demands and threats to the federal workforce, and how reporters are disputing the cost-cutting claims of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
On Monday, a federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE from accessing private information at the Office of Personnel Management and Education Department.
Also on Monday, a different federal judge said the way DOGE is operating may be unconstitutional since the the appointments clause of the Constitution requires leaders of federal agencies to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and Elon Musk was neither nominated nor confirmed.
This all comes after the Trump-appointed heads of key agencies, including FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, all told their workers not to comply with a demand Musk made on Saturday to all 2.3 million federal workers. On his social media platform X, Musk wrote, quote, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” unquote.
In response, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees called Musk “unelected and unhinged.”
Meanwhile, President Trump backed Musk’s plan, calling it a, quote, “pretty ingenious idea,” and said workers who don’t answer would be, quote, “semi-fired or fired,” even as the Office of Personnel Management contradicted him and said responses were voluntary.
Elon Musk doubled down on Sunday, writing on X, his social media platform, quote, “A large number of good responses have been received already. These are the people who should be considered for promotion,” unquote. Critics noted a promotion would make them probationary, and Musk has directed federal agencies to fire probationary workers.
For more, we’re joined by two guests. Stephen Engelberg is ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, which has a team of reporters covering Donald Trump’s second presidency. And in Philadelphia, we begin with a federal worker at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where the Trump cuts already led to the dismissal of more than 1,000 newly hired workers, including nurses, doctors and other workers. Latisha is using only her first name for interviews, in part out of fear of reprisal. She’s also a member of the American Federation of Government Employees.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Latisha, let’s begin with you. You work at the Department of Veterans Affairs. All 2.3 million federal workers have gotten this message they have to say what they did this week, and if they don’t respond, they will be considered resigned — except that a number of different agency heads said you shouldn’t respond to that email. And yet President Trump says it was an “ingenious idea.” Can you explain the kind of chaos in the Veterans Affairs Administration right now? How are federal workers feeling and responding?
LATISHA: Good morning, Amy. Thank you so much for having me and for drawing attention to this national fight. I just want to make the disclaimer that things that I share today are my personal views and of my experience, and I am not representing my agency nor my union in any fashion.
The email — “What did you do last week?” — it’s insulting. It’s disrespectful to the work that federal workers do every single day. As you mentioned earlier, it caused mass confusion, also concern for privacy and the security of the very sensitive and confidential information federal workers handle every single day.
This is a game to DOGE. This is a game to Elon. He has acknowledged that it is a ruse. And federal workers are learning and understanding that this is all a ruse, right? It’s under the guise of efficiency, of accountability, but we know the “rude awakening,” that Elon calls it, or the second dose of reality, which is his real goal, is to gut public services in the federal workforce and pave the way for privatization of public services, goods and programs that we all need and love.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Latisha, the VA is one of the largest agencies in the federal government, about 400,000 employees. What was the communication you got from VA supervisors about — if any, about what you should do in terms of this deadline that Musk imposed?
LATISHA: Yes. So, you know, we were at the time — you know, earlier part of the day, before we were then told that we did not have to reply, you know, our union, as well as our agency, did direct us to comply to the request.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what has been the morale and the — of your fellow employees as you’re facing this contradictory pronouncements and announcements of layoffs, rescinding of layoffs? Could you talk about what the impact is on your day-to-day work?
LATISHA: Sure. So, you know, including myself, as well as my colleagues, this is very distressing for us. It’s demoralizing, and it’s dehumanizing. We know what we do for the federal government, for the American public, truly, every single day. Like, the United States Postal Service ensures that mail gets processed and delivered to every home address in the United States of America. The Consumer Protection Bureau ensures that, you know, these corporations are held accountable and making sure that everyday working families are not being scammed.
It’s demoralizing. We know that it’s meant to be intimidating, to sow chaos and confusion for the ultimate goal of gutting public services and, you know, paving a way for Elon and his very wealthy, disgustingly wealthy allies to gain more profit. And it’s not right. You know, if Elon is successful, this will impact working families everywhere. In fact, it already is, right? With the loss of jobs, with the mass resignations, there will be, and has already been, perhaps delays in processing of claims at Social Security and Medicare. Delays will come for medical care for veterans. You know, our public lands will not be ready and accessible and safe for the summer and spring seasons. This will continue to have deleterious impacts for many generations to come. And I’m very happy to be a part of a group of informal rank-and-file workers who are fighting back against these austerity measures.
AMY GOODMAN: In addition to Latisha, who is a Veterans Affairs federal worker, we’re joined by Stephen Engelberg, who is ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, which has a team of reporters covering President Trump. In December, Stephen, you wrote ”An Open Letter to Elon Musk,” in which you suggested his Department of Government Efficiency read the ProPublica reporting on wasteful practices and spending by federal agencies.
On Monday, you wrote a piece headlined “The Trump Administration Keeps Citing an Untrue Stat as It Targets Federal Workers.” It begins, “As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the ‘wood chipper,’ a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices.
“By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week.
“It’s also completely untrue,” unquote.
Stephen Engelberg, talk about why you dug into this one false claim among many, what you found, and how it fits into the bigger picture here, why this is so significant.
STEPHEN ENGELBERG: Good morning, Amy.
Well, of course, we are hearing an awful lot of things that are untrue — you know, Ukraine attacked Russia, so on. I mentioned in the piece the, you know, rise and fall of the $50 million in condoms to Gaza. So, there are many, many kind of false claims filtering around here.
This one caught my eye, because it was a bit of a sort of a kerfuffle in early December. A senator from Idaho, Senator Joni Ernst, who’s been a longtime foe of the federal workforce’s purported wasteful practices, put out a report, and it said 6% of federal workers — only 6% of federal workers show up to work Monday through Friday. And the minute that came out, it was on — it was in the New York Post. You know, Hannity picked it up, Fox News, Speaker Mike Johnson. So, it was everywhere.
And, you know, being an investigative type — we at ProPublica do a lot of investigative reporting — I was just curious: Where did this come from? And so, I went to the report. The report had footnotes. And the footnote took me to something that was a story done by Federal News Network, an operation out of Washington that covers the federal workforce. And they had done a sort of completely unscientific survey saying, you know, “Write in if you want to tell us about your work habits.” And so, they got a little over 6,000 people writing in. And by the time that I got to the website, they had put an editor’s note in, saying this is an unscientific survey, everyone is self-selected. There is no possibility that this is actually accurate.
In fact, the OMB has done kind of the definitive survey of this, and, first of all, only 50% of federal workers can work remotely at all. So, half the workforce goes to work every day, because, if we think about it, aircraft carriers and veterans’ hospitals and so on. I mean, the doctors can’t work remotely. The nurses can’t work remotely. The 5,000 sailors on an aircraft carrier, they’re not working remotely. So it was obviously wrong. And then, of the remaining 50% of us, they spend about 60% of their time at work. So, this statistic was clearly wrong, clearly disproved.
And frankly, I didn’t think it was much of a story, because, you know, there was — you know, the various fact-checking websites came out a few days later, picked up the editor’s note on the story and said, “Look, this is baloney.” PolitiFact said, you know, “pants on fire,” which is the lowest possible rating for truth of a political statement.
But then, lo and behold, when Trump took office, this thing started popping up again. On January 20th, it was in Trump’s fact sheet explaining why they’re going to cut the federal workforce. And so, I thought that was worth kind of honing in on and sort of explaining to people. The first iteration of this, the report, might have been a bit of sloppy research, you know, misreading of a story in a footnote by somebody writing a report. But the second iteration of it was not. That was done with malice of forethought. And I thought that was worth stopping and telling people, so that’s why I did the story.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Stephen, I’m wondering if you could talk about the status of DOGE, what exactly it is. One of your articles in ProPublica says, “If DOGE is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public,” which the Trump administration has been doing. But “If it’s not an agency, then DOGE’s tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned,” some people are contending. Could you talk about this limbo area that DOGE exists in?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG: Yeah, I mean, I think the way they’re handling it is, you know, despite the public statements about transparency, to limit any transparency. You know, as your viewers no doubt noticed, when they were sort of challenged on this, they began putting out some notion of what they’re doing. You know, talk about “tell me five things you did last week.” DOGE began reporting some of the things they’ve done, and said, “Look, we’ve saved $55 billion.” And it turned out it was nowhere near that.
So, I think this is designed — you know, you’ll notice they’ve gone round and round on who even runs DOGE. I mean, you know, at one point, obviously, the president said, “I’m appointing Elon Musk to run this thing.” When they began to notice that maybe that might have legal implications, they announced that, no, he’s not running it at all. But they won’t say who is running it.
You know, it walks like a duck. It quacks like a duck. It’s a duck. I mean, this is a federal agency. It’s wielding arguably the most power that any federal agency has ever wielded. I mean, when other presidents who were, shall we say, skeptical of the federal workforce became president, the Office of Personnel Management, which runs, is the HR sort of arm of the government, they were not able to fire thousands upon thousands of workers at a stroke. So, I think it’s pretty clear. And I think that, ultimately, this will be concluded that DOGE is a federal agency, and whoever is running it is the leader of an agency, and that’s going to have a lot of implications.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a video that ProPublica and Documented obtained from a 2023 speech by the now, well, director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who is considered one of the chief architects of Project 2025. He spoke at a private gathering at the pro-Trump think tank Center for Renewing America. Here, Vought is describing his goal of defunding federal bureaucracies.
RUSSELL VOUGHT: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want — when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are so — they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down, so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry, because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Stephen Engelberg, talk about the significance of what Russell Vought, now, once again, head of OMB, said.
STEPHEN ENGELBERG: I think it’s incredibly important. I mean, it’s a funny thing. You know, you do a lot of stories in the run-up to an election, and I remember that one fairly vividly. And I thought, you know, that it was chilling, it was important. We played it up a lot. But I also wondered if this was a sort of rhetorical flourish, as these things sometimes are.
That is not a rhetorical flourish. You listen to that and you look at what’s happened, and you can see that is the game plan. Whatever they said during the campaign about “2025 is not really what we’re going to do,” I think it’s turning out it is exactly what they’re going to do.
And in particular, that one clip gave us as much of an insight as any into this kind of abstract thing that they say: “Well, it’s a unitary executive” I mean, this is a sort of fairly fringe legal argument that now is at the center of our country, which is that you don’t really have any independence in the executive branch; the president leads the executive branch, and therefore, he can hire and fire anybody at any time. There are some things where we have a level of norms, right? I mean, generals can get fired. Previous presidents have fired various senior generals. So, you can’t say that that was against the law. But then you have other things like the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau — the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, or the EEOC, which are independent agencies, and laws suggest that you can’t just fire the people that run those.
And the argument here is, “Yes, you can. The president is the president. Separation of powers means that everybody who works for the executive branch, under any circumstances — inspector generals, you name it — they’re all subject to dismissal immediately by the president,” since he has what, you know, he himself, I think, is now referring to as king-like powers.
And that is what is driving this. And Vought is an architect of that viewpoint. So, I think that clip turns out to be one of the most important things we did in the run-up to the election, far more important even than we understood at the time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you — also, you’ve been tracking quite a few of the employees of DOGE. Many of them have not gotten much attention. One of them that you tracked was a woman by the name of Katherine Armstrong Loving, who has been apparently attached to EPA. She, it turns out, is the sibling of Brian Armstrong, who runs the industry crypto company Coinbase, which, by the way, donated, as you mentioned, $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. How does this square with Trump’s promise to drain the swamp?
STEPHEN ENGELBERG: Well, I mean, I think, you know, we’re going to be learning more and more as time goes on. And, you know, it certainly appears that the hiring of people working for DOGE went through the sort of personal networks of various people, you know, people who worked at Palantir, other kind of Silicon Valley things, people from SpaceX. It is not the slightest surprise, I think, to anybody that some of these folks are going to turn out to be siblings, friends and allies of various contributors.
The problem here, again, is that if you’re going to give this group of people absolute power and there is no transparency, how is the public to know when they stumble/walk straight into an obvious conflict of interest? I mean, there’s so much going on. You know, there was a moment there where somebody found a contract that the State Department was going to buy $400 million worth of Teslas. And then it was quickly sort of erased. And Trump keeps saying, “Well, we just won’t let Elon do anything that’s a conflict of interest.” But if you look at the range of his companies and his wealth, it’s most of the government. I mean, you know, it isn’t just cars. It isn’t just rockets. You know, Neuralink is a company that has major sort of oversight from the Food and Drug Administration, and he’s trying to create this cutting-edge technology relating to the brain, and so on and so on and so on.
So, I mean, you know, there’s nobody home. They fired the main government ethics officer. I mean, I think that’s saying it with words. You talk about draining the swamp as a thing, but let’s not look at what you say. Let’s look at what you do.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to end with Latisha. Latisha, you are a federal worker with the VA, a very vulnerable population, I mean, the highest in any group of people, the highest number of suicides every day. I hear about the cutting, the slashing of the LGBT office within the VA. If you could start off, though, by talking about the racial composition of federal workers?
LATISHA: Yes, Amy. That’s a great question. So, first off, I do want to share that about 30% of our entire federal workforce are U.S. military veterans. And my understanding is that about one in five of all VA employees are veterans, as well. So, you know, not only do I serve veterans in my capacity, I work alongside them, as well. You know, these veterans are the supporters of their families and bring in income for many of our working families, so it will have a deleterious impact on them.
Namely — excuse me — there is a long history of Black workers in the public sector. Since 1861, the federal government has been employing Black workers. As of, well, post-World War II, actually, there were about 150,000 Black workers within the federal government. And these folks were lobbying. They were organizing to make sure that everyone in the federal government had more fair working practices, safer conditions and stronger collective bargaining rights. Today, 20% of the entire — of all Black workers in the United States of America work within the public sector, earning a living wage, living with more stability and, importantly, receiving lifesaving, life-changing benefits. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, 25 — or, Black workers in the public sector make about 25% more than those in the private sector.
So, yeah, this will have a major impact on Black families specifically. Black families cannot afford to lose these jobs. As a predominantly working-class population, we have to fight, resist DOGE and these austerity measures, and the larger fight for racial justice, and as well as the larger fight to save our democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: Latisha, we want to thank you for being with us, a federal worker with Veterans Affairs, member of the American Federation of Government Employees, and Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica editor-in-chief. We’ll link to your piece, “The Trump Administration Keeps Citing an Untrue Stat as It Targets Federal Workers,” and the other pieces that you’ve been involved with.
Coming up next, the private company running the migrant detention center in Guantánamo has a history of abuse. Stay with us.
