The Education Department spent an estimated $28 to $38 million on attempted staff cuts last year at its Office of Civil Rights, according to a report from the US Government Accountability Office released Monday.  The department initiated a reduction in force last March, pushing nearly 50 percent of its more than 4,000-strong workforce onto administrative leave. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon called the cuts a “commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.”  Later that month, Donald Trump signed an executive order stating that the Secretary of Education should “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities.” At the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which enforces federal civil rights laws in schools and other institutions that receive Education Department funding, close to half its 575 employees were put on leave in March. In October, they were officially laid off. In November, they were taken off the payroll. The department’s cuts were challenged in court, and in December, some fired staff were told to return to work. This back-and-forth doesn’t scream “efficiency.” And the cuts to OCR did not, in fact, save money.  But they did have real consequences: From the beginning of the layoffs in March to September 23, Americans filed more than 9,000 federal complaints about discrimination in education. Of the 7,000 cases resolved, about 90 percent were thrown out.   From Trump’s first inauguration through the end of 2017, OCR reached a resolution agreement in more than 30 racial harassment cases. From his second inauguration through the end of 2025, it resolved only two, a review of public OCR data by NPR found. In 2017, the office reached about ten times as many agreements in disability cases than in 2025. And while even Trump’s first-term OCR resolved about 60 sexual harassment cases and 15 sexual assault cases in 2017, it did not reach a single agreement on either kind of case in 2025. The Department of Education declined to comment regarding the cost of its staff cuts and the stark increase in civil rights complaint dismissals, citing the temporary government shutdown. “Every child in America should be able to get a good education no matter where they live, what their religious beliefs are or whether or not they have a disability,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who commissioned the GAO report. “Instead, the Trump administration fired half of the Education Department employees working to protect the civil rights of students and wasted as much as $38 million in taxpayer dollars by preventing investigators from doing their jobs. That is unacceptable.”

Donica Brady lost her job after the Trump administration cut grant funding to bring solar power across the country, including to tribal nations. She picked up multiple jobs to make ends meet. That, in addition to caring for children, whittled down Brady’s free time. So she invited reporter Ilana Newman over when she found a quiet moment—while skinning a deer—to talk about what the loss of solar funding meant to her and her community.  “When the opportunity came up to work and help us get something established…it was huge,” she said. Brady was one of many Indigenous people working to build energy sovereignty for tribal nations—work that continues despite the administration clawing back federal funds.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This week on Reveal, we’re diving into how small communities across the country are navigating the current administration’s policies and how they show up in everyone’s lives, no matter where you are in this country. We’ve partnered with The Daily Yonder to share a story about the solar energy hopes of tribal nations; The Tributary in Jacksonville, Florida, to learn how local and state DOGE are complicating efforts to run the city; and Idaho-based reporter Heath Druzin to hear how the Trump administration’s immigration policy is rupturing the state’s Republican Party.

On Wednesday morning, the Labor Department quietly reposted grants aimed at getting women workers into fields like construction and manufacturing, tow months after DOGE sanctimoniously canceled the program. The move came as a shock to employees. DOGE previously eliminated dozens of the congressionally-mandated Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants, which support recruiting and training women in industries in fields like construction, manufacturing, and information technology. As Mother Jones previously reported, DOGE cancelled the funds, which it dismissed as “wasteful DEI grants,” back in May. The Labor Department is trying to spin the renewed availability of the $5 million grants as proof of the Trump administration’s support for women in the workforce, even though the administration is also trying to eliminate the congressionally-mandated, 105-year-old Women’s Bureau that administers them. Instead, employees at the department say the agency’s attempted spin is laughable and yet another example of the administration backtracking on cutting support for marginalized populations after public outcry. “The press release makes it sound like it’s something they came up with,” said Gayle Goldin, former deputy director of the Women’s Bureau under the Biden administration. “This is a multi-decade grant program that has had bipartisan support for years.” A DOL employee familiar with the work of the Women’s Bureau agreed, adding, “This seems to be on trend for them, taking credit for revamping programs when they are largely the same.” (The DOL employees who spoke to Mother Jones for this story were granted anonymity for fear of retribution, given that a department official previously threatened staff who spoke to journalists with “serious legal consequences,” including criminal charges, ProPublica reported.) In fact, experts say the extent to which the program has been altered merely dilutes its goals. Compared to last year’s detailed guidelines for the grant, this year’s eliminate prior references to prioritizing “historically underrepresented communities,” such as women of color, women with disabilities, and women at or below the federal poverty line, and transgender and nonbinary people. Another DOL employee called those changes “unfortunate,” pointing to recent federal data showing a rise in Black women’s unemployment. “To remove this focus on underrepresented communities, it just makes it less likely that the organizations that ultimately get awarded will intentionally make sure that they are reaching all women, including and especially the ones who frankly need it the most,” that employee said. Another major change in this year’s grants: It reduces the amount of funds that can be used for supportive services like child care for participants’ kids or transportation to help them get to training programs. “We know how critical supportive services are to recruiting and retaining women in these programs,” the DOL employee added. The previously cancelled WANTO grants, which will not be restored despite the new funding announcement, were used to support programs for getting women and nonbinary into construction in places like North Carolina and Mississippi. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, cited some of these details included in my previous reporting when she questioned Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer about the status of WANTO grants at a House Appropriations Committee hearing. (Chavez-DeRemer declined to comment on the specific WANTO cuts at that hearing.) Prior grantees and experts have mixed feelings about the latest development. Goldin, the former deputy director of the Women’s Bureau under Biden, said that on the one hand, “it is surprising, in a good way, to see the grant announcement back up.” “At the same time,” she added, “I feel like this administration is all over the place. Do they actually want women in the workforce? If so, I really hope organizations apply for this grant funding and that they go ahead and fund them.” Nora Spencer’s North Carolina nonprofit, Hope Renovations, which supports and trains women and nonbinary people to work in construction, lost about $300,000 of its $700,000 WANTO grant in May. “We have gone through all of this frustration and heartache from the grants being taken away,” she told me on Wednesday, “and now they’re back again with no notice to us.” Spencer is unsure if she will reapply, citing ethical concerns about seeking the funding when this administration does not want to support historically marginalized populations. Those requirements, she said, would “limit the people that we can serve.” Rhoni Basden, executive director of Vermont Works for Women, a nonprofit that supports women’s and young people’s career development, also does not know if she will reapply. She had the remainder of her organization’s $400,000 WANTO grant cancelled back in May, and she did not know that the grants had been reopened for applications until I contacted her on Wednesday morning. The application deadline is in less than a month, and her organization’s prior WANTO-funded work was focused on serving marginalized populations, which seem to conflict with this administration’s priorities. Using funds for support services to help participants in rural Vermont attend their programming or pay for childcare was also critical, she said. “For us specifically,” she said, “it feels dismantling and backwards.” Spokespeople for the Labor Department did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency was many things in the first months of the second Trump administration. It was a chain saw, a wood chipper, and “a way of life, like Buddhism,” according to Elon Musk, its fearless leader according to everyone but the president’s lawyers. It was a funnel of disinfo, a conflict of interest, a bureaucratic mystery, and a tired meme. But above all, it was the realization of a dream. For all the talk of changing demographics and new coalitions, the most important development in US politics last fall involved money and power: The billionaires who believe their technology will save civilization found common cause with authoritarians who hoped that same technology could help them control it. They realized that, in the end, the things they wanted were mostly the same. The problem was democracy; the solution was technofascism. The idea that a post-liberal, “merit-based” ruling class should use new technologies to govern the rest of us has been building on the right for years. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and former Musk business partner whose condemnation of vacuous startup culture nudged Vice President JD Vance toward Catholicism, once questioned whether “freedom and democracy are compatible.” (This skepticism of the democratic process did not stop him from spending tens of millions of dollars to influence it.) He was neither the first nor the last to suggest that our current political system had set a trap that only a few skilled visionaries could free us from. Among the earlier proponents was Musk’s own apartheid-­supporting grandfather, who believed in replacing the electoral system with a “technocracy” of benevolent scientists. One of the more prominent thinkers on the new right these days is Curtis Yarvin, whose pitch for a monarchical “Dark Enlightenment” reached an audience that included Vance, Thiel, and VC billionaire Marc Andreessen. Andreessen, who has mocked the use of the term “technofascist” to describe the administration, describes himself as a “techno-optimist,” who believes artificial intelligence breakthroughs will usher civilization onto a new plane of existence and the sooner we get there, the better. This faith in the destiny of accelerating technological progress has become Silicon Valley’s version of end-times theology and is affecting our politics in much the same way—anything that can be done, must, to hasten the coming of the Borg. DOGE offered a glimpse of the technofascist future. It formed the beachhead for a targeted hit on public institutions and their employees in the service of a new, radical, and cash-soaked post-democratic order. The fact that a few were imposing this on the many was the point. > If this bureaucratic smash-and-grab had a technical mission, it was to break > down existing silos of the data the government collects on you to enable a > sort of God’s-eye view of the American populace. Musk and his allies relished demolishing firewalls online and off, forcing their way into buildings and firing or threatening to arrest civil servants who refused to comply. Federal employees feared that DOGE was monitoring what they typed and using AI to eavesdrop on what they said. At one point during Musk’s successful attempt to “delete” the United States Agency for International Development, employees thought they had restored funding for a few lifesaving programs for children, only for two Musk lieutenants to simply uncheck those boxes in the agency’s computer system; “pronatalism” for me, DOGE for thee. A manifesto shared by Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the surveillance behemoth Palantir with Thiel, implored the administration to “fire people who can’t be fired…Mass deport people who can’t be deported.” Musk, for his part, urged the administration to “go after” Tesla critics and suggested the administration could ignore court orders—which, of course, Donald Trump did. If this bureaucratic smash-and-grab had a technical mission, it was to break down existing silos of the data the government collects on you to enable a sort of God’s-eye view of the American populace. Big Tech and the government have hoovered up and exploited your data for decades, but never so openly and so panoptically. Musk was trying to riffle through your Social Security, Medicare, and tax data. The goal was to use these pots of information—long legally separated to avoid exactly this kind of thing—to purge the undesired and justify the mass reduction of government the right has long pined for. As usual, immigrants bore the brunt. The government used AI to trawl through the personal data of thousands of students to find thought crimes. Palantir used its vast data collection apparatus to help the government locate and track undocumented residents. To ensure those immigrants could never collect benefits, the Social Security Administration simply reclassified thousands of people as dead. At the Border Security Expo in Phoenix in April, acting ice Director Todd Lyons expressed his wish that the government could streamline the logistics of mass deportation. What was needed, he said, according to the Arizona Mirror, was “like Prime, but with human beings.” The first few months of the administration were filled with moments like that. It was not just that the new people in charge sounded like the sort of people who hunt service workers for sport, but that they didn’t really seem to care who knew. The key to the administration’s technofascist turn was that you could start from either direction and end up in the same place. Tech was a means to impose fascism; fascism was a means to unfettered tech. The rise of cryptocurrency and AI helped the MAGA movement and Silicon Valley moguls meet in the middle. Eager to have a president who would let them do as they pleased, some of the biggest names in the business showered Trump with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign cash. To them, these kinds of civilization-shaking creations demanded an accommodation from everyone else. They would require massive new infusions of energy and render the existing economy obsolete. (With one notable exception: Andreessen predicted recently that venture capital investing could be “one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing” after AI takes over, because it is more an art than a science.) And then there’s Trump 2.0’s preferred aesthetic, a sort of machine-learning mashup of Thomas Kinkade, Leni Riefenstahl, and Starship Troopers that renders the harshest fever dreams in soft-focused and cruel ways. In February, the president posted an AI-generated video of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, with Musk eating flatbread on a beach. The Department of Defense recently offered up its own vision of Secretary Pete Hegseth holding up an inexplicably four-fingered hand next to the border wall. Slop like this is everywhere now, in White House statements and in the depths of Musk’s Grok-powered feedback loop. This grand alliance is a bit fraught, though, as the recent falling out between the president and his richest ally underscored. Trump wants to unshackle particular kinds of technology to help particular groups, but it’s not exactly “technocracy.” For one thing, he fired all the technocrats—and gutted the nation’s capacity for research. Andreessen’s “Techno-­Optimist Manifesto” includes the immortal line: “We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.” How’s that going? Immigrants were just the initial target. Musk’s legion—which is also, according to the Wall Street Journal, how he describes his kids—launched a broader attack on the mostly liberal white-collar professionals he and his fellow oligarchs blamed for debasing society. They were “the professional managerial class” or “childless cat ladies”—denizens of what the court philosopher Balaji Srinivasan refers to as the “Paper Belt.” The professional class who staff not just the government, but higher education, media, law firms, and NGOs were the enemy, and the solve, in industry terms, was to blow up those sectors. “You probably deserved it,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told a recently axed Department of Health and Human Services employee who confronted him on Capitol Hill in April. Why? Because, Banks later explained, the man had a “woke job.” All of the most malicious forces in government are now integrated with a Silicon Valley powered by an existential sense of urgency and illusions of its own supremacy. For all the flashy tech and futurist manifestos, this new politics is a throwback. Offering medals to women who have a certain number of children—an actual proposal that two of Musk’s fellow pronatalists sent to the White House —feels a bit midcentury German. Musk’s obsession with IQs and large brains is a sequel many times over, indicative of a growing sense that the people in power believe they are innately superior. To them, the world is divided between protagonists and NPCs—automated background video-game characters, in other words, not so unlike “the unthinking demos” Thiel once lamented controlled “so-called ‘social democracy.’” For a long time, as investors threw money at robotaxis and never-realized Hyperloops, the joke was that the San Francisco Bay Area’s best and brightest were hard at work trying to reinvent the bus. But it turns out if you get enough VCs in a Signal chat together, you’ll eventually reinvent feudalism, too.

On Friday, Elon Musk once again pledged to depart his role at DOGE, taking with him his bad personality, weird public behavior, complicated family life, troubled businesses, alleged regular illegal drug use, compulsive social media habits, exploding rockets, messianic conviction that he control all of earth’s resources so as to colonize Mars, and a remarkably poor track record in his brief life as a quasi-public servant. He leaves behind the incredible destruction DOGE has wrought, and of course, DOGE itself, which will continue its work, as Project 2025 architect and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought reportedly floats making its cuts permanent without the approval of Congress. > Even Trump says Musk is “really not leaving.” But it would be a mistake to think that Musk’s grip on the government is lessening; beyond his continued relationship with the Trump administration, Musk’s companies will still have billions in lucrative and influential federal contracts. And as his recent travel shows, there are clear signs that Musk is also using his relationship with President Trump to pursue business, especially in the Middle East. To be sure, after embarking on a hugely successful quest to make the lives of ordinary Americans a lot worse, Musk does seem to be pulling back on his obsessive political involvement. He has said that his focus from here on will be his companies, even though DOGE, as he put it, will continue “as a way of life.” He’s also said he plans to cut his political spending; he invested heavily in March’s Wisconsin Supreme court race, an effort which failed miserably, as did his earlier attempts to influence German voters to put the ultra-right AfD party in power.  But there are also clear indications that Musk will continue trying to influence politics. For one, he and Trump immediately gave the game away in their Friday Oval Office press conference, where Trump said that Musk is “really not leaving,” adding, “He’s going to be back and forth, I think. I have a feeling.” A person characterized as a “senior administration official” told CBS News that “Musk left on good terms and is still friends with the president. This isn’t a separation, but just a return to the private sector for Musk. He will continue to be a friend to the president, and we can characterize that as an ‘adviser.'” Another key data point: Katie Miller, the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, has reportedly left DOGE to work elsewhere for Musk full-time, suggesting a continued link between Musk and the upper reaches of the administration. Beyond DOGE, Musk’s companies also still have heavy ties to DC, with what the Washington Post estimated in February amounts to about $38 billion in federal government funding. That multi-pronged business relationship is only going to grow stronger; as Ars Technica wrote in April, almost every recent military launch contract has gone to SpaceX.  Musk also recently attended investment forums in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which coincided with Trump’s visits to those countries. Musk is making an aggressive push in Saudi Arabia, where Starlink was just approved and where he’s said he plans to bring Tesla’s self-driving cars and Optimus “humanoid robots,” which he said he’d shown to Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.  Musk’s attempts to meddle in governments, domestic and foreign, don’t always work: the Wall Street Journal reported last week that he tried to scuttle a deal to build a huge AI data center in the United Arab Emirates because it will be led by OpenAI and Musk’s arch-rival Sam Altman, and won’t include his own AI company, xAI. But CNBC reported that the announcement “was delayed by several days as stakeholders, including the White House, dealt with blowback from Musk.”   The image of a major international business negotiation momentarily foundering out of fear that Musk might get mad says it all. Even if his time as Trump’s “first buddy” has drawn to a close, Musk will still be able to use his clearly continuing influence on the federal government and American foreign policy to draw more cash and attention to his businesses—and to try to reshape global business and politics to his will. 

President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to support women, grow jobs, and revive American manufacturing in his second term. But a recent round of cuts by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to undermine all three of those supposed priorities. On Tuesday, the Department of Labor (DOL) terminated more than two dozen grants to increase women’s representation in trades like construction, manufacturing, and information technology, and to fund programs to prevent and respond to gender-based violence and workplace harassment. The grants were administered by the Women’s Bureau, an office created by congressional mandate in 1920 to support women’s employment. This article, the first to report on the grant cancellations, is based on communications with four current and former Labor Department employees familiar with the work of the Women’s Bureau, and five of the affected grantees, some of whom also provided copies of termination notices. Experts and advocates say the cancellations will undermine women’s safe participation in the workforce at a time when Trump has promised “a boom like no other” and “millions and millions of new jobs.” They also threaten to reverse the progress women have made in the trades: Research conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR)—a Washington, DC, think tank that researches women’s employment—has found, for example, that the number of women working in construction grew by nearly 30 percent from 2018 to 2023. (Spokespeople for DOL, the Women’s Bureau, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) “A lot of these programs have been designed to help women get into the pipeline of some of these male-dominated jobs, and make those jobs safer places for women to be,” said Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at IWPR. “Any administration [would] value programs that help overcome these barriers…This is clearly not doing that.” DOGE sees it differently. In a Tuesday night post on X, the office bragged about cutting millions “in wasteful DEI grants” at DOL, including cuts to “gender equity awareness training.” But DOGE’s cuts may not be legal: The two-year grants are mandated by a bipartisan act of Congress passed in 1991 that aimed to get more women into apprenticeships and nontraditional careers, and required the Labor Department to make support and training grants to that end. The most significant Women’s Bureau cancellations affected the congressionally mandated, two-year Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants, which support recruiting and training women in industries where they constitute less than 25 percent of workers, including construction, manufacturing, and information technology. Grantees from the past two years received notices on Tuesday that their funding was immediately being terminated. Four of the termination notices reviewed by Mother Jones state that the programs do not support the department’s “priorities for its grant funding, including with regard to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” (Trump, of course, signed an executive order on his first day in office seeking to purge DEI programs across the federal government.) Last year, the Women’s Bureau awarded $6 million in WANTO funding to nine organizations, the department’s largest-ever award; the year before that, it awarded $5 million to seven groups. The only grant not canceled on Tuesday, according to DOL sources, was one given to Chicago Women in Trades, which is suing the administration for its anti-DEI executive orders. Nora Spencer, founder and CEO of Hope Renovations, a North Carolina nonprofit that supports and trains women to work in construction, was in a workforce development meeting on Tuesday when the Labor Department notified her that her organization was losing more than $700,000 in 2023 grant funding, which it used to support job training for 76 participants, including recent high school graduates and people in their 50s and 60s, with tools and materials, instructors’ salaries, and internship stipends—and about half of which it was still counting on reimbursement for. The internship program will now have to be shuttered, Spencer said, and she is bracing to potentially cut staff. The termination notice justified the cancellation by quoting Spencer’s grant application, in which she wrote that Hope Renovations sought “to increase the number of women…in construction.” “It was so blatantly sexist,” Spencer told me. “It stung to see that from my own government.” The cancellation did not make economic sense to Spencer, either: The construction industry, she pointed out, is already expected to take a hit from Trump’s tariffs and mass deportations, given the role that immigrants play in the field, as my colleague Isabela Dias has written. Plus, research has shown that the industry will need to hire more than half a million new skilled workers per year to keep up with demand, especially in light of its aging workforce: More than 40 percent of the current construction workforce is projected to retire by 2031, according to the National Center for Construction Education and Research. “To be losing a development program at a time that’s really critical to bringing on workers, it’s insulting to the industry,” Spencer said. “I’ve worked with builders who are like, ‘I don’t care what gender you are, I need to know if you can swing a hammer or if you can pull wire.'” Vermont Works for Women, a nonprofit that supports women’s and young people’s career development, is also losing the nearly $400,000 WANTO grant it received last year. That grant helped fund training for about 55 women and nonbinary people per year for careers in construction and renewable energy, and to launch a new pre-apprenticeship program in the semiconductor and advanced manufacturing industries, according to its executive director Rhoni Basden. That program, which was going to kick off this fall, is now on indefinite pause. The news, she said, came as “an absolute shock.” “It completely dismantles [the] only progress that has been made within these industries,” Basden said, adding that half of Vermont’s population consists of working-age women. “This is a prime program to help fill multiple gaps that our state is experiencing.” Moore Community House, a nonprofit in Mississippi, lost more than $700,000 in funding for its Women in Construction program, which has already trained nearly 200 people and was counting on $250,000 in further reimbursement. Branden Forshee, the organization’s CEO, pointed out that Mississippi has some of the country’s highest poverty rates for women and children. “Workforce training programs like this one are so important in this area,” Forshee said, “and taking funding from that, again, it directly contradicts [Trump’s] goal” of creating jobs. A Labor Department employee described the WANTO program as “definitely life-changing for a lot of women,” saying the funding “gives [women] a career path they might not have had before.” Another DOL employee said the DOGE cuts would mean that fewer women “are going to be exposed to these different career paths” or “have the opportunity to get careers in these industries that have family-sustaining wages.” A separate set of Biden-era Women’s Bureau grants known as FARE—Fostering Access, Rights, and Equity—that focused on preventing and addressing gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace were simultaneously canceled, DOL sources said. Last year, that program awarded $1.4 million in grants to four community organizations, according to an archived version of its webpage. The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence used a FARE grant to create a toolkit to help employers identify signs of domestic violence, said the coalition’s CEO, Meghan Scanlon. The organization was also about to begin creating a more in-depth training program on the topic for employers, staff, and supervisors, which will no longer proceed, she said. While it’s not unusual for new administrations to create new programs, it is unusual for officials to claw back funding that a previous administration already promised to pay out, Labor Department sources said. And the cancellations are especially ironic in light of Trump’s campaign-trail promise to “PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE.” “He’s literally taking away the enforcement mechanisms for protections,” Bahn, of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said, calling the move “absurd.” (As I have reported, the Trump administration also reneged on that promise by gutting the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health and cancelling grants for programs supporting crime victims.) A pair of smaller DOL grants—one focused on projects to get women and people of color into infrastructure jobs, and another to reduce gender and racial disparities in state paid leave programs—were also canceled, according to the same departmental sources. Spencer, who runs the formerly Women’s Bureau–funded construction program in North Carolina, expects DOGE’s latest cuts to come back to haunt the Trump administration. “We live in an industry that is very much filled with people who voted for Trump, and I think there’s a lot of feeling right now in [the] industry that they’re just overlooking people who voted them in,” Spencer said. “I think things like this are just going to exacerbate that.”

For years, I’ve heard the familiar refrain: “America should be run like a business.” First, it came from the young Republicans at my small, conservative, undergraduate institution, advocating for Mitt Romney in 2012. More recently, it has become a justification for Elon Musk’s indiscriminate cuts to government spending alongside his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In a recent interview on Fox News, Musk claimed that a commercial company would have filed for bankruptcy by now if they were to operate the way that the federal government operates.  So I reached out to Mike Mechanic, a senior editor at Mother Jones, to ask if the government should be run more like a business. His answer was simple: That’s bonkers.  Not only does the government provide services and resources that do not easily map to the business world’s profit/loss framework, the government is, designed to be a corrective force to the excesses of business.  “The government does all sorts of things that you can’t put a number on the outcome,” says Mechanic. Watch part of my conversation with Mechanic here:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently denied a request from health officials in Milwaukee to investigate a lead poisoning crisis in that city’s aging schools. Instead, the city’s 67,500 public school students seem to be caught in the crosshairs of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mission to massively overhaul the Department of Health and Human Services. “I sincerely regret to inform you that due to the complete loss of our Lead Program, we will be unable to support you with this,” Aaron Bernstein, director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, told city officials in an email obtained by CBS News. Kennedy is a longtime vaccine skeptic whose unorthodox approach to health and medicine has made him a perfect acolyte for Donald Trump and his best known sidekick, Elon Musk. Despite recently flip-flopping on the measles vaccine after a recent outbreak in Texas, he’s also forced a top vaccine official out of office and killed the National Institutes of Health’s climate change programs. As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy promised to cut 10,000 of the agency’s 82,000 jobs in an effort to streamline the federal government’s efficiency. “We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Kennedy told reporters in March, according to the Guardian. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.” Those cuts are part of Trump’s broader effort to dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. Led my Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cuts have been characterized by the people at the center of them as chaotic, wasteful, and ineffective, according to reporting by my colleague Julianne McShane. Kennedy himself nearly admitted as much, saying less than a month after he announced them that up to 20 percent of jobs slashed at his agency were cut in error and would need to be reversed. “Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday, according to the Guardian. “We’re reinstating them.  Back in Milwaukee, local officials will try to manage a crisis that could impact most of the city’s public school buildings. Those schools were largely built before 1978, when lead-based paint was outlawed in the United States. Longterm exposure to lead, which has for decades been found to disproportionately impact low-income Black communities (see: Flint, Michigan), can have behavioral and physical impacts well into adulthood. My late colleague, columnist Kevin Drum, wrote about them often for Mother Jones. The CDC’s lead poisoning team was one of several that were cut on April 1.

On Wednesday, S.W., an award-winning probationary worker at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), spent the day crying in bed.  S.W., who is being identified by her initials due to fear of retaliation for speaking out, is one of more than 24,000 federal probationary employees, those who have been in their jobs for a year or less, who were fired en masse on Valentine’s Day as part of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s purge of federal workers. A month later, in mid-March, she and thousands of other probationary workers were reinstated following a court order. For S.W., who said she is five months pregnant and her family’s breadwinner, getting that news felt like a win. “I felt so happy, I was on top of the world,”  Her hope was dashed Wednesday, when an appeals court allowed the Trump administration to resume terminations of probationary workers. It was one of two court rulings this week that allowed the firings of federal probationary workers to proceed, along with a Tuesday decision from the Supreme Court in which a majority of the justices ruled that the nonprofit organizations fighting the firings lacked standing to sue over them. After getting the news, S.W. felt herself slipping back into the depression that she fell into after initially being fired in February. “This week, I feel like I’m failing my child,” she said, referring to her pregnancy. “Her mom is not emotionally in a good place.”  The recent court rulings have thrown the future employment of this portion of the federal workforce into question. Six probationary employees who work at four different federal agencies told Mother Jones the recent chaos has left them stressed and anxious. One probationary HUD worker likened the government’s changing directives to a breakup with someone who keeps coming back: “It’s emotionally very turbulent,” he said. It’s also “the ultimate irony” for a government allegedly obsessed with reducing its bottom line, he added. “I think they have saddled themselves—and particularly agencies—with the burden of paying people who aren’t actually contributing to their mission and with years of litigation and administrative burdens.”  S.W. agrees. “I have been getting paid to do nothing,” she told me. “I don’t know how efficient it is to have thousands of people getting paid to sit around.” Spokespeople for the White House and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which administered the first round of “fork in the road” buyouts, did not respond to questions for this story. The firings of previously reinstated probationary workers have reportedly already begun after the courts gave the green light this week.  On Thursday, Reuters reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, housed within the Department of Commerce, had promptly begun firing previously reinstated probationary workers. One of them, Mike Garza, was an IT specialist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) within the Department of Commerce. Garza told Mother Jones on Friday morning that he worries about finding another job and fears will not be paid for the current pay period, since NOAA’s probationary workers did not get back pay for the month-long period between February and March when they lost their jobs. Garza said he missed out on nearly $10,000 during that time. “I get angry, I get sad, I get depressed about the country being taken apart,” Garza said. “I’m trying to keep it together, but it’s really hard, to be honest.” A spokesperson for NOAA did not immediately respond to questions. “Probies,” as they’re known on Reddit, at other agencies are bracing for the same fate. “It’s essentially a whiplash situation,” a probationary worker at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) told me. While they wait, many “probies” are weighing whether or not to take the second round of “fork in the road” buyouts that more than a half dozen agencies reportedly offered last week. Two of the three HUD workers I spoke to said they plan to take it. Even if “probies” can take the buyout, it will bring its own set of sacrifices. Those who accept it will likely forfeit their ability to take legal action against their agencies, according to one of the law firms representing probationary employees in a class action lawsuit contesting their terminations. Legal action is one of the only avenues left for probationary workers to contest their firings, given that they have more limited rights to appeal them than other federal workers do.  Other “probies” do not trust the government will follow through on the offer they are promising. “I am not relying on the federal government at all to come through with what they say,” said Claire Bergstresser, a probationary worker in HUD’s Office of Fair Housing, who added that she does not plan to take the buyout. Indeed, experts have questioned whether the buyout offer is legally sound. HUD workers have good reason to doubt the government’s word: HUD “probies” did not receive back pay for the period between mid-February, when they were terminated, and mid-March, when they were reinstated and placed on administrative leave following a court order. The three HUD employees I spoke to recounted losing thousands in pay during that month, ranging from $4,000 to more than $12,000. When HUD officials reinstated the approximately 300 fired “probies” in mid-March, they urged them to cancel any unemployment insurance claims they filed with their states—without clarifying that the agency would not be paying them for the prior month of missed work. They did not explain that detail until more than a week later, according to internal emails sent to HUD employees and reviewed by Mother Jones. Spokespeople for HUD did not respond to questions from Mother Jones. Some “probies” never got a second buyout offer. S.W. and three other HHS employees said the agency has yet to send out a second round of offers. That may be because HHS fired 10,000 people last week, and eliminated 10,000 more through the first round of buyouts and voluntary retirement offers. Spokespeople for HHS did not respond to questions from Mother Jones. The probationary workers say that ultimately, it’s Americans who will pay the price of their job losses. One worked on a grant program that develops affordable housing, which will likely be in even shorter supply in light of the Trump administration’s reported plans to terminate half the housing agency’s workforce overall. “Grantees—people on the ground who are building the housing and implementing the programs—are basically going to be left without guidance, support, and advocates at the federal level to help make sure they’re getting the money on time and that they have proper guidance on how to spend the money in the most effective ways,” the HUD worker said.  The “probie” purge will also be a loss for the future of the federal workforce, experts say. Caitlin Lewis, executive director of Civic Match, a platform that matches federal workers with jobs in state and local government, said that while the company does not ask about candidates’ probationary status, more than 9 percent of federal workers who use its services have between one to three years of relevant work experience, indicating they are likely probationary employees. “Young workers go into public service because it’s their dream career, so these layoffs can feel particularly soul-crushing,” Lewis said. “It’s incumbent on us to keep them in public service because their enthusiasm and passion can translate into fulfilling careers where they’ve made a real difference in their communities long-term.” The GSA worker agrees: “They fired their next generation of federal employees and they’re going to find out the hard way that we were valuable. Nobody works harder than a probationary employee.” S.W. is trying to stay calm in the midst of uncertainty—at the very least, for the sake of her pregnancy. She knows that chronic stress can lead to a low birthweight and potential developmental delays for her future child. But trying to stay calm is easier said than done. “I could get an email at any moment that says, ‘you’re terminated.’” If that happened, she would also lose the insurance her family relies on and that she uses to access therapy, which helps her manage her depression, she said.  For now, she is holding out hope she will eventually get to go back to work. “I felt like it was meaningful work and that was very important to me,” S.W. said. “You want to wake up and love what you do, and that’s what I had.”

In February, after Donald Trump returned to office, Army veteran Mark Puhl’s medical requests to the Department of Veterans Affairs—for surgery and a chemotherapy port, both related to cancer for which he had already received care through the VA—were denied. Puhl, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, holds the cost-cutting efforts of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” responsible. “They approved me to see the surgeon who would do the surgery,” Puhl, 37, said. “They approved an MRI on top of that, to make sure that there were no vessels wrapped around the lumps they wanted to cut out to test for cancer. But then they denied the surgery itself.” Puhl, who served Army tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq, was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma, a rare type of cancer, in 2022. Puhl was exposed to burn pits—open-air incineration of trash, often toxic, by militaries in the field—and said that a VA doctor had previously connected his case of lymphoma to his service. Due to the complexity of treatment for his cancer, Puhl was referred to the VA’s Community Care program, through which the agency would pay for his care at an outside hospital. Every day, Puhl takes oral chemotherapy pills; once a month, he takes steroid medication, both of which the VA provides. But even before the Trump presidency, his coverage was not exactly perfect. “Even under the Biden administration, there were issues with me just getting assistive devices,” Puhl said. “The [VA] didn’t want to get anything done in a timely manner. It took them over a month for that one.” It was already challenging to get into Community Care. Another veteran I spoke with, Ed Anderson, an organizer with Common Defense, told me that he was rejected by the program last year when he reached out for help with gastrointestinal disorders. Anderson previously received mental health support through Community Care, which he described as “life-saving.” In February, it was announced that Veterans Affairs would be subjected to billions of dollars worth of contract cuts. It emerged later that month, following backlash, that the contracts themselves would not be slashed—but the recent crop of unexpected denials like Puhl’s reflect veterans’ concern that workers in the VA, whose budgets and jobs face the sweeping threats of DOGE, may feel pressured to take steps to save money, even in areas they haven’t yet been explicitly directed to. In a statement to Mother Jones, VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said that “VA DOGE liaisons are not involved in Veterans’ health care decisions, and VA has made no efforts to scale back community care.” Puhl said that VA staff who rejected his Community Care coverage told him they were just following agency policy—and that the care they had previously approved for him already “cost the taxpayers money.” To Puhl, that doesn’t add up: the surgeon he had been approved to see at an outside hospital was also already going to cost money through the Community Care program.  The rates, Puhl replied, were the problem—not the vets. “If you’re complaining about keeping your job and having money saved, [it’s] $50,000 for 30 minutes to talk to an oncologist,” Puhl said. He then asked why he hadn’t been approved for a new chemotherapy port, which he needed in order to receive inpatient chemotherapy treatment twice a year. The person he spoke with said they weren’t in charge of that denial. A notice Puhl later received, reviewed by Mother Jones, said that a VA surgeon could perform his cancer-related surgery—but the agency had previously referred him to Community Care because it believed that wasn’t the case. It made no sense to him. “If you want to sit there and worry about your job and affect other people’s lives,” Puhl said, “that’s not going to work.” Those delays in care have made Puhl sicker in recent months. It’s not easy to keep up with work—which includes running his own animal rescue service, having a dog training business, and a job at a friend’s mechanic shop—while being in a lot of pain. Dealing with delays to cancer treatment is an extra job that he does not need.  Given the longstanding veterans’ mental health crisis, Puhl is also extremely concerned about the psychological impact of further roadblocks for veterans trying to get the care they need. “What do you think is going to happen next?” Puhl asked, rhetorically.