I’ve needed a break from the constant commentary, hence the slower pace of writing. I have some other topics I want to write about at some point, but for now I thought I’d share a few recommendations and thoughts from recent weeks that I think are important in understanding the bigger picture of recent events.
DOGE
First up are two articles from The Atlantic that provide an essential view of the costs of the activities of the “Department [sic] of Government Efficiency.” Both are worth reading in their entirety if you care about how this is impacting our fellow citizens, but I’ve excerpted some of the more compelling bits.
Federal Workers Are Facing a New Reality
The employees who have so far survived the Trump administration’s federal defenestration project are morose. For some, the new workload is untenable. For others, chaos reigns. Scientists have been unable to purchase mice for research, while human-tissue samples have sat on dry ice, unsent, thanks to worker layoffs. Lawyers at the Education Department are racing through a backlog of complaints from parents of special-needs children. And many employees are learning that teammates have been fired only when they receive an email bounce-back: Address not found.
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In many cases, federal employees are simply unable to do the work for which they are paid by the American taxpayer. “At least 50 percent of my time is devoted to trying to deal with the repercussions, the shock” of having hundreds of colleagues suddenly disappear, including many researchers who oversaw studies, one senior National Institutes of Health scientist based in Bethesda, Maryland, told me. What outside observers haven’t yet grasped, he and other federal employees said, is just how far things have spiraled out of control.
Most federal workers know—and will freely volunteer—that some bloat in government exists. Certain contracts should be reviewed, many acknowledged to me, and particular programs axed. “Do we have to know every single language? Maybe not,” the senior Foreign Service officer told me. “Reasonable people can disagree about whether we need 27 communications shops at NIH,” a retired senior scientist at the agency, who requested anonymity to protect his former colleagues from retaliation, told me. The problem they have is with the administration’s approach—instead of being thoughtful and precise, it looks more like giving a haircut with a hedge trimmer.
For weeks, Trump staffers froze or restricted purchase cards for employees at most agencies, requiring senior approval for even such trivial acquisitions as a replacement cable or a last-minute car rental. Government scientists have felt it most. At NIH, the majority of staff members in the acquisitions office were fired, and researchers were unable to order reagents for experiments or basic tools for cancer-screening studies. One scientist working on a clinical trial to save the lives of children with a severe pediatric disease sent a series of email requests through the usual channels for new supplies, but received only bounce-backs, the Bethesda-based senior scientist told me.
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One of the crown jewels of American government—the world-renowned research-and-development capacity that, back in 1989, discovered the hepatitis C virus and earlier this month announced progress on a breakthrough cancer treatment—is losing its luster. The United States is on the cusp of an unprecedented brain drain: Thanks to other actions by the Trump administration, academic posts are scarce, and the private-sector job pool is already swollen with government refugees. Established NIH scientists told me that they’ve been counseling younger scientists, students, and recent graduates to seek work abroad, where government funding for research is more reliable. “People won’t come here to train; they’ll go to Europe,” the NIH retiree told me. “And China is going to kick our ass.”
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Last month, the Trump administration closed seven of the 12 civil-rights-enforcement offices within the Education Department. Employees at these offices respond to complaints from families of students who need accommodations for learning, many of whom are children with physical and intellectual disabilities. Before January 20, if a complaint came in, staff could usually resolve it within 180 days. Because of the layoffs, one attorney who survived them told me, that will now be impossible. “A student might never hear back,” she said. From her perspective, the Trump administration’s approach boils down to vandalism. “They’re trying to make it so that the systems are so broken that they don’t work, and there’s an argument to get rid of them.”
The Trump administration is asking us to reimagine America as a country that not only does not value public service but actually torments its public servants. Elon Musk, Rolling Stone reported last week, responds to messages about the workers whose lives have been upended, or who fear for the continuity of their research under the DOGE crackdown, with laugh-crying emoji. As the USDA scientist told me: “They don’t see us as people with lives and cares and worries. We’re just those damn federal employees.”
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Many of the scientists at the NIH could find work in the private sector. They could make a higher salary working in agriscience or the pharmaceutical industry, but they’re devoted to the kind of high-risk, high-reward research that only federal resources can facilitate. “It’s one of the things that really made me patriotic—that America was the leader of this,” the Bethesda-based NIH scientist told me, before pausing for a moment. He and so many of the employees who remain are wrestling with a dilemma: Get out now, and spare themselves several more years of stress and contempt—or stay, to keep plugging away on the projects to which they have dedicated, in some cases, most of their life. “You’ve talked to a lot of people,” the scientist said to me at last. “What do you think is the right thing to do?”
The Scramble to Save Rural Health Care From DOGE
Efficiency was not exactly the concern when Waits, a family physician and obstetrician, first started practicing medicine in 2003. He was a doctor’s son who had grown up in Alabama and been raised Southern Baptist, and his most fundamental conviction was that all human beings deserved health care, a belief that almost took him to Indonesia as a medical missionary until that plan got stalled. Instead, he moved to a town called Centreville, the seat of rural Bibb County, on the edge of Alabama’s Black Belt region, a fertile swath of the state defined first by slavery, then by the civil-rights movement, and that was now a lush green landscape of decaying towns, tornado-blasted trailers, chronic illness, and afflictions more common in developing nations.
After one week of seeing patients, Waits realized that the mission field was Alabama. And six months after opening his first clinic inside a red brick house in Centreville, he realized that policy ideas that had enthralled him as a college student, such as health savings accounts for the uninsured, made no sense for people who had nothing to save. He had patients who skipped appointments because they had no gas money. He had one who tried to pay his bill with pine straw, offering to landscape the flower beds outside the [Cahaba] clinic.
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After an elaborate process of getting Cahaba accredited as a teaching health clinic, Waits and Smith welcomed their first group of four residents in 2013. The initial funding allocated $150,000 per resident, enough to pay for their salaries and the support staff needed to retool Cahaba as an educational institution. Smith and Waits were not at all sure the plan would work. But out of the first group of residents, one decided to stay on at the Centreville clinic after she finished. Another one stayed from the second group of four, and out of the third group, all four stayed—a pattern that continued not only at Cahaba but at more than 80 other health clinics that became teaching health centers in other parts of the country. Out of the roughly 2,000 doctors who have graduated from rural residency programs, roughly 70 percent have continued to practice in underserved areas, according to program data.
As a practical matter, the $175 million federal program was creating a steady pipeline of doctors into some of the nation’s worst health-care deserts: places such as the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, inner-city Detroit, and southern West Virginia. And every year, the grant got renewed with bipartisan support, even as Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act dozens of times.
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In a state where at least 14 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, Waits was able to tell the director of Bibb County’s only hospital that he’d never have to worry about recruiting doctors again. In 2015, the hospital reopened its labor-and-delivery unit, the first such unit to launch in Alabama in 20 years. When the mayor of Centreville pitched his town as a retirement destination, he could tell people that, yes, it had doctors and a hospital. Developers were building new housing. The town was repaving roads and sprucing up its downtown facades. By 2023, literally every low-income person in Bibb had access to affordable health care, according to federal data. State data also showed that the county’s infant mortality rate was beginning to drop.
This article does a good job of describing the critical work that little-known Federal grants support, the amount of time and stress those who value the programs are having to spend in order to keep them from being cut, and the ongoing danger to programs like this from a Federal government leadership that assumes the worst about what the government does and which cuts things without caring to understand their value.
The Church, The Pope and Abrego Garcia
As past readers will know, one of my favorite commentators is David French, a conservative evangelical who in my mind is one of the best public examples of how Christians should view and engage with culture and politics. He features in a recurring “French Friday” episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Holy Post. The most recent episode was well worth listening to, as it explores a recent op-ed he wrote in The New York Times about contrasting Christian postures we see in our society: the fear-based church, and the “love your neighbor” church, and applies this framing to the pastoral nature of Pope Francis. They also close with an important conversation about the recent case involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia (The Dispatch also had a good explainer on this recently).
As a bonus, I’d also recommend a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show featuring conservative Catholic Ross Douthat. The discussion centers on Douthat’s recent book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious (Klein is a secular Jew which makes for an interesting conversation) but I particularly enjoyed the ending conversation around how much of our current cultural divisions stem from differences in our view of “official knowledge” and what we believe about truth.
A Few Quick Takes
On the economy: the market has surprisingly shrugged off the “liberation day” tariffs despite the fact that the current state of our trade policy is much worse than most were expecting on April 1. We have a near-embargo on trade with China, 10% or more tariffs on the rest of the world, and nothing concrete to show for it so far despite claims of ongoing negotiations. China is holding firm because they know we rely on them more than they rely on us, and Xi can withstand unpopularity more easily than democratically elected leaders can (especially when his population knows we started this). But even if Wall Street is willing to ignore all this for now, Main Street is not likely to be immune for much longer. We haven’t felt much yet, but that’s largely because lots of importers moved up their orders prior to April and it takes weeks for orders from China to arrive. There are already clear signals that shipping from China is way down, which will likely to hit domestic truckers, importers, manufacturers, small businesses and consumers soon. And once it does, a hit to corporate profits won’t be far behind. I don’t expect this market rally to last much longer; rather, I expect this will turn out to have been what they call a “dead cat bounce.”
On the Ukraine war: I’m grateful that Putin’s continued attacks on Ukranian cities, despite cease-fires and ongoing negotiations, has prompted Trump to finally take a slightly tougher line on Russia. How long this will last is uncertain, but for now at least I’m hopeful that America won’t completely abandon Ukraine as had previously looked likely. Of course, Trump’s approach to this entire conflict has been naive (“I can end the war in 24 hours”) and unpredictable, so who knows, but it’s a rare green shoot and I’ll take it.
On backlash: Tesla’s sales are cratering thanks to Elon’s unpopularity, and Trump’s approval rating is broadly negative and falling fast, including on what had been his strongest issues: the economy and immigration. And this is before many of the consequences have actually affected most Americans. If stagflation is indeed around the corner, things will get a lot worse.
On the state of right-wing populism: Although the U.K. appears to be flirting again with the same foolishness that led them toward Brexit, signs are that populist and nationalist movements in other countries are suffering in large part thanks to America. Canada re-elected a liberal after the conservatives were heavily favored thanks to Trump’s bullying of Canada, and Australia also re-elected a liberal leader. Just as the failure of Brexit dampened anti-EU movements elsewhere in Europe, a bright spot of America’s embrace of populism may be that it strengthens its opposition elsewhere. I remain hopeful that the same will prove true here in future elections.
On executive overreach: Republicans’ willingness to let their President sabotage congressionally established programs and fail to perform his constitutional duty in enforcing laws (like the perpetually postponed TikTok ban) is setting a dangerous precedent for future presidents of either party. America will not be the stable, predictable, prosperous nation it has been if we whipsaw between administrations that set about remaking the Federal bureaucracy every four years. This approach is unsustainable, and I doubt Republicans will be too happy if the next Democratic administration uses the same tactics toward their preferred ends. I am holding out hope that most Democrats are still committed to our constitutional system and will focus on reforming and strengthening it against these sorts of abuses, but that’s not a given. It remains absolutely critical that this approach to governance not become the new normal, but rather the wake-up call that we need to restore guardrails and limits on executive power.