We Are Living in a New Reality
In the name of eradicating waste and fraud and “making America great again,” President Trump has found common cause with a highly organized 40 year project to create a “unitary presidency” and to unravel many features of the US’s regime of fairness and dignity. This project is most clearly laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a document written in part by Russell Vought, who has recently been confirmed as head of the Office of Management and Budget. President Trump has also found common cause with the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, to whom Trump has given carte blanche under the auspices of a government department - the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE - created with no congressional approval, to fire federal employees and cut agencies without any discriminatory protocols. By this means, in the past four weeks, President Trump has been presiding over the dismantling of the world’s oldest and most influential democracy.
No one questions the importance of addressing the US’s trillion-dollar debt. And it would be naïve to suppose there are no areas of the federal government where waste could be cut. Nor would anyone dispute that the US system for handling matters relating to immigration is seriously broken. Over and above these premises, it is no secret that the situation of blue-collar workers in the US has been undermined by forty years of diverting industry overseas, leaving possibilities for livelihood, pride, and meaning-making in the dust. And beyond that, angst is understandably growing everywhere in the face of the world’s breakneck speed of change, leading all of us to believe deeply in the need for new approaches to governance.
The rapidity with which Donald Trump’s government has acted would be admirable if we could see that its initiatives were leading to a thoughtful reinvention of American institutions. And we can’t entirely dismiss that possibility in a few cases. But we are now seeing individuals with little knowledge and no experience of what our government does being let loose to apply a wrecking hammer. Elon Musk’s free rein allows him to eliminate all barriers to his own business interests, to be Donald Trump’s representative in challenging guardrails and checks that protect government, to blur the division between governance and politics. Some are arguing that it is now Elon Musk, not Donald Trump, who runs the US government. All these actions suggest the imposition of an authoritarian regime that takes no notice of Congress’s role in governance.
This is not conservatism, because conservatism means slow evolution, protecting existing institutions from rapid change. It is not populism, because populism operates in the interests of the non-elite, whereas many of the programs that protect the vulnerable have been placed on the chopping block in the first four weeks of this administration. These actions amount to an authoritarian takeover, where guardrails have been destroyed, and arbitrary orders delivered that require tests of allegiance or firing. A number of these actions are clearly contrary to the wellbeing of citizens of the US, and contrary to President Trump’s campaign promises to reduce inflation and increase the welfare of Americans.
DOWNSIZING GOVERNMENT AT WHAT COST?
Plenty of statistics are available, and the only difficulty with providing them is that they change every day. A comprehensive list of federal government layoffs as of February 19 can be found here. Some highlights: the federal government has offered early retirement to all federal employees who wish to take this offer, and so far 75,000 have signed on, though the program has been temporarily halted by a judge who is looking into the repercussions. DOGE’s layoffs will prioritize all probationary federal workers, which means anyone who has worked for the government for less than a year. Numbers involved are not entirely clear but there were 200,000 such workers as of March 2024, whose jobs are therefore immediately on the line. 1,300 of these are at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making up one-tenth of the workforce in that body. The jobs of more seasoned civil servants are also on the line: 5,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services, 1,000 from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Department of Education is having $900 million cut from its institute that tracks student performance, and it is unclear whether the institute will continue to exist.
Many who voted for Trump applaud all of the above as a good and necessary reduction in government spending. The crucial question is at what cost does all this occur to the American people and the country’s future as a democratic government?
Some provisional answers:
Firing seventeen Inspectors General without giving Congress the required 30 day notice removes government employees who are already doing precisely what President Trump claims he wants to do: eliminating fraud and abuse in government at the federal, state and local level. The logicality of this move can only be understood as a power play, testing the willingness of the system to push back, and showing that Trump-Musk will call the shots on how things are done even if they are being done very well already.
The directive to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, will make it difficult for anyone to speak honestly in public about racism or exclusion because they will be open to accusations of using DEI language. This could end up being one place where the issue of free speech will be put to the test.
Trump’s announcement that the Gulf of Mexico will now be called the Gulf of America seems laughable, but when Associated Press continued to use the term Gulf of Mexico because it serves an international clientele, it was shut out of the White House press briefings. This is even more serious than it sounds, because Associated Press holds a unique position in the journalism pool for its highly trusted and longstanding role in global journalism. It is the US’s largest, and until recently the world’s largest, press agency, servicing thousands of other journalistic outlets. Trump’s action is a highly thought-out tactic to assert power and create precedents for limiting free speech.
In bulldozing Federal agencies through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has brought in a group of young people with no experience or understanding of the role played by government workers who now have to access government records and private information. The highly prized “right to privacy” is thus also being threatened. This situation plays out in its most acute form with regard to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where Musk and his people initially attempted a level of access to information – through the Integrated Data Retrieval System - that even the head of the IRS does not have, because the need to protect this elaborate system is so prized. Fortunately, yesterday the Treasury Department cut across the White House’s acceptance of this and forbad DOGE from accessing individuals’ personal tax information, though DOGE is persisting in its bid to get access to medical files of the Social Security Administration.
With regard to the US’s stance on the global stage, the decision to cut over 800 existing programs from the US’s foreign assistance agency , USAID, and to lay off approximately 10,000 people employed by USAID, removes one of the most important means by which the US reinforces good relations with the rest of the world, quite apart from the substance of the work it does. This action is a brutal removal of humanitarian aid in numerous areas.
ABANDONING UKRAINE’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
Blaming Ukraine for the war it is fighting is a blatant untruth and a declaration that the US is no longer the world’s ultimate defender of freedom. US actions in the past week in relation to Ukraine have raised questions for Europeans about whether the longstanding Atlantic Alliance still stands. And the Trump administration’s criticism of the EU because “it has too many rules” and thus interferes with the goals of American tech companies has reinforced concern about the demise of trans-Atlantic ties. Comments one columnist, “The era of international gangsterism has arrived.”
In addition, Trump’s government has placed our justice system under assault. A series of examples of this are available, but consider, as one case, the offer made to New York Mayor Eric Adams to have his corruption indictment removed if he cooperates with the Federal Government’s immigration agenda as it relates to New York City. The prosecutor who was ordered to drop the case, a Republican who had, in her early career, clerked for two of our most far-right Supreme Court Justices, resigned immediately, and seven other prosecutors have followed suit. Now four deputy mayors of New York City are threatening to resign as a vote of no-confidence in their Mayor. People are taking a costly stand against Trump’s Justice Department, because they see a blatant attempt to introduce political manipulation into the legal system.
In sum, these actions and others threaten to endanger us all if they alienate us from our allies, undermine our dedication to truth, freedom and global humanitarian solidarity, and produce an apathetic population that is amenable to a power grab.
Highlighting the courageous actions of individuals who have found ways to push back is part of the task of We Are One Humanity. Another task is to help our readers keep perspective on the larger significance of this turn of events.
CAN WE GROW TO MEET OUR GLOBAL CHALLENGES?
The emergence of so many democratically elected far-right governments that are questioning long-held assumptions about fair, just and inclusive politics, underlines that humanity is at a turning point. “Turning point” language has been used many times before but has never been more true. This moment of truth is prompted by the coalescence of a number of mounting challenges: pressures of immigration, climate change, shifts in understanding of the nature of morality and values, disrupted economic patterns caused by the pandemic, failures over the past forty years to address the economic realities of the hardest working people in a number of countries, not least the world’s wealthiest country, an overly intellectualized university-educated elite that lacks attunement to core economic needs of people not like them, accumulating power of a small number of the very wealthy, and a shifting international security picture that allows older assumptions to be called into question.
A large body of people exists globally who believe very significant changes are needed for us to be able to function on the planet both within our countries and in our relationships to others. Tensions between realism about a range of economic considerations, and concerns about justice, dignity and fairness, underlie the debate for even the most sincere and least self-serving people.
We, the residents of this planet, don’t have fully developed answers to these large conundrums. But we have many of the raw materials to create answers, if we will choose to use them. This is a moment of deciding who we are. It is not an academic matter, it is an existential matter. It is a time for those who believe we can grow to meet our challenges to find common cause by embracing essential honesty about our situation and truth in our discussions.
