‘Cruelty Is the Point’: The Toxic Trickle-Down of Musk’s Government Purge

On the day of his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order establishing the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. Musk, an unelected advisor to Trump working outside the federal government, lashed out at “unelected” bureaucrats, promising to slash $2 trillion in federal spending and drastically reduce the government workforce. (DOGE, along with its access to troves of federal data, has been subject to multiple ongoing lawsuits.)

According to recent analysis by PEER’s executive director Tim Whitehouse, many of the agencies targeted by DOGE, like the Department of the Interior and the EPA, are far from “bloated.” In fact, most are chronically underfunded and understaffed. By one estimate, it will take 7,000 years for EPA’s chemicals program at current staffing levels to complete its legally-mandated safety review of chemicals currently on the market. Meanwhile, the number of federal employees has remained relatively constant since World War II, while spending by agencies like the EPA, the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes for Health and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association make up a fraction of the federal budget.

PEER began in 1992 with Jeff DeBonis, a U.S. Forest Service ranger in the late 1980s who spoke out against the agency’s clear cutting practices. Today, PEER encompasses public employees working in environmental and health arenas, from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Fish and Wildlife Service to state departments of environmental protection and local conservation commissioners, offering legal protections or even suing on their behalf to expose underlying issues at public agencies. PEER will often take action to ensure workers don’t need to become whistleblowers, Bennett says, as agencies oftentimes “try to kill the messenger instead of dealing with the message.”

Bennett lives in southeastern Massachusetts, and talked with Barn Raiser about her firsthand knowledge of the difficult life of a whistleblower and the current situation facing federal and public employees across the country.

You used to work at the Environmental Protection Agency and now you work at PEER, which represents public employee whistle blowers. Over those past 35 years what has changed and what has stayed the same?

I’ve worked at the EPA under Democratic and Republican administrations, and at PEER I’ve worked under both.

Until Trump, I preferred working under Republican administrations. The Democrats are way sneakier about the bad stuff that they do. Republicans just say, “Screw wetlands. We’re just going to get rid of them all.” But the Democrats are like, “We love wetlands. We’re going to protect them.” And then they issue a rule that basically says wetlands suck and we can fill them all.

So in one sense, it was easier to work under a Republican administration, because they were honest about what they were doing.

That being said, the Trump administration is completely different. It was bad the first time around. This time it is orders of magnitude worse.

It’s basically a coup.

I’ve had to put all my work with state and local employees to the side because the federal employees are suffering enormously. It’s been like trying to drink out of a fire hose.

What are you hearing from the people who are contacting PEER?

Cruelty is the point. Trump told us this is what he was going to do: Make people miserable so that they quit. And that is what he is doing.

Some people who call me from the federal agencies are being fired. Most are calls from people being put on administrative leave, or they’re being ordered to stop work on regulatory enforcement, on any climate change initiatives or all the environmental justice initiatives. The administration is demanding that they take all their pronouns off of their signatures. They’re eliminating remote work and having people return to office.

I had one person tell me that they’re removing all the chairs from the office spaces in Washington so that workers will have no place to sit when they get there. Again, cruelty is the point.

Trump has illegally made executive orders that are attempting to dismantle the checks and balances that are supposed to protect these employees. People don’t understand that these federal employees are the ones standing up for things like safe food, planes that stay in the sky, bridges that don’t collapse, knowledge about diseases that are out there and job safety regulations.

Today he issued an executive order to get rid of ethics laws that prohibit American companies from bribing foreign officials [the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act].

One of the big ones that was really troubling was when Trump fired 17 inspector generals, including the inspector general of the EPA and the inspector general of Department of Interior. According to the law they have to be fired for cause and they have to be given a 30-day notice, but he did it without that.

One of the reasons he fired these IGs was because some of them found that he had done illegal things in the first administration, and he doesn’t want that to happen again.

Another huge thing is schedule F. He’s created this new employment category that strips protections from civil servants so they would become at-will employees and he could fire anyone that he thinks is disloyal to them, which is nuts.

He wants a bunch of yes men. And when I say men, I mean men. They’re no longer funding anything that has the word “woman” or “female” in it. The attack on grants for the National Institutes of Health is also clearly an attack on women.

He issued an order saying that for every rule that comes out under EPA, they have to get rid of 10 rules. That’s going to just bring everything to a grinding halt. He prohibited federal workers from communicating to outside parties like PEER or the media. And he’s firing all the probationary employees. It’s just hit after hit after hit.

Once he pulls all of the employees who have been working remotely back to their offices, at least the D.C. offices, he’s going to close the offices down and send them—he’s said this—to a red state that “loves our country.”

Think about it. People who’ve worked remotely, maybe they live 100 miles away, maybe they live across the country, they’re going to get called back to D.C. They’re going to have to uproot their spouse, their children, and find a place to live. And it’s hard to find month-to-month leases, you know, so they’re probably going to be signing year-long leases. And as soon as they get back, there is no doubt in my mind that he’s going to say, you’re all moving to Amarillo, Texas, or Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Cincinnati, Ohio, or somewhere like that.

Here’s another thing: they’re putting in keystroke software into the computers of federal government employees, which violates some of their collective bargaining unit agreements. There are two reasons they want to do it.

One is to look for keywords. Artificial intelligence can scroll through the software, and it can collect what people are typing. If an employee dare uses a word like “diversity,” they’ll get flagged and presumably fired. Second, it lets them know how much people are typing at their computer. That let’s them come up with some arbitrary metric, say that you must type 60 words every minute. And if you don’t meet that, then can they fire you? I don’t know.

I’m a scientist. I spend a lot of time reading scientific papers or using my calculator and doing math and graphing. I’m not typing. Not all work is typing.

Again, the purpose is cruelty. It is to terrify people, to hound them, to make them uncomfortable, to make them scared.

These are human beings. And he is trying to make them miserable so they quit.

How well has the media, like the New York Times or the Washington Post,  covered what’s happening to federal employees?

Not well enough. I think that the independent media has been doing a lot better. We are in a full-blown constitutional crisis and they’re namby-pambying around.

Honestly, a lot of the people, they’re frightened. I’m not going to lie about that. But they’re also really angry, as they should be.

Here’s a good example: 36 scientists in the EPA’s chemicals and toxics program are standing between every chemical industry in this country and the American public.

And those 36 scientists are not all the same. Some of them are ecotoxologists, some of them are human health toxicologists. There’s only a handful of each kind, and that’s it.

They are all we have standing between you and a license for chemical companies to put whatever poisons they want into the American public. People think when they go to Walmart, Target, Shaw’s, Stop and Shop, Home Depot, Lowe’s or whatever and buy something off the shelf that because it’s legal it’s safe. And that is absolutely not true.

And it’s about to get a lot more not true. When the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) was enacted in 1976, there were 62,000 chemicals already in commerce and EPA didn’t know what to do with those. So they just grandfathered all these in.

Those 62,000 chemicals on the market have never had a risk assessment done. And now they want to gut the program that performs that risk assessment. They are bringing back the chemical industry people who are responsible for a lot of the malfeasance that happened under the first Trump administration.

It’s a shit show. Pardon my language, but this is a dire crisis.

Do you have a sense of how this attack on federal workers is affecting public employees at the state or county levels?

It absolutely has. State and federal laws work in conjunction with each other. Let’s take wetlands laws, for example.

At the federal level, these laws are under section 404 of the Clean Water Act, which is already gutted by Trump’s Supreme Court, but it’s still there. Whenever you want to fill a wetland, you have to get both a federal permit and a state permit from those states that have wetland protection laws. But once the federal laws stop being enforced, or permits stop being issued, all of that work is going to get shifted to the states, and the states don’t have the money or the resources  to take up that void.

Or look at the PFAS regulations. He’s going to yank the new standards that limit PFAS contamination in drinking water. A lot of state laws are tied to the federal laws. In other words, the state laws will say, our drinking water limits are whatever the federal limits are.

So if the federal limits go away, the state limits are going to go away as well. Then everyone’s water is going to get contaminated, and if states or local governments want to keep their people healthy, they’re going to have to spend millions of dollars for filtration systems that a lot of these municipalities don’t have. There’s such a domino effect down to the state and the local level with what’s happening at the federal level that nobody is taking into consideration.

Our rural areas are going to suffer the worst, because rural people rely on federal money for so much.

For example, $2 billion a year of USAID money is spent on red state farmers to buy their lentils and their grains, which are shipped overseas to feed starving people.

Did anyone think about what the funding freeze is going to do to those farmers? And what about the deportations? Even if those farmworkers aren’t being deported, some of them are afraid to come to work. There’s fruits and vegetables rotting on the vines, because most Americans don’t want to do those jobs.

The issue of PFAS contamination with biosolids [sludge from municipal sewer systems] that are spread on farmland. Our farmers are going to be some of the worst hit with all of this.

Is this deregulatory fervor in Washington trickling down to red states?

Yes. I saw Katie Britt, a Republican Senator from Alabama, saying, “Wait a second, we need that NIH money for our universities.” Well, yeah, you do. You’re just realizing now? Republicans seem to not care until it affects them.

Red states are going to suffer way more than the blue states. If you look at a map of how much federal money is given to red states versus blue states, it’s very uneven.

I don’t know why the Republicans are being so compliant. But there are a few instances of Republicans saying, wait a second, this is going to hit my constituents hard.

But shouldn’t we be caring about everybody in America? Shouldn’t we be caring about our food supply? Shouldn’t we be caring about our health? Trump has tried to order the cessation of killing poultry that had bird flu. What! He doesn’t want the price of eggs to go up because that reflects badly on him.

What is happening at the EPA?

Lee Zeldin tweeted something the other day about the five pillars of EPA moving forward.

And one of them was Americans should have access to clean air, water and land. I don’t know what access means. Does that mean you have to drive a hundred miles to get a clean drink of water?

And the other four were like, we’re going to become AI leaders and we’re going to become energy independent. Well, those are not EPA goals. That has nothing to do with protecting the environment and human health.

So out of his five goals, only one of them was about the environment. It made the hairs on the back of my neck rise up.

In January, PEER filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s executive order that turns civil servants to at-will employees. What is PEER’s argument in that lawsuit and what does it hope to win?

We’re trying to prevent it from going into effect and keep civil service protections in place.

PEER is a plaintiff because our job has gotten so much harder with so many federal workers calling us saying, “Oh my God, I’m going to be Schedule F-ed.” Virtually everybody in the EPA inspector general office could fall in this category. The White House says it’s anybody involved with policy.

People don’t go to work for the EPA or any of these federal agencies because they want to get rich or famous. You go there because you care about the issue. Trump wants to fire all these people, people he considers loyalists to the environment or to previous administrations, and put in all his 19-year-old yes-men who know nothing about science or toxicology or anything.

He doesn’t care about the American people. He doesn’t care about the federal workers. He just wants people to defer to him. So yeah, we’re fighting back on that.

And my fear is that he doesn’t seem to be complying with any of the federal judges’ orders so far. Is he waiting until things get up to the Supreme Court? Is he hoping that they’re going to say, “You have immunity. Go ahead and do whatever you want. You are King”? Or will there be enough Supreme Court justices to say, “No, you’ve gone too far.”

What if he doesn’t comply with the Supreme Court? He didn’t with TikTok, right? The TikTok ban was a Supreme Court decision, and he’s ignoring it and nobody’s doing anything.

The Trump administration has a lot of support ranging from Christian Nationalists to industry executives. What are the competing views of our natural world that you see playing out here?  

Even ExxonMobil came out and urged Trump, please don’t get out of the Paris agreement. That’s pretty scary, when you’ve got ExxonMobil saying, don’t do this.

I hate it when politicians say, “I believe in science.” Science is not a belief system. That’s like saying, I believe in math or I believe in French.

At this point, we’ve blown past the 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Under Trump, we’re guaranteed to make it two or three degrees.

This isn’t just going to affect America. This is going to affect every country in the world. And it’s going to make large swaths of this planet uninhabitable by humans, not to mention the loss of biodiversity, which can doom us as well.

I don’t want you to think it’s just climate change. It’s a polycrisis [a situation where multiple crises interact and worsen each other, creating a complex and difficult-to-manage situation].”

Climate change is not the problem to be solved. Climate change is a symptom of ecological overreach, of using far too many resources on a finite planet.

I guess if you want to look for a silver lining in the bird flu, maybe it’ll kill enough people to calm some of that down. Five billion people dying is not a good thing, but that’s a possibility at this point.

I know I sound crazy, but honestly, as a scientist watching these things happen, I can tell you we’re in deep, deep trouble.

It was just announced that Musk’s DOGE team is about to do a huge reduction in force. So if people don’t leave voluntarily and they can’t fire them for cause, they’re just going to say, sorry, we’re cutting your agency down 70%.

Nobody’s going to be able to get permitting done. TSCA [Toxic Substances Control Act] say that the EPA has to review new chemicals going on the market within 90 days. And if the EPA doesn’t give them an answer in those 90 days, chemical companies are going to say, “Okay, great, I can get this chemical out on market.”

It’s a disaster.

What are you hearing from the scientific community?

I’m getting calls from professors at state universities saying, my grant was just pulled, and I have to fire all my grad students and my lab workers.

It is going to bring research to a screeching halt—research that is important for human health and our survival. This is research that gives us medicine, it isn’t just to satisfy scientific curiosity—most of what scientists do has real world implications. Not only is it going to harm our knowledge base, it’s going to put a lot of people out of work.

If universities no longer have the NIH money, they’re going to have to fire their grad students—people who can’t afford to go to grad school without those grants. It’s going to have this trickle-down effect. Unemployment is going to shoot through the roof.

I was always taught that scientists are not supposed to be advocates, we are seekers of truth. We’ve got to throw that away.

I’m speaking at the AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] annual meeting Friday. I was supposed to speak on scientific integrity. But that’s kind of like rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic at this point. I am going to tell this room full of hundreds of scientists, “You need to now be advocates. You need to communicate with people and explain to them why the scientific knowledge is so important.”

Right now, we’re all Cassandra. We were screaming from the rooftops about what we know to be true with climate change, bird flu, the loss of biodiversity—all of these things.

And everyone is like, “Yeah, we don’t believe you, because I can google it.” I was literally in a town meeting, telling people about the PFAS that was in the artificial turf that they were about to put down at a local school.

I am a scientist. I have a Ph.D. and I also have a law degree. And I was sitting there telling the school board about this. None of them had advanced degrees. And one of them said to me, “Dr. Bennett, we so appreciate your expertise, but I Googled it, and it’s safe.”

That’s what we’re facing. For some reason, scientists are viewed as evil, or wrong. People think that a google search is research, that their opinion is as valid as a real scientist’s opinion. And on top of that, we’ve got an administration that’s hostile to science, because science is telling Trump things that he doesn’t want to hear.

It’s a perfect storm of awfulness.

What do you think people can be doing and what the media should be doing  that would be helpful?

I think people should be reading independent media right now. ProPublica has been awesome. The Guardian has been good.

People need to get their news from independent sources, not just the mainstream media. And I think they need to read these smaller publications like yours, because frankly, the mainstream media was complicit in getting Trump into office.

They need to learn that we’re in a crisis and they need to resist and, in any way they can. They need to support federal employees who are being raked over the coals.

I saw some Congressional representatives marching with the unions in D.C. today. People need to start doing the same thing. Regular people need to take to the streets and tell everyone who will listen that this is going to hurt me and you need to do something.

How would you clear up some of the misconceptions out there about federal workers?

I don’t know where they’re getting this story that federal workers are all lazy and liberal. Trump said the other day that people who work from home aren’t really working, they’re golfing. No, that would be him.

This myth that they’re lazy is just simply not true. These people are doing work to protect Americans—all Americans, not just the blue state Americans, all Americans.

It’s important for people to understand that there are a ton of people at the EPA, for example, who have Ph.D.s and can make a fortune working for the American Chemistry Council or some lobbying firm. But no, they’re working at EPA because they care about that work.

People who say we can slash the government, they need to look at the details. Is there waste, fraud and abuse? Absolutely. I’m not going to deny that. But if there is, why did Trump fire all the inspector generals whose job it is to root out that waste, fraud and abuse? If you really look at what they’re calling fraud anything they don’t like. He and Musk, they’re saying, “Oh, that’s fraud.” It’s not fraud.

Justin PerkinsMore by this author →

Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is currently finishing his Master of Divinity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The son of a hog farmer, he grew up in Papillion, Neb., and got his start as a writer with his hometown newspaper the Papillion Times, The Daily Nebraskan, Rural America In These Times and In These Times. He has previous editorial experience at Prairie Schooner and Image.

Joel BleifussMore by this author →

Joel Bleifuss is Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher and Board President of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is a descendent of German and Scottish farmers who immigrated to Wisconsin and South Dakota in the 19th Century. Bleifuss was born and raised in Fulton, Mo., a town on the edge of the Ozarks. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1978 and got his start in journalism in 1983 at his hometown daily, the Fulton Sun. Bleifuss joined the staff of In These Times magazine in October 1986, stepping down as Editor & Publisher in April 2022, to join his fellow barn raisers in getting Barn Raiser off the ground.