Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Kate Aronoff: Thanks for having me.
Aronoff: I think it’s been clear how little coherence there is to anything that’s happening within the Trump administration, in that to even describe it as an administration is [giving] it too much credit. What we’ve seen is that there are various agency heads which may or may not have very much power, and then Musk [who] goes in and mucks around in everything that they’re doing. That became very clear in this meeting today. And that generates, obviously, a lot of dissensus and chaos both within the agencies and within this thing called the Trump administration, which at any given point looks very different.
Aronoff: Well, exactly. The stunning thing about that exchange in particular, having covered Sean Duffy a little bit, is that it takes a lot to make Sean Duffy seem like a coolheaded, even-keeled guy. This is the same person who proposed tying transportation funding to higher birth rates and marriage rates in different governments around the country. It’s nuts. You have that exchange, and then at the tail end of that, Trump chimes in and says, We should hire people who have high IQs from MIT to be air traffic controllers. So it is just a mess.
Aronoff: Right. And clearly, to read not too far between the lines of that, Elon must saw a person of color who is an FAA employee, right? That is what all of this means: He just wants to fire as many people of color as possible, and will call them DEI hires or whatever he wants to in order to do that.
Aronoff: Yeah. Just to back up a little bit, insofar as most people know what NOAA is, they know that it makes weather forecasts or maybe that it does some scientific research. But what I, as a climate reporter, didn’t know really until this week is that NOAA has a really vast array of functions that it performs that businesses take for granted, that other government agencies, including parts of the U.S. military, take for granted. These include its website operations, which keep ships from crashing into each other, which, as the people who I talked to said, monitor very large watersheds for things like algal blooms, which can produce toxins, which have been known to poison dogs, cause nausea in humans, [and] are just really nasty things if they get into the water supply.
Sargent: And agencies rely on each other for this stuff. I think that’s a critical point here, isn’t it? The U.S. military relies on NOAA. Can you talk about that element of it? It’s not like you can just hive off the functions of an agency like NOAA and then just forget about it, you know what I mean?
From talking to people across NOAA, both in that research outfit and elsewhere, these cuts were totally indiscriminate with really little attention, or any attention, paid to whether the people they were firing did things which would pose real material dangers to the U.S. and, in the case of the Great Lakes, to Canada, to other countries, too, if they’re fired.
Aronoff: Yeah, and I think you only have to look at what happened to X, the everything app, formerly Twitter, or even at Tesla to see the model here, which is to come in, slash as quickly as possible, regardless of how much chaos or real danger it causes. With something like Tesla where you have people dealing with, in some cases, dangerous chemicals, with really harsh industrial working conditions, if you say the rules don’t matter, rules are for losers, then people get hurt. And I think that happened at Tesla, and that’s happening now in the U.S. government with Musk in the reins.
Aronoff: On the NOAA firings briefly, one idea I had before reporting this piece was that they were going through cutting things that maybe had the word “climate” in the name or “environment” because they thought they were stupid or wasteful. But it’s actually a lot dumber than that. The people who were fired, who I spoke with, were probationary employees, which includes people who were recently hired, younger people who have very specific skills and are eager to put them to use for the U.S. government, [and] also people who have been in NOAA for a long time either as contractors who were recently brought onto the Fed side or who were promoted recently—so people who were actually doing very well at their jobs and had gotten new positions because of it. That was across the board.
Sargent: It’s all so ridiculous. The Times reported on another clash between Musk and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, who said that firing huge amounts of people from V.A. might actually have bad consequences. This one is politically really dicey for them, but again, Musk doesn’t care. He’s not the one who will be on the hook. At the end of the day, it seems to me this is the crux of the issue, the crux of the conflict. These guys don’t want to be held accountable for Musk’s lunacy, do they?
The U.S. government employs a lot of veterans. And because of these firings, a lot of veterans will lose their jobs at the hands of Elon Musk. And that is just transparently a political disaster that you don’t need to do a lot of polling to recognize.
Anoroff: Right. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this funny, but one interesting thing, looking at the USAID situation just from a left foreign policy perspective, is that it’s not exactly controversial to say that USAID is a tool of American soft power, right? That is a way that the U.S. accomplishes goals around the world and does many things that make people’s lives better—and it is not just charity. USAID is a way that the U.S. improves its reputation in various parts of the world, and that does good things and also has a real politic element to it that has not been secret at all. And so one would expect that that Marco Rubio, foreign policy hawk that he is, would support that. But also, a defining feature of this administration is that it’s full of cowards. And so he is, like his colleagues, a coward, and [he] will not stand up to Trump because he doesn’t want to or is afraid to. It doesn’t really matter why, but nobody in this administration seems willing to speak ill of anything their boss is doing.
Aronoff: I am weary to say that the people that Donald Trump has appointed will themselves act as a bulwark against Musk. I think the hopeful thing we could say maybe is that there is so much chaos within this cabinet and Musk’s influence over every part of that that parts of that will start to break down, that it will become overwhelmed by its own contradictions and start to become unfunctional. It is not functional to a large degree already—but as this continues insofar as it does, you might have things start to break down in a way that becomes much more obvious, and then hopefully that doesn’t harm too many people in the process.
Sargent: I do think it’s plausible. One other point to close this out, you mentioned that there are basically contradictions inside this project. And I think that’s really key. In fact, the contradictions can be mapped onto the MAGA coalition in a way. The MAGA coalition is getting strained by these contradictions. You’ve got, as you said, a lot of veterans in the federal workforce. We’re seeing on the news now lots of veterans getting quoted with some form of buyer’s remorse and complaining about what’s happening, rightly so. You’ve now got Musk digging around in Social Security, and there are a lot of aging working-class whites in the MAGA coalition.
Aronoff: I think there is a limit to just how much can be slashed before people get fed up, whether that’s the midterms or at some point before. The real question is: If it is the case that these cuts will stop at some point, that Musk gets kicked out, that we return to something that seems a little bit more like a normal government, how much damage is done before then? How many more people get hurt? How many essential government functions are degraded or privatized or sold off in some other way? And that’s a really scary question. I don’t think this will go on forever, but I think a lot of people can get hurt for as long as it does go on.
Anoroff: Well, I’m a climate reporter. I don’t get to talk about cheery things too much. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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