While many Trump supporters party on as the Trump/Musk team continues its assault on the federal government, its employees, and the beneficiaries of its programs, some of the rest of us have one question for the President: Why?
We know the official answer: It is to end government waste, fraud, and abuse while reducing the cost of government and regulations at the same time. Forgive me, Mr. President, but I don’t believe you.
Most of Mr. Musk’s shocking discoveries of “fraud” and “waste” are nothing more than programs and expenditures with which he and, presumably, the President disagree. There are no 250-year-old people receiving social security.
And then there is the elephant in the room—the President wants to extend and expand his 2017 tax cuts. The cost is $4.2 trillion over 10 years, according to the Treasury Department. Mr. President, billionaires don’t need another tax cut.
By the way, the Committee for a Responsible Budget says the 10-year cost is between $5 and $11.2 trillion. That is a lot of money.
So, let’s not pretend that the Trump administration has anything to do with a balanced budget or reducing the federal debt, even if Elon Musk’s DOGE is successful in finding $2 trillion in “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The federal debt will increase in the next four years. Mr. President, I know that you know that is true—that is why the House Republican budget resolution raises the debt ceiling.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s first five weeks in office wasn’t just about budget accounting. More worrisome is the absence—I will say complete absence—of any sign of empathy for the thousands of federal employees who have been fired or who are terrified of what Elon Musk and Trump have planned for them.
Setting aside the legal questions regarding the authority of the President to implement wholesale firings and “terminations” of federal agencies without Congressional authorization, there has not been a clue or sign that the administration cares about the impact of the human beings involved. (Federal employees are, without exception, human beings who have feelings and who had, before January 20, 2025, an expectation of being treated with dignity and respect.)
There are hundreds of examples of people who have been fired from their federal jobs and who now face economic crises as a result. There is rent to be paid, food purchases necessary to survive, and new employment to be found. Unfortunately for the summarily fired employees, the job market is flooded with former co-workers.
In the coming months, we will read about some former civil servants becoming homeless, of divorces, and other evidence of despair. I have seen no sign that anyone working for the new administration cares. Have you?
Administration spokespeople will tell you that Americans should celebrate because a burden is being lifted from their shoulders. That message would be easier to accept if the Trump administration did not appear to enjoy the purges now underway.
Did you see Elon Musk dance with a chainsaw, celebrating the work of DOGE, at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting? Any president other than Trump would have fired him on the spot. Instead, Trump posted that Musk is doing a great job, and he would like to see him become “more aggressive.”
The employee purge now underway is only one of the subjects prompting me to ask Trump, “Why?” The others include his controversial cabinet picks. Trump officials, without a single exception, are “not the best.”
I also wonder about increasing signs of coming “retribution” against the President’s perceived enemies. Will Attorney General Bondi, aided by FBI Director Kash Patel, work to indict former President Biden? I expect it. How about former Special Counsel Jack Smith?
What is going on with this administration? Why aren’t more of us raising our voices and asking “Why?” and urging the president to rethink what he’s doing?
One final thought: Ukraine. President Trump has switched sides in the war. He now calls Ukrainian President Zelensky a dictator and accuses him of starting the war. Trump envoys are working on making Vladimir Putin a friend of the United States. Mr. President, Putin will never be my friend.
And then there is Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine into surrendering half its mineral rights. I have a question for you, Mr. President: What sort of person proposes something like that? Sounds like extortion to me. Why, Mr. President, Why? What is wrong with you?
J.E. Dean writes on politics, government, and, too infrequently, other subjects. A former counsel on Capitol Hill and public affairs consultant, Dean also writes for Dean’s List on Medium and Dean’s Issues & Insights on Substack.
Stewart R Seitz says
Mr. Dean . I enjoyed reading your article. For most rational folks in the reading audience there shouldn’t be any doubt as to the overarching purpose(s) of this administration. Clearly ( and we’re only six weeks out from inauguration day) President Trump and his crowd have betrayed the promises to the American public who voted for him with a side dish of destroying a variety of governmental agencies and programs. Not reforming them but a wholesale slaughter !!
Many of my friends and colleagues are astonished as to the speed of the ineptitude taking place before our very eyes and would like to be part of the solution.
When half of the congress can best be described as invertebrate “toadies”, what can the average concerned citizen do besides writing letters to the leadership in Congress, participating in appropriate and targeted boycotts and aligning themselves with appropriate “activist” mobilizations.
Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
John Dean says
Thank you for your reply.
I am working on what people should do–it is not an easy question to answer. I often wonder whether my columns in the Spy make any difference. I’m glad many people seem to agree with me, but wonder if I have persuaded a single Trump supporter to question their support for the President.
Samuel Stokes Tomlin III says
I do not like to post jokes… But I’m a reminded of the one that everyone says that they see a light at the end of the tunnel… This time it is a freight train and I think we will all pay dearly. Thank you so much for your comments.
John Dean says
Thank you for your comment. I am hopeful that the Trump administration will not be as destructive as I fear.
Anne T Stevens says
Thank you for this article. I have wondered ‘why’ for the last 10 years or so. His band of goons enable him and are much to blame. But, I also find myself blaming an ill-informed and ignorant electorate. I feel helpless and mired in ‘why’.
Jack Straw says
Thank you so much for your opinion letter. I totally agree with you. What the president is doing is a farce and a smokescreen. We aren’t going to become great again as we were before he even won his first term. He just wants to make the richest richer and make the hard working people of this country pay for this. I wish people understood they are being bamboozled and hoodwinked. It is time for mass protests here like many cities across the country are doing. Time to stop the craziness and time to stop trump from destroying America for all of us common people.
Beryl Smith says
Your anger is palpable and so should it be for the rest of the country–and I expect it will be in the long run. The question is how long we can wait before it will be too late to put the pieces back together again.
John Dean says
That is a good question. . .
James Nick says
The current administration is an assemblage of servile lackeys and fanatical ideologues. They have absolutely no experience or competence in the areas under their control. They were all recruited from the hermetically-sealed MAGA world where white Christian manly men see themselves as the last bastion of heroic patriots battling wasteful government insanity, liberal, woke hoaxes, cross-border criminal invasions, and LGBTQ depravity. In reality, MAGA world is a fact-free Lake Wobegon suffering from a high prevalence of Dunning-Kruger hubris.
The current administration is a Jenga tower built on absurd conspiracy theories, lies, junk science, magical thinking, irrational economics, a dangerously distorted worldview, and willful ignorance. It will fall. The indiscriminate blunderbuss of recent government layoffs is early evidence that incompetent inmates are now running the asylum.
No one, repeat no one, disagrees that there is waste, fraud, abuse or that there are not many, many opportunities for efficiencies to be made in the government. But what we’re seeing now is not the first attempt to shrink the federal workforce and control waste. In the 1990s, the Clinton-Gore administration launched the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, a task force to reform and streamline the federal government that led to the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs. During its five years, it catalyzed significant changes in the way the federal government operates, including the elimination of over 100 programs, the elimination of over 250,000 federal jobs, the consolidation of over 800 agencies, and the transfer of institutional knowledge to contractors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinventing_Government).
But even if the ENTIRE civilian government workforce was cut it would only save about 6-7% of the federal budget. It amounts to pocket change. It’s money under the sofa cushions. Everyone knows that the big ticket budget items that move the needle are mandatory programs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, unemployment insurance and SNAP (60%), defense (13%), and interest on the debt(13%).
One simple truth is that we have a debt problem because we spend too much. The other simple truth is that our social programs are not just popular but have become fundamental for maintaining the health and welfare of the vast majority of this country. This leads to the last simple truth: we tax ourselves too little.
Until and unless politicians stop wanting to be Santa Claus when they get in office and come to grips with this reality, there is no hope out of our debt and deficit problem.
John Dean says
Great comment. Thank you for it. As you may have guessed, I agree with you.