Mike Phipps reviews American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, by Sasha Abramsky, published by OR Books.

Within days of taking office, President Trump empowered Elon Musk to make swingeing cuts to the US’s most important government agencies. The ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) was not a properly constituted government department, set by Congress. It was a shadow government agency, aimed at destroying government functionality.

For those on the receiving end, some of its operations were truly Orwellian. Workers at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau were told not to come into the office, which was closed, and not to perform any work tasks. Eighteen days later they were required to fill out a Musk-mandated questionnaire listing what they had done over the previous week. Their limited answers would be used to justify their dismissal. Elsewhere, remote workers were instructed to return to offices with no furniture, where the heating and air conditioning had been turned off.

American Carnage follows eleven federal workers in eight different agencies following the moment they were fired. But tens of thousands of people were affected by the deletion of Congressionally mandated programmes deemed antithetical to the prejudices of the new government. Some were frog-marched out of the building; many lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in expected earnings, and were unlikely in late middle age to find new work. Some lost their vital medical insurance; many suffered extreme anxiety.

The breadth of destruction was vast. It hit services to disabled veterans, health care, cancer research, anti-corruption investigations and much more. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) was denounced by Musk as a “criminal organization”. Its termination would lead to millions of preventable deaths worldwide.

Many who lost their jobs had only just started: sacking probationary workers was easy, ‘low-hanging fruit’ for Musk’s eager, ignorant teams. They would get no severance pay or anything else. One woman who was recruited to a post at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and had to relocate from Pennsylvania to Boulder, Colorado, took a five-day road trip 2,000 miles out to her new job when she was told it had been deleted – along with her health insurance. She suffered from Crohn’s disease.

Some of the fired workers applied unsuccessfully for hundreds of jobs. One was told to tone down her USAID employment history, since in the new Trump era, potential employers would regard it as “toxic”.  

The human stories here are shocking. Many of the victims of this purge are now on medication, exhibiting symptoms akin to trauma. The firings also underline how precarious one’s existence in the US can be, with so much healthcare provision dependent on one’s easily terminated employment. But what’s especially galling is how little Congress did to defend the programmes which it had itself created – and the way many of the courts rolled over to let Trump do whatever he wanted.

What DOGE did was never about improving government efficiency. It was intended primarily to cow the civil service, to show those who kept their jobs the fate that could await them if they failed to comply with the new regime.

The project’s wide brief also allowed the incoming administration to break down the departmental barriers between different sets of data. Put bluntly, the information gathered from the Housing and Social Security Departments could be used by ICE to hunt down migrants. It also allowed Musk to harness huge amounts of data for his own tech empire.

Speaking in London recently about his book, Sasha Abramsky underlined some of the other consequences of the purge. Now that Trump is bombing Iran with no clear aim in a war that many say Israel has been trying to involve the US for decades, it’s obvious that the key expert energy analysts were simply no longer there to tell Trump about the likely consequences of his action – they had all been fired, courtesy of Elon Musk’s attack on the federal government.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.