Category
Gutting agencies, mass firings, destroying institutional capacity
26 incidents
DOGE's elimination of the State Department's energy diplomacy bureau months before the Iran war left the U.S. without key personnel who monitored energy chokepoints, oil markets, and Iranian energy infrastructure — capabilities now desperately needed during a conflict centered on the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's oil economy.
RFK Jr.'s dismantlement of federal health agencies during an active measles crisis — including firing vaccine advisors, cutting thousands of positions, and clawing back billions — has resulted in the worst measles outbreak in 30+ years and threatens America's measles-elimination status.
The Department of Education serves approximately 50 million K-12 students through Title I funding to schools serving low-income students, special education grants under IDEA, and civil rights enforcement under Title IX and other statutes. It administers the federal student loan system covering 43 million borrowers. The mass staff reductions — approximately 1,300 of 4,000 positions initially — severely affected the agency's capacity to process loan applications, investigate civil rights complaints, and distribute funding to schools. Schools serving the highest-need students, which depend most heavily on Title I funding, faced the greatest uncertainty.
DOGE fired over 600 National Weather Service employees including hurricane hunters, meteorologists, and storm modelers, leaving 30 forecast offices without lead meteorologists. The NWS Goodland, Kansas office became the first to abandon 24/7 operations. Five former NWS directors warned the cuts endanger lives heading into tornado and hurricane season.
DOGE fired 350 NNSA nuclear weapons workers, including warhead assemblers at Pantex and radioactive waste managers at Savannah River, as part of a 2,000-person Department of Energy purge. Most firings were rescinded within 24 hours after bipartisan alarm over nuclear stockpile security, but the incident exposed DOGE's indiscriminate approach to agencies with critical national security functions.
The systematic dismantlement of the Department of Education began with DOGE slashing $881 million in research contracts and eliminating IES, followed by cutting half the workforce, and culminated in an executive order to shutter the entire department.
DOGE operationally shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a Congressionally-created agency protecting 330 million Americans from financial fraud — by ordering staff to cease all work, deleting social media accounts, and planning to fire nearly all 1,700 employees. Federal courts intervened but the agency remains gutted.
Mass layoffs at the FDA driven by the Department of Government Efficiency eliminated over 3,500 staff in 2025, causing foreign food safety inspections to drop by nearly half, outbreak investigations to go unsolved at record rates, and critical programs like avian influenza testing to be halted.
DOGE directed mass firings of probationary employees, coerced ~75,000 resignations through the 'Fork in the Road' program, and orchestrated reductions in force totaling ~300,000 federal positions. Courts found the probationary firings illegal, but the Supreme Court sided with the administration on appeal.
Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general across the federal government without the advance notice to Congress that the Inspector General Act generally requires, and a later federal ruling said the notice failure violated the statute.
Schedule F reclassification targets 50,000 federal employees for removal of civil service protections, enabling political firing for 'subversion of presidential directives.' The rule strips appeal rights, whistleblower protections, and Merit Systems Protection Board access, drawing lawsuits from over 30 organizations.
An unprecedented withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, UNFCCC, and IPCC, combined with the rescission of the endangerment finding and rollback of 31+ environmental rules, constitutes the most comprehensive destruction of environmental protections in US history. The actions remove the world's largest historical emitter from the international climate framework while eliminating domestic regulation of greenhouse gases.
A systematic effort to dismantle federal disaster preparedness and response capacity through budget cuts, mass layoffs, program terminations, and structural reorganization. FEMA's workforce has already shrunk by one-third, with plans to cut it in half. The disaster response workforce faces a 41% cut and the surge workforce an 85% cut, leaving the country dangerously unprepared for hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, and other disasters.
A systematic dismantlement of OSHA's regulatory and enforcement capacity through mass deregulation, inspector cuts, and penalty reductions that experts warn will lead to preventable worker deaths across construction, manufacturing, and agricultural sectors.
DOGE operated as an unaccountable parallel executive structure. Musk's associates accessed federal payment systems, personnel databases, Social Security administration data, IRS systems, and classified networks. Congress had not authorized DOGE to exist, to fire employees, or to redirect agency funds. Courts issued numerous injunctions against DOGE actions. Multiple agencies had their websites taken offline, their career employees locked out, and their operations functionally suspended within weeks of inauguration. USAID was effectively eliminated — folded into the State Department without Congressional action — ending decades of foreign assistance infrastructure. Federal workers who objected or filed suit faced retaliation.
Schedule F's reclassification potentially covered hundreds of thousands of federal workers, stripping civil service protections that prevent politically-motivated firing. The 'deferred resignation' buyout offer — which OPM claimed would allow employees to stop working but continue receiving pay until late September 2025 — was sent without adequate legal review; courts later found the offer may not have been lawfully authorized. Tens of thousands of workers accepted. Agencies including USAID, the Department of Education, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were simultaneously subject to mass reductions in force. By spring 2025, an estimated 100,000+ federal workers had left or been terminated.
Systematic destruction of the US Agency for International Development resulted in termination of lifesaving programs across the developing world, with The Lancet projecting 9.4 million additional preventable deaths by 2030.
Systematic destruction of the government oversight apparatus: 17 inspectors general fired, heads of the Office of Special Counsel and Office of Government Ethics removed, whistleblower retaliation cases up 9x at DOE, and federal employees reporting fear of speaking up or reporting wrongdoing.
The US withdrew from the WHO effective January 2026, removing the organization's largest funder and dismantling pandemic preparedness infrastructure. The WHO announced plans to cut 2,300 jobs — 25% of its workforce. The withdrawal degrades global disease surveillance, influenza vaccine matching, and outbreak response capacity at a time of ongoing zoonotic disease threats.
Bob Woodward's taped interviews revealed Trump said in February 2020 that COVID-19 was 'deadly stuff' and 'more deadly than even your strenuous flus' — while publicly calling it 'no worse than the flu' and 'a Democratic hoax.' The administration rejected WHO tests, blocked CDC mask guidance, slow-walked ventilator production, pressured states to reopen prematurely, promoted hydroxychloroquine against scientific evidence, and suggested people inject disinfectant. By Inauguration Day 2021, 400,000 Americans were dead.
Net neutrality rules required internet service providers to treat all internet traffic equally — not to slow down or block Netflix while favoring their own streaming service, or charge websites for premium delivery. The repeal allowed ISPs to create tiered access to the internet. The FCC's public comment process was flooded with millions of fake comments submitted using stolen identities; the New York attorney general investigated. Pai's arguments that the repeal would increase broadband investment were contradicted by ISPs' own earnings statements and CEO comments to investors.
Maria caused the largest blackout in U.S. history and destroyed Puerto Rico's infrastructure. The Trump administration delayed FEMA resources, deployed far fewer personnel and supplies than comparable mainland disasters, slow-walked waiver of the Jones Act, sent paper towels rather than aid at a critical moment, and accused Puerto Rican officials of corruption when they asked for more help. Harvard researchers estimated 2,975 excess deaths; the Trump administration initially reported 64.
The administration's attempt to repeal and replace the ACA failed through three separate legislative vehicles: the American Health Care Act (AHCA) passed the House but died in the Senate; the Better Care Reconciliation Act failed to advance in the Senate; and the 'skinny repeal' (Health Care Freedom Act) failed 51-49 when McCain, Murkowski, and Collins voted against it. Following legislative failure, the administration cut the Navigator program (enrollment assistance) from $63 million to $10 million, reduced the open enrollment window, and created an association of short-term health plans that could deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. Termination of cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers triggered premium increases and a complex subsidy dynamic that ultimately cost the government more than the payments themselves.
The Paris Agreement was the result of two decades of diplomatic effort to establish a global framework for addressing climate change. Trump withdrew citing economic impacts that were disputed by most economists, a commitment to the 'forgotten workers' of coal country, and a broader rejection of international cooperation he described as harmful to American sovereignty. Scientists and diplomats documented the withdrawal's immediate effect on global climate negotiations and the precedent it set for other countries.
Trump's first budget proposal, released May 23, 2017, proposed over $3 trillion in safety net cuts over 10 years — including $610 billion in Medicaid cuts through block grant conversion, $193 billion in SNAP cuts, and $64 billion in Social Security disability cuts. The proposals contradicted Trump's repeated campaign promise not to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. While the budgets were largely dead on arrival in Congress, they represented the administration's stated priorities and established the ideological context for the ACA repeal effort. In February 2020, Trump's budget proposed cutting Social Security disability insurance by $70 billion.
Having failed to repeal the ACA legislatively (defeated by the 51-49 Senate vote, including John McCain's thumbs-down), the Trump administration used regulatory and administrative mechanisms to undermine it: eliminating the individual mandate penalty, cutting navigator and outreach funding from $63 million to $10 million, supporting a lawsuit arguing the entire ACA was unconstitutional, and expanding short-term health plans that excluded pre-existing conditions. CBO projected these actions would cause 10-13 million people to lose insurance.