Drain the Swamp. President Donald Trump campaigned thrice – and won twice – on that promise, and now he’s making good on it. Though the mass reduction of the federal workforce was temporarily paused by a federal judge, the US Supreme Court cleared the way on Tuesday, July 8. And the White House isn’t wasting any more time.
Justice for the Federal Workforce?
President Trump signed an executive order on February 11 that instructed federal agencies to enact massive “reductions in force,” but that directive was blocked by a federal judge in California. The Supreme Court, however, granted an emergency appeal from the administration, seeking permission to enforce the order. The High Court ruled 8-1 that, though it was not addressing the legality of the layoff plans, the administration is free to continue downsizing while litigation continues.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole justice arguing in favor of the lower court injunction – and she had quite a lot to say on the matter. While the nearly unanimous ruling was just a couple of paragraphs long, Justice Jackson penned a 15-page dissent.
“For some reason,” she argued, “this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation. In my view, this decision is not only truly unfortunate but also hubristic and senseless.”
Her passionate dissent was so radically opposed to the eight-justice majority that her fellow liberal, Sonia Sotomayor, felt the need to counter it. “I agree with Justice Jackson that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates,” Sotomayor wrote. “Here, however, the relevant Executive Order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force ‘consistent with applicable law’ … and the resulting joint memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management reiterates as much.”
You’re Fired!
Again, the Court didn’t rule on the merits of the layoffs themselves, but the majority did mention they were likely to affirm that power when it eventually makes its way to them. In any case, the president and his department heads aren’t going to wait around and find out – and the Department of State is leading the charge.
The State Department notified employees Thursday evening, July 10, that widespread layoffs would be coming “soon.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced his intent to remove or consolidate hundreds of offices. Though no final number has been announced since the federal workforce reduction was cleared to resume, the State Department has previously said it would cut 3,400 positions and that, after accounting for voluntary, incentivized resignations, about 2,000 people are expected to be laid off.
The agencies now freed from the injunction include Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Health and Human Services, Justice, Labor, Treasury, State, Veterans Affairs, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Social Security Administration. Any one of them could be next, though the VA has already seen 17,000 employees resign since January and expects another 12,000 to leave by the end of September. As a result, Secretary Doug Collins says they won’t need to conduct widespread layoffs. Before this announcement, the plan – according to a memo leaked to the press – was to cut 76,000 employees.
What’s This Country Coming To?
The American Federation of Government Employees, a labor union and one of the plaintiffs that sued the government over the federal workforce reduction, took quite an apocalyptic view of the situation. The court has “dealt a serious blow to our democracy,” it argued, adding that this “puts services that the American people rely on in grave danger.”
While estimates vary, the total cuts so far seem to fall somewhere between 275,000 and 285,000. The New York Times, for example, tracked at least 58,500 confirmed cuts, 76,000 buyouts, and 149,000 planned reductions. That comes out to 283,500 – or about 12% of the civilian federal workforce, leaving around 2.3 million employees.
How will America survive without anyone steering the ship? Well, the facts of the matter are that the federal workforce has swollen to well beyond what it historically has been, and these massive cuts, while impressive, fall far short of two of Trump's predecessors' records – both Democrats.
As Liberty Nation News reported back in April, the last time we checked in on the president’s efforts to drain the Swamp, Harry S. Truman and Bill Clinton both have him beat – and by quite a lot. Clinton eliminated somewhere in the vicinity of 399,000 civilian jobs from the federal workforce, and Truman cut about 566,000. Trump is now solidly in third place, but there remains a considerable gap between the leaders.
As well, his reduced employment numbers aren’t even the lowest in the modern era. Truman brought the post-war workforce from a high of 3.1 million to just 1.8 or so in 1948. There were about 2.5 million when he left office in 1953. Clinton brought the numbers down from about where they are now to a low of 1.8 million. It hovered around the 1.9 million to 2 million mark for several years from 2020 through 2023, as well as for much of the 2010s. Note how the government didn’t collapse entirely, and Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, Veterans Affairs, Pell Grants, and student loans didn’t stop paying out. Utilities didn’t fail, national parks didn’t close en masse, and the mail didn’t stop running. In short, our country did not go – as the saying goes – to Hell in a handbasket due to a lack of federal workers. If anything, the government somehow seemed to grow more intrusive into the lives of its citizens each year in the post-9/11 and then post-COVID world, not less. So much for democracy and government services being in “grave danger.”
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