The DOGE Time Bombs

Cutting the size of the federal government has been popular for a long time—especially among Republican presidents and presidential candidates. But Democratic presidents have championed the cause as well, most recently President Bill Clinton who assigned Vice President Al Gore the task of “reinventing” the federal government. However, no president has gone about this task the way Donald Trump has. While Bill Clinton and Al Gore used a scalpel to downsize government without threatening important functions, Donald Trump and the man he chose to lead his effort, Elon Musk, attacked it with a chainsaw.

Calling themselves DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—Musk, and the people he brought into the government, (mostly young people from Musk’s businesses with no government experience) began cutting civil servants and contracts with no regard for the law or for the functions that Congress had authorized and that the public had come to expect.

In 1993, I was chosen by Vice President Gore to lead the Clinton Administration’s Re-Inventing Government effort (REGO). Looking back, there are three major differences in the Clinton and Trump approaches to government reform, which will lead to different outcomes.

Timing. Clinton’s government reform effort lasted the entirety of his presidency, brought in permanent employees in every agency, and had goals and metrics that were measured and reported. In contrast, DOGE’s effort was fast and furious. It began days after the inauguration, while Cabinet secretaries were still preparing for their Senate confirmations. Its leader, Elon Musk, and those he brought with him were “special government employees,” not permanent members of the civil service. The law limits special government employees to 130 days of employment, so the DOGE effort began with an end date in mind. As Administration officials were confirmed, the DOGE effort came in for a constant struggle with Trump’s newly appointed Department heads, to the point that Musk was defenestrated by the Administration’s own team.

Personnel. REGO’s staff was recruited from among the civil servants. In recruiting, Vice President Gore looked for people who were known as change agents within their departments. Because they came from government, they understood government and the mission of different agencies. DOGE was led and staffed by 128 mostly young tech staffers with no government experience, who, therefore, had to learn about government and reform it on the fly.

A Theory of the Case. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s 1992 book on reinventing government provided the architecture¹ behind the REGO effort to “impart private sector techniques to make government more results-oriented.” As in Osborne’s book, the REGO effort spent little time questioning the purpose of government and more time on how to achieve the government’s missions more effectively. REGO moved slowly so as not to disrupt the crucial role² government plays in the lives of Americans. The REGO effort was an optimistic one to "replace red tape with results,"³ and to achieve "customer satisfaction,"⁴ with the customer being the taxpayer. The result of Clinton’s REGO was better government, as evidenced by a 19-point boost in Americans’ trust in the federal government between the start of his government reform effort (25%) and the end of his presidency (44%).

In contrast, the DOGE team adopted a radical version of the Republican party’s traditional antipathy towards big government.  This led DOGE to cut civil servants and contracts with no regard for the law or for the functions that Congress had authorized and that the public had come to expect. In addition, Musk brought with him a Silicon Valley theory of change – “move fast and break things.” Using AI to examine government databases without even a partial understanding of the mission of the agency they were looking at, the DOGE team made frequent and embarrassing mistakes. For instance, attacks were made on funding for “transgenic mice.” The DOGE team assumed this had something to do with transgender.  But in fact, “transgenic mice” are mice that are produced in a laboratory for conditions such as cancer research to research on Alzheimer’s.⁵

The public quickly soured on DOGE and thought it was a mistake. In a recent Pew poll⁶: 55% said they disapproved of Trump’s cuts to the federal government, compared to 44 % who approve. At the one-year mark in Trump’s Administration, shrinking the government ranked 11^th in a list of 12 things voters saw as a top priority for Trump.⁷

The ultimate results from DOGE are still to be determined. In the short term, Musk became a political liability to Trump and was pushed out of the Administration. As political appointees were confirmed, they took over—adding a small amount of sanity to the effort. But in the meantime, DOGE left behind some staff and a legacy of bad decisions, jeopardizing important government functions that may not be easy to reverse.

I call these DOGE time bombs. Some are easier to spot than others. This essay lists six of those time bombs—there is no doubt that others have yet to be identified. But they represent an unprecedented and dangerous attack on the safety of the American public and a lesson in how not to cut the government. They are as follows:

• Social Security databases
• Affordability and reliability of electricity
• Protecting air travel
• Emergency warning and response
• Preventing terror attacks
• Vaccines and MnRNA research

Social Security Databases

In the Trump attack on the federal government, no one has been spared, not even the Social Security Administration (SSA) – the body that implements the famous “third rail” of American politics. In late February⁸, DOGE went into the SSA announcing it would cut the workforce from 57,000 to 50,000. 

As part of those cuts, the Washington Post reported that the SSA was considering ending or curtailing its phone services for claims processing and direct-deposit bank account transactions. Phone services⁹ account for about 40% of claims, which help recipients who have issues with internet access. They also announced intentions to close 47 field offices. The agency has since closed 1,200 field offices¹⁰ nationwide, most of them in the South and Southeast. With all the chaos, by mid-March, 2025, 2,477 employees¹¹ at SSA had accepted the voluntary separation incentive payment.

In addition to the cuts in service, SSA was facing an even more difficult challenge—demands from the DOGE team that they have access to the massive Social Security database containing personal sensitive data on everyone in the United States with a social security number. This may be the most valuable database in the world—it contains records of every American, the places they have lived and worked since their first job as a teenager and how much money they made there, medical records, and mental health records. These records become the basis for determining whether a person receives benefits, and critically, whether they paid enough into the system to get benefits at a certain age, and how large their monthly social security checks will be.

Early on, the experienced Acting Commissioner, Michelle King, stepped down from her role in protest, after opposing DOGE’s request for access to this database. She was replaced¹² by a more junior civil servant, Leland Deduk, who was seen as sympathetic to the Trump Administration. The DOGE demand for access to the SSA database was stopped¹³ in two federal courts, but on June 6, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that DOGE could have access to the databases.

In August, we learned from chief data officer Charles Borges, a whistleblower, that the DOGE team had uploaded the entire database to a vulnerable cloud server, putting at risk everyone’s data and providing a rich target for those who would like to steal social security numbers – the major identifier of identity in America today. Borges compared¹⁴ the breach to “stepp(ing) away from your personal laptop in a crowded cafe and (giving) someone the password.” 

No one can quite figure out what the DOGE staffers who worked so hard to gain access expect to do with all this data. Early on, they tried to make the case that Social Security was riddled with fraud, even getting a section of Trump’s State of the Union address devoted to 125 year-old people who were, allegedly, on the rolls. The entire thing turned out to be a farce. The DOGE team fed President Trump information based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the data. Having a social security number doesn’t mean you are drawing benefits. Many people die before they reach the age to even qualify for benefits. The extremely old people Trump talked about were people for whom Social Security had no birthdate, and so a standard date was placed in their records.

Fraud in getting social security checks is difficult because when you sign up, the Social Security Administration checks your earnings record. No earnings record, no benefits. And that is what makes the vulnerability of the database so worrying. In addition to the privacy concerns and the national security concerns, manipulation of this data could lead to political enemies being targeted and their data compromised. The New York Times first  reported¹⁵ that a whistleblower at the SSA had raised concerns about the security of the data in early August. As of this writing, there has not been, fortunately, a security breach – at least not one we know about.  But the DOGE team left at Social Security has yet to make a compelling case for gaining control of the data and separating it out into another, unauthorized server. In the whistleblower’s complaint Borges points out a worst-case outcome. “… The creation of the DOGE cloud environment would be that all data kept by the SSA on individuals would be breached and the SSA would need to re-issue SSNs [Social Security Numbers] to everyone who possessed them.”

Evidence the bomb is ticking: The personnel cuts at the SSA are already being felt in a serious deterioration in customer service. 

• As of August, 2025, the agency was down¹⁶ by about 7,000 or 12.3%. As a result, call wait¹⁷ times have risen dramatically along with in-person appointment times. Disability claims/hearing times are at an all-time high¹⁸. And overall processing slowdowns¹⁹ and drops in productivity due to a shortage of disability examiners will make it harder for disabled people to get payments.
• Two acting Social Security Commissioners have already left. First, Michelle King, who left over concerns about data privacy, and now Leland Dudek, whose leave is pending over the same concerns. “That absolutely has been the problem with that environment since I’ve been with the agency, that it is too little secured,” Dudek said Borges was “absolutely right,” about his fears of a data breach and his whistleblower complaint was “appropriate,” and “accurate.”

The Senate confirmation of Frank Bisignano as Commissioner of SSA brought a sigh of relief – finally someone with real authority would be in place to rein in and perhaps correct, some of the damage caused by the DOGE team. And some SSA employees have been called back while others have been retrained to minimize the customer service problems. But the issue of insecure data remains as a stark reminder of what DOGE may have done to America’s most popular social program. 

While the customer service issues are immediate and receive the most attention, security of the database is the overwhelming issue for the future. Banks, state and local government and a host of other entities use social security numbers for identification. Imagine the opportunity for identity theft if the database is compromised. It’s not just social security but every verification system in the country that would be at risk.

There are huge national security risks to this as well. Enemies could use the list to micro-target disinformation campaigns, or to create an enemies list. The difficulty of reconstructing what is a massive identification database is overwhelming. And it doesn’t require a bad actor to throw it into chaos; a simple mistake by someone who decided to mess with it could do the same.

Affordability and Reliability of Electricity

In the midst of stubborn inflation and what has been called the “affordability” crisis are persistently high electricity costs which have been rising at twice the rate of inflation.²⁰ Even before Trump took office the reliability of the nation’s electrical grid was of major concern. In the popular press much of the blame for this is currently attributed to AI and the huge energy costs of data centers. But the DOGE attack on the Department of Energy is perhaps an even bigger part of the story. 

Many of the DOGE targets had to do with projects they regarded as related to climate change but many of these also dealt with long standing worries about the fragility of the grid. Trump’s well-known preference for fossil fuels and his aversion to wind power and solar power can be seen in DOGE’s attack on DOE. For instance, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory cut staff working on grid integration and wind/solar and energy storage. DOGE cancelled $3.7 billion in Clean Energy Demonstration grants. They ended 223 projects including erasing pipelines of grid, resilience, and clean-tech work that states were counting on. A White House order suspended new offshore wind leasing and paused wind approvals. Knock-on effects included New York pausing its offshore wind transmission plan (up to 8 GW)—a direct reliability/affordability setback for a load-constrained region.²¹

Evidence the bomb is ticking: According to the Trump Administration’s own report, “The Nation’s power grid is not prepared to meet the energy demand of AI, putting U.S. national security at risk by compromising both our grid stability and our ability to innovate.”²²

• Electricity prices are expected to rise 5.8% in 2025, double the rate of inflation. “Between 2013 and 2023, electricity prices closely tracked inflation²³, but we expect increases in electricity prices to outpace inflation through 2026,” according to the US Energy Information Agency.²⁴
• The average consumer price per kilowatt/hour of electricity spiked 6.1% between January and June of 2025, according to the St. Louis Fed. The June and August level was the highest in US history.²⁵

"Shovel-ready offshore wind projects are poised to add major capacity to the U.S. grid just when it’s needed most," said Hillary Bright, executive director at Turn Forward, a nonprofit organization aiming to advance offshore wind power. "Experts across the board are warning that the U.S. will soon face a shortfall in power supplies due to escalating demand from AI, cryptocurrency, and other digital economy drivers."²⁶

To assure affordability and reliability, the Administration should be pursuing every possible source of new energy. Instead, they are returning to coal that Grid Strategies estimates could cost American ratepayers an additional $3 billion per year,²⁷ and ignoring energy sources that are ready to go. When the country begins to experience blackouts along with high energy prices many will look back at the dismantling of the Grid Deployment Office and the cancellation of programs to strengthen and modernize the grid and they will know who to blame.

Protecting Air Travel

More than 10 million²⁸ commercial flights take off from American airports each year, and the millions of Americans who fly on them are accustomed to safe and on time travel. Efficient air travel is critical to the American economy. The federal agency responsible for this, the Federal Aviation Administration, falls under the Department of Transportation. It regulates air safety and runs air traffic control.

This is a place where we could use more, not fewer, civil servants. Long before Musk and DOGE, FAA was facing critical shortages in air traffic control. According to NATCA²⁹, The National Air Traffic Controller Association, from fiscal year 2012 to 2023 there was a 10% decrease or 1,160 fewer Certified Professional Controllers in the workforce. In 2023 the Department of Transportation found “20 to 26 (77% of) critical facilities are staffed below the Agency’s 85% threshold, with New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) and Miami Tower at 54% and 66% capacity, respectively.”

Training air traffic controllers is a lengthy and difficult process, and a lot of people wash out and never make it. The COVID pandemic had a substantial impact on the already lengthy training and certification timelines for recruits. The full effect of delays will not be determined for several years since training outcomes vary.

Given this background, it was no surprise then that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was one of the first cabinet secretaries to openly challenge Elon Musk’s plans. In a Cabinet meeting that got a lot of attention, Duffy asserted that Musk³⁰ had tried to fire air traffic controllers. Musk however, blamed³¹ diversity, equity and inclusion programs for pushing out “a bunch of really good, talented old white guys,” from the Federal Aviation Administration. But air traffic controllers, as well as airline pilots have to retire early—56 years old for controllers and 60 or 65 for pilots—for good reasons. In these jobs, “the ability to cope with the high-stress, fast-paced and multi-tasking working conditions and immense responsibility deteriorates with age.”³²

By April, the department sent a second voluntary buyout offer to staff under the deferred resignation program. Critical safety positions were excluded³³ from the offer, such as air traffic controllers, railroad safety inspectors, and motor carrier safety specialists. Nonetheless, the ongoing chaos in the federal government meant that by May, more than 2,700 FAA³⁴ workers had signed up for Transportation’s deferred resignation program, which allows staff to go on paid leave through September, when they must leave government.

While the effort to protect air traffic controllers was laudable, insistence on cuts without attention to the broader mission meant that people who give vital support to air traffic controllers were included in the cuts. For instance, included in the downsizing³⁵ were maintenance mechanics, people who approve or deny medical exams for air traffic controllers, specialists who support the upkeep of communications systems for the controllers, and aeronautical information specialists who prepare the charts the air traffic controllers use.

Preserving the jobs of air traffic controllers but cutting the support systems which enable them to make the skies safe is a little like sending soldiers into battle with no guns.

Evidence the bomb is ticking: Just nine days after Trump’s inauguration, a commercial aircraft and a Navy helicopter collided over the Potomac River, killing everyone in both planes. It was the first high-profile commercial aviation disaster in years. The Administration was not to blame, but neither were DEI policies at the FAA which the Administration quickly highlighted.

The accident, however, highlighted that air safety is not something to be trifled with and that we should always look for warning signs that there is stress in the air traffic and safety systems. There are:

• Between January and June of 2025, 59,609 flights³⁶ from  US airports were cancelled, up from 52,533 over the same period of 2024, according to the US Department of Transportation.
• Through July, tarmac delays³⁷ of at least three hours have exceeded all of 2023 and 2024 combined and have blown past previous records dating back at least as far as 2018 when DOT began making long delays public.
• Delays³⁸ in 2025 attributable to National Aviation System causes are on pace for a 15-year high and have spiked in May, June and July of this year (the latest months with available data), according to the Department of Transportation. 

There were nearly six National Aviation System delays for every one weather delay during these three months in 2025. And on-time arrivals during these three months were below the same three months for every year dating back to 2004, the earliest year in which DoT posted flight delay records.

Emergency Warning and Response—NOAA and FEMA

No matter how conservative someone is, in the middle of an emergency, they often find themselves asking, “where is the government?” We rely on the federal government to warn us of an emergency—whether man-made, such as a terrorist attack, or natural, such as a Category 5 hurricane. And we rely on the government to help us out when the emergency is so severe that the local responders, EMTs, police, fire, etc. can’t do it themselves.

NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is responsible for forecasting the weather —a function that is a lot more important than telling us when we can go golfing. Accurate weather predictions give us time to escape from tornadoes, hurricanes, massive snowstorms, flooding, and other life-threatening events.

In early February, the DOGE team arrived at NOAA headquarters, announcing plans to cut³⁹ 50% of the personnel and 30% of the budget. Then confusion reigned as plans were made to cut, then rehire, then cut again. As in many other agencies, the confusion led folks at NOAA to take buyouts and early retirement. By the time of the Texas floods that cost so many children their lives, NOAA had so many vacancies that the 92 weather stations across the country that were responsible for sending up weather balloons were short on personnel, with some launching only one balloon a day instead of two, and others stopping launches all together. Although the Administration exempted meteorologists from the cuts, it was too late. One of every seven employees at the National Weather Service have either been fired⁴⁰, resigned, or took retirement, according to the Washington Post.

In natural disasters, hours matter. Every hour of warning gives people time to get out of the way. DOGE has significantly weakened NOAA.

Finally, when real disaster strikes, the response needed is too big for the locals for one simple reason —the first responders are also victims. They are likely to be stuck in their homes as the waters rise, (as were so many in New Orleans under Hurricane Katrina) unable to get to their patrol cars or ambulances. When the disaster passes, those hit often need fresh water, medical care, rescue workers, electricity maintenance, and many other services, which need to come from outside the state or locality. Here’s where FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, kicks in—or should. But the Trump Administration came into office promising to get rid of FEMA. By April, 1,000 employees⁴¹ had left the agency, including many seasoned disaster professionals who, expecting to be fired, took the buyouts offered. Another 400 FEMA employees were reassigned⁴² to ICE. In addition, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, enacted a rule requiring her to sign off on any expenditure over $100,000, a procedure likely to result in critical delays in disaster relief.

Evidence the bomb is ticking: During the devastating floods in Texas on July 4, 2025, 135 people, including more than 35 children, died. During disasters, people call FEMA’s hotlines to get assistance. Many people who have lost their home need immediate cash assistance just to get shelter. Two FEMA misfires occurred during and after the flooding. First, the call centers went down because Noem had cancelled the contracts. 

• On the night of July 5, the day after the storm, 99% of calls were answered, but on the next day, the contracts were cancelled because Secretary Noem had failed to renew⁴³ them, and only 35% were answered.  On the day after, 15% were answered.

A second widely reported story had to do with search and rescue teams. State search and rescue teams are organized by FEMA into the “National Urban Search & Rescue Response System,” a collection of 28 task forces⁴⁴ across the country that FEMA calls upon that are equipped and able to respond within six hours.” 

• In Texas, the out-of-state teams arrived days after the flood, when many were already dead. The reason for the slow response? A rule requiring Noem to sign off on contracts of a certain size.

Given the downsizing⁴⁵, the departure of seasoned disaster response officials, and the slow response during the Texas flooding, on August 25, 2025, 180 former and current FEMA employees wrote to Congress criticizing FEMA’s management. They warned that FEMA was in no shape to confront a natural disaster the size of Hurricane Katrina. 

• In St. Louis, $700 million in federal assistance⁴⁶ to clean up one million tons of debris left over from a May tornado storm had not been paid due to FEMA bottlenecks and the DHS rule to get the Secretary’s signature on any outlay more than $100,000.

During the massive snowstorm that hit multiple states in the south and east on January 2026, FEMA responded by prepositioning 28 urban search and rescue teams, and stocking “… 7 million meals, more than 2 million liters of water, over 600,000 blankets and more than 300 generators,” at distribution centers in those states.⁴⁷ Their actions proved, once again, that when real disasters strike the first responders are also victims and need coordinated help from outside – that’s what FEMA does. Before the storm the Administration had announced a planned cut of 1000 disaster workers.⁴⁸ If the Administration goes through with this it will draw substantial opposition and for good reason.

Vaccines and mRNA Research

Under the leadership of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services is creating yet another time bomb—this one a public health emergency. Four agencies critical to our national health exist under HHS: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). On March 27, 2025, Sec. Kennedy announced the layoffs⁴⁹ of 10,000 employees, including 3,500 from the FDA, 2,400 from the CDC, 1,200 from the NIH, and 300 from the CMS. As has been typical in other agencies, some of these firings were a mistake, as Kennedy announced⁵⁰ just days later amidst plans to rehire 20%.

All of these HHS agencies—with the exception of CMS that runs the giant Medicare and Medicaid programs—are science-based. The FDA ensures that the drugs we use are safe; not only do they approve new drugs, but they conduct examinations of the plants where drugs are manufactured—many of which are outside the United States. The NIH conducts research into basic science that is not being done in the private sector. And yet, NIH funding for research is critical to the private sector’s development of new treatments for diseases like cancer. Research by the nonprofit group United for Medical Research found that “every dollar of research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) delivers $2.56 in economic activity, a multiplier effect that extends the agency’s impact as the largest public funder⁵¹ of biomedical research in the world.”

Under the guise of downsizing, the Trump Administration seems determined to undermine the very scientific research that has saved lives and made America the envy of the world in medical advances. In August, Sec. Kennedy cancelled $500 million in projects related to mRNA technology—the miracle technology that enabled the historically rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine. In addition, he fired⁵² the panel that made vaccine recommendations and then fired Susan Monarez, the CDC director recently confirmed by the Senate. Even Republican Senators who had given Kennedy the benefit of the doubt expressed dismay. Louisiana’s Republican Senator Bill Cassidy made a statement⁵³ saying that while Trump should get the Nobel prize for “Warp Speed,” the project that delivered the COVID-19 vaccine, Kennedy’s actions were denying people the vaccine.

States have begun taking matters into their own hands. Following Sec. Kennedy’s lead, Florida just removed their vaccine requirements for children in public schools. In the meantime, Washington, Oregon, and California have banded together to create their own vaccine advisory system, and Massachusetts and other New England states are doing the same. Unless this is stopped by a Democratic Congress or by a President listening to the doctors in his own party, there is a distinct possibility that the remaining three years of the Trump presidency will see children in red states dying from measles, polio, and other diseases that have been eradicated.

Evidence the bomb is ticking: Parents are increasingly forgoing vaccinations for their children at rates not seen in generations, according to a Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation survey. Among those with the highest rates of non-vaccination are children of religious white parents and home-schooled children, with one-fifth having delayed⁵⁴ or skipped the MMR or polio vaccines. 

• Texas saw a large measles outbreak⁵⁵ in the first half of 2025, with 762 cases reported, 99 cases hospitalized, and two dead. It was the largest⁵⁶ outbreak in 30 years.
• In January 2026 South Carolina saw an outbreak of 700 cases of measles.⁵⁷ And we can expect more outbreaks. And a federal government ill-equipped to deal with them
• Mississippi experienced a surge in infant mortalities⁵⁸ at a time when PRAMS—the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System which collects data on pregnancy and birth outcomes—suspended its work due to lack of staff and the disintegration of the Division of Reproduction Health. 

Preventing Terror Attacks

The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) is responsible for taking in all the information we collect around the world and figuring out if there’s a threat to the United States and how big it is. Often, the information is gathered the old-fashioned way—spies. But in recent years, satellites eavesdrop on billions of phone calls and texts each day. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need people.  We do. The trick is making sense of all this data, and that often comes down to understanding the local language, history, context, and culture. 

Part of DOGE’s war on the government included firing people who worked on DEI at the agency. No matter what your opinion of DEI programs is, you have to admit that making sense of all this data requires an enormous amount of judgement. Most of the world is not Caucasian and while there are, no doubt, Caucasians who wish us harm there are many other races and nationalities who do as well.  So of all places the CIA should be recruiting and training spies and analysts from a wide variety of backgrounds who can help us understand the world.

Reducing the CIA or FBI workforce in an era of asymmetric warfare, when threats to US security can emerge from places most Americans have never heard of, may be, as intelligence expert David Ignatius⁵⁹ put it, “the Trump [A]dministration’s most dangerous misstep.” The failure to prevent 9/11 was one of the most significant intelligence lapses in US history—downsizing the CIA could risk a similar failure. 

Evidence the bomb is ticking: President Trump’s decision to call immigration an “invasion” has no basis in any law. And yet, Trump has used this excuse to move personnel from other agencies and put them into states and localities to do deportation. The removal of hundreds of people who work in law enforcement across the government from their normal work leaves America vulnerable to threats. Intelligence failures aren’t evident until it is too late. The next intelligence failure will rest squarely on the Administration’s single-minded efforts to downsize.

Conclusion

Americans have a great deal of common sense. While they may not be familiar with the inside workings of the federal bureaucracy, they know that the dramatic and chaotic approach that the Trump Administration has taken to its “reform” of the federal government is bound to backfire. Put simply, the degrading of key government agencies like FAA, CIA, NOAA, and FEMA is putting American lives at stake. Cutting scientific research and restricting access to vaccines is also putting lives at stake whether you are a cancer victim or a kindergartener, although it may take time to see these effects. And putting the private information of every American with a social security number on an undisclosed server threatens the integrity of the most important element of our national social safety net. These are but some of the self-inflicted wounds that the Trump Administration has inflicted on American citizens. They may be apparent next week, next year, or after Trump leaves, but they should stand as a stark example of how not to cut the government.