For Donald Trump, there are witches everywhere. And there are so many ways to burn them—literally and figuratively. Telling scientists, like Anthony Fauci, to shut up. Forcing agencies of all sorts to shut down. Undoing affirmative action programs. Turning inclusion back to exclusion. Ending foreign aid. And because they have had it so easy, making life even more miserable for men who have transitioned to women, women to men—especially, God forbid, if they, like the rest of us, want to play sports.
So much work to be done: prosecute the career prosecutors and FBI agents who actually did the jobs we asked them to do. Those who followed the trail of the stolen top secret documents from the White House to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bathroom. Then, by all means, punish those who pursued the January 6 criminals who savagely beat some police to death and so many close to death. Fire those at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who actually care about protecting the environment. Dismiss those national security experts who worried about Trump’s unfailing affection for autocrats, his pals Putin and Kim Jong Un. The folks legitimately concerned with his willingness to mix his business with his official duty.
All those folks now have to go, so say Trump and the unelected Elon Musk, his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and those powerful influencers at Project 2025. Now that they have received the February 11, 2025, official Presidential Declaration to proceed, they are even more motivated to find and ferret out the witches they know about, and and even the witches they suspect:
As is so often the case in Truskmumpia, the rhetoric soars far above the reality:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. To restore accountability to the American public, this order commences a critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy. By eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity, my Administration will empower American families, workers, taxpayers, and our system of Government itself.
Who, I wonder, is truly in favor of “waste, bloat, and insularity.” But it doesn’t take long for us to learn that DOGE is really about firing government workers and making sure that Elon Musk and his whoever-they-are-accomplices can hire MAGA loyalists to replace them. And so, I assume in order to do that job as efficiently as possible, they are all super familiar with the TESLA Insularity Detector 2.0:
Donald Trump and the MAGA Congress are convinced that when it comes to excellence and efficiency and productivity, no one is better equipped than Elon Musk to hire and fire the American workers upon whom we all depend. It is not like he blows things up. Oh, wait a second. According to Newsweek, maybe that is what he did:
SpaceX’s latest test of its Starship rocket, the world’s largest and most powerful launch vehicle, ended in dramatic fashion on Thursday as the upper stage disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean.
The test, conducted from SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, saw the Super Heavy booster perform a successful controlled descent, marking a partial success. However, the upper stage encountered a propulsion anomaly approximately 10 minutes into the flight, leading to its failure.
You could call a propulsion anomaly an explosion.
Why, Newsweek asks, does this matter:
This is the seventh test of Starship, the vehicle tasked with returning NASA astronauts to the moon by the end of this decade. While SpaceX has achieved remarkable success over the last few years with both Starship and the already commercialized Falcon 9, the failure yesterday highlights the challenges and ambition of the company’s space program.
Sort of what Donald Trump did with his casinos in Atlantic City, N.J. Hopefully, Elon Musk will bring the same happy-go-lucky sense of humor he brought to his failed rocket launch to the Trumpian task of firing thousands of hard-working government employees:
Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed! ✨
pic.twitter.com/nn3PiP8XwG— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 16, 2025
We live in remarkable times. It used to be that Congress members fought to the death to protect their roles as the ultimate decision makers and power brokers. These days, however, as the unelected DOGE brigades dismantle our government agencies and as the Truskmumpians shamelessly usurp the Article 1 Constitutional powers of the legislature under the banner of the Unitary Executive, Republicans in both the House and Senate sheepishly and cowardly melt into pathetic co-conspirators.
So, pretty much anyone and everyone who took and still takes their oath to the Constitution seriously ought to be worried. They are, in effect, a witch to be hunted and dispatched with. And, as we have learned over the centuries, when it comes to burning witches, it doesn’t really matter if you have burned a real witch or just someone who, in your fevered, partisan, and paranoid imagination, could easily become a witch in the future. It is the burning that is the message. And if you look to the horizon, you can see the smoke rising.
I want to first focus on the witch enemies Trump and DOGE have targeted here at home, who, whether you fully realize it or not, have played an important part in our lives in Berkshire County. Since the mid-1930s, General Electric (GE) has allowed its toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to pollute our Housatonic River. Additionally, GE dumped massive amounts of its PCB-contaminated waste in the Pittsfield City Dump, then in makeshift landfills throughout the county. In the process, an elementary school, a children’s playground, local businesses, a shopping center, a softball complex, and a housing complex in Lanesboro were all built on toxic land. Only a counterforce approaching GE’s power—the EPA—could effectively pressure the company to clean up at least some of its mess. I have a long history with the EPA, and along the way, in order to prompt a more extensive cleanup, I joined other citizens in two court challenges to the EPA. Despite this opposition, I know full well that if it wasn’t for the EPA and those many EPA employees who have come and gone over four decades to work on the GE/Housatonic site, there would have been no progress at all.
Now, forgive me for suggesting that the recent reassuring article in The Berkshire Eagle, “As Trump administration sends layoff notices to EPA workers, we asked: What about the Rest of River plan?,” is offering unverified optimism: “PCB cleanup of Housatonic River expected to ‘proceed as planned.'”
“An EPA spokesperson said because there’s a responsible party committed to funding the cleanup, ‘at this point there’s no direction other than to carry on and proceed as planned,’” The Eagle writes, continuing:
The public comment periods for GE’s conceptual design plan for Reach 6 of the cleanup, Woods Pond, ended Monday, as did comment periods for the baseline restoration assessment and pre-design investigation report.
Comment periods for revisions of the proposed landfill, the landfill operations plan, a water treatment and sediment dewatering plant at the landfill and the quality of life compliance plan are due by Feb. 10.
The Berkshire Eagle has a several-decades-long history of minimizing the extent of the PCB contamination, allowing GE to run advertisements falsely denying the severe risks to human health, and deferring to GE’s deceptive version of their ongoing disposal practices. Add to that The Eagle’s unwillingness to critically examine the EPA’s history of sidelining those who actively advocated for the most comprehensive of cleanups and for holding GE accountable to the maximum extent of the law. You can also add The Eagle’s unwillingness to fully explore the EPA’s decades-long reluctance to provide pilot tests for innovative alternative remedial technologies.
It will surprise few of us who have unwaveringly fought for a fishable, swimmable Housatonic that some still at the EPA have managed to survive the comings and goings of several conservative administrators at Region One. But they are scarcely prepared for what is coming. And it seems to me that given the pro-industry, pro-polluter predilections of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and those responsible for Project 2025, any optimism that the new EPA will embrace the need for a restored Housatonic and continue to insist that GE perform the required PCB cleanup is hardly a smart bet.
And so, to me, it comes as no surprise that they have quickly taken steps to cripple the EPA. By enforcing environmental legislation passed by Congress, the EPA has thrown roadblock after roadblock in the way of the most powerful corporations who have chosen to maximize profit—and GE and Monsanto have made billions from their PCBs—at the expense of public health and a healthy environment. The cost to the citizens of Berkshire County, to the workers and their families who were needlessly exposed to toxic chemicals for decades, to those denied full use of our beautiful river, to those who are living beside the PCB landfills in Pittsfield, and to those soon to be living beside the massive PCB dump in Lee is incalculable.
As they schemed to dismantle what they call the “administrative state,” MAGA and Project 2025 conducted a comprehensive analysis of every major federal agency, including the EPA. Their political bias was apparent:
The challenge of creating a conservative EPA will be to balance justified skepticism toward an agency that has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states. Further, the EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator.
By pursuing “A Coopted Mission,” they claim:
[T]he EPA has been a breeding ground for expansion of the federal government’s influence and control across the economy. Embedded activists have sought to evade legal restraints in pursuit of a global, climate-themed agenda, aiming to achieve that agenda by implementing costly policies that otherwise have failed to gain the requisite political traction in Congress. Many EPA actions in liberal Administrations have simply ignored the will of Congress, aligning instead with the goals and wants of politically connected activists.
They are clearly talking left-wing witches.
This right-wing political bias will be immediately felt here in Berkshire County where local, grass-roots environmental groups like the Housatonic River Initiative (HRI) have played a critical role in exposing GE’s past practices of dumping its toxic waste, in challenging their absolutely inaccurate estimates of the extent of PCB contamination in the Housatonic, fighting for increased public participation in the cleanup process, and advocating for innovative remediation technologies. HRI has used EPA Technical Assistance grants to bring in a series of environmental experts to even the playing field and help the community better appreciate the complex issues involved in assessing the environmental damage to the river as well as evaluating GE’s proposed solutions. Not surprisingly, Project 2025 made a point of targeting these kinds of grants: “Stop all grants to advocacy groups and review which potential federal investments will lead to tangible environmental improvements.”
The Trump administration’s assault on the EPA began almost immediately:
The Trump administration has warned more than 1,100 Environmental Protection Agency employees who work on climate change, reducing air pollution, enforcing environmental laws and other programs that they could be fired at any time.
An email, reviewed by The New York Times, was sent to staff members who were hired within the past year and have probationary status. Many of those employees were encouraged to join the E.P.A. under the Biden administration to rebuild the agency, which had been depleted during President Trump’s first term. Others are experienced federal workers who had taken new assignments within the agency.
Many had been hired to work on programs that Congress created through two recent laws, doing things like helping communities replace lead pipes, remediating toxic sites and funding clean energy projects aimed at reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet.
‘As a probationary/trial period employee, the agency has the right to immediately terminate you,’ the email states …
At 9:21 a.m. on Monday, E.P.A. employees received another email notifying them of that the agency-wide intranet was out of service. Without the internal agency network, employees cannot access documents or other information needed for their jobs.
The email from E.P.A.’s Office of Mission Support reads ‘Access to work.epa.gov is current unavailable’ and that technical specialists were working to resolve the issue. It was not immediately clear if the outage was related to efforts to reduce the work force.
Asked about the email, Ms. Vaseliou said ‘There was an outage.’
The New York Times followed up the next day with a new report, “E.P.A. Demotes Career Employees Overseeing Science, Enforcement and More,” that the Trump administration launched an all-out assault on the EPA:
A spokeswoman for the agency said the change was ‘common practice.’ Others said it injects partisanship into jobs that have always been neutral …
The Environmental Protection Agency is demoting career employees who oversee scientific research, the enforcement of pollution laws, hazardous waste cleanup and the agency’s human resources department and will replace them with political appointees, according to two people familiar with the approach.
The move would give Trump administration loyalists more influence over aspects of the agency that were traditionally led by nonpartisan experts who have served across Republican and Democratic administrations.
It would also make it easier for the Trump administration to bypass Congress. While those formally overseeing sections of the E.P.A. must be confirmed by the Senate, the new appointees would be able to assume the role of acting department heads, circumventing the need for congressional approval. …
The E.P.A. is emerging as a case study in the lessons that Mr. Trump has learned from his first term in office, when career staff members often thwarted his administration’s efforts to sideline scientists and repeal air and water protections. Mr. Trump’s allies promised that in a second term they would be more prepared to swiftly begin dismantling the E.P.A., the agency that played a central role in the Biden administration’s strategy to combat climate change.
Mr. Trump has stocked the agency with political appointees who have worked as lawyers and lobbyists for the oil and chemical industries. They include David Fotouhi, the nominee for deputy administrator, a lawyer who recently challenged a ban on asbestos; Aaron Szabo, a lobbyist for both the oil and chemical industries who is expected to be the top air pollution regulator; and Nancy Beck, a longtime chemical industry lobbyist, who is serving as a senior E.P.A. adviser on chemical safety and pollution.
[Emphasis added.]
Early on, it became clear that those in America paying the highest price for the contamination of our environment were the poor and the powerless. Monsanto allowed PCB-contaminated oil to leak and poison the Black neighborhood nearest its PCB plant in Anniston, Ala. And the first major landfill for PCB-contaminated waste was built in a Black area in Warren County, N.C. And in Pittsfield, GE’s PCB-laced oil went down their drains and across the street to contaminate stores and small businesses in the largely Italian immigrant working-class community of Lakewood.
It was only when these communities organized and fought back that the issue of environmental justice moved to center stage. It is not surprising that Donald Trump, DOGE, and MAGA adherents are making a major effort to stamp out the existence of federal programs specifically designed to alleviate environmental injustice.
Perhaps you are skeptical. But the practice continues. Ask yourself, is it merely coincidence that our wealthiest inhabitants, with their multi-million dollar homes in Lenox and Stockbridge, have managed to avoid the stigma, the public health concerns, and the diminished real estate valuations that will come from living beside GE’s poetically named massive Upland Disposal Facility? Not really. In fact, as they took part in secret negotiations with GE, their representatives quickly voted to spare themselves the problem while burdening the working-class community of Lee with the reality of many lifetimes’ worth of PCB-contaminated river sediment.
So, not surprisingly, on February 6, 2025, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration quickly went after the EPA’s Environmental Justice program:
The latest shake-up came Thursday, when Trump appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency notified staff members that they plan to close the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and place 168 of its employees on administrative leave, according to agency officials.
I expect that Elon Musk and his DOGE employees have been too busy scrubbing the offending websites at the National Institute of Health and USAID, and so, in the interests of history at least, I urge you to appreciate this excerpt from the EPA’s website while you still can:
The Washington Post continues:
The tumult has also engulfed the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, a little-known yet crucial office tasked with defending the federal government’s environmental actions in court. Trump appointees recently announced plans to fire about 20 employees at the division, among other actions that have sent morale there plummeting, according to three people familiar with the matter who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
And as one of her first acts after being sworn in as the nation’s 87th attorney general Wednesday, Pam Bondi rescinded former attorney general Merrick Garland’s directives on environmental justice, according to a memorandum obtained by The Washington Post. Bondi also directed the heads of all U.S. Attorney’s Offices to revoke any ‘memoranda, guidance, or similar directive that implement the prior administration’s “environmental justice” agenda.’
According to Sommer Engels, Andrew Mergen, and Justin Pidot writing for LegalPlanet:
The Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD) of the Department of Justice faces its most profound crisis since it was established in 1909. In a little over a week, the Trump administration has (1) reassigned four career managers (leading nearly half of ENRD’s sections) to the newly formed Office of Sanctuary Cities Enforcement; (2) placed career attorneys working in ENRD’s Office of Environmental Justice on administrative leave; (3) suspended the nearly 75-year-old Honors Program for entry level attorneys; and (4) if rumors are to believed, made plans to eliminate the entire Law and Policy Section, discharging career attorneys and support staff as part of a ‘reduction in force.’ More rumors swirl that other closures and terminations may follow.
And it is similarly not surprising that Trump and Musk are going after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency few in Berkshire County even realize helped secure a significant Natural Resource Damage Award to reimburse us for some of the damage GE caused to the Housatonic:
In October 2000, a settlement was formalized with GE for NRD associated with the GE facility in Pittsfield and the Housatonic River environment. NRD recoveries include $15.5 million, plus interest, from GE as detailed in the October 2000 Consent Decree (CD). The Trustee Council for the GE-Housatonic River case consists of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA), the State of Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (CTDEP), the U.S. Department of the Interior [via the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)], and the U.S. Department of Commerce [via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)].
[Emphasis added.]
While most people have focused on NOAA’s connection to the weather and the climate, NOAA has worked hard to protect our oceans and rivers. NOAA has been a particular target of Project 2025:
Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures) …
Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized … Ensure Appointees Agree with Administration Aims. Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.
[Emphasis added.]
As for the Environmental Justice section at NOAA, it has not fared as well as the EPA’s:
Here are a couple examples of what is happening close to home. WBUR in Boston is reporting on those in the EPA Region One headquarters:
Seven employees at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Boston office have been placed on paid administrative leave because of their work on environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, according to union officials. The staffers were placed on leave at a hastily-arranged meeting late Thursday afternoon, according to Lilly Simmons, acting president of AFGE Local 3428, which represents about 500 EPA employees in New England.
‘The emails that people received told them they had no access to the building. They’d have no access to their computers. They’d have no access to their personal information on government systems,’ she said. She added that the administrative leave had no set end date, leaving employees ‘very stressed out.’
In a memo to EPA employees, agency spokesperson Molly Vaseliou wrote ‘EPA is working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” as well as subsequent associated implementation memos. President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people to do just this.’
And yet another cautionary tale for those imagining that the GE/Housatonic River Cleanup will proceed without any problem. WBUR reports:
WBUR explains:
These projects are just some of the many casualties of the on-again-off-again freeze on federal funding stemming from President Trump’s executive actions. One order, titled ‘Unleashing American Energy,’ called for an immediate pause on hundreds of billions of dollars promised to groups planning a broad swath of environmental and infrastructure projects. In Massachusetts, the leaders of nonprofits that received this funding are reeling from the chaos. Some have paused projects, unable to access millions of dollars they were granted — an apparent violation of multiple judges’ orders that the funding be restored. Others have put projects on hold out of concern they won’t be reimbursed for expenses, or that the administration will find a way to claw back the funds. Still others have decided to move forward, albeit cautiously and with their fingers crossed.
‘I’m holding the bag on $17.5 million in NOAA grants I’m unable to get paid for,’ said Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ‘Our access to the funding system was shut down.’
Gottlieb’s group won grants in 2024 and early 2025 for wetland and habitat restoration projects along Cape Cod. Worried that the Trump administration might pause the federal grant process, the group made sure to get its contracts signed before inauguration day. ‘Never in our wildest dreams’ did he and his staff think the U.S. government would fail to honor the contracts, Gottlieb said. ‘And we are one small version of this story that’s being repeated thousands of times and in thousands of places across the country.’
[Emphasis added.]
For the moment, the battle has shifted to the federal courts as a wide variety of employee unions, nonprofits, and attorneys general from a wide variety of affected states sue the administration to halt the firings, staff freezes, and suspension of grants. On January 20, 2025, the Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) filed NTEU v. Trump:
NTEU argues:
Plaintiff National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) is a labor union that represents federal government employees in 37 agencies and departments in grievances and litigation. NTEU also negotiates collective bargaining agreements with agency employers, pushes for legislation that improves the working lives of federal employees, and engages in general advocacy for federal employees’ rights. NTEU’s mission is to ensure that federal employees are treated with dignity and respect.
On January 20, 2025, Defendant Donald J. Trump issued an executive order that attempts to strip civil service and due process protections from a large swath of federal employees, including many that NTEU represents. Executive Order, Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce (Jan. 20, 2025). The Policy/Career Executive Order reinstates Executive Order No. 13957 (October 21, 2020, which created a new excepted service Schedule F. The Policy/Career Executive Order directs agencies to move numerous employees into a new excepted service category with the goal that many would then be fired.
Congress has enacted comprehensive legislation governing the hiring and employment of federal employees. When establishing hiring principles, Congress determined that most federal government jobs be in the merit-based, competitive service. And it established that most federal employees have due process rights if their agency employer wants to remove them from employment. Because the Policy/Career Executive Order attempts to divest federal employees of these due process rights, it is contrary to congressional intent. It is also directly contrary to Office of Personnel Management (OPM) regulations. The Career/Policy Executive Order is thus and must be enjoined.
[Emphasis added.]
Unions representing other government workers affected by the new actions of the administration subsequently filed additional suits. Here is a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts on February 4, 2025:
The suit claims:
Plaintiffs American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO (AFGE), AFGE Local 3707 (Local 3707), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFLCIO (AFSCME), and National Association of Government Employees, Inc. (NAGE) bring this action against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Acting Director of OPM and allege as follows:
1. The Office of Personnel Management’s January 28, 2025 decision to offer a purported ‘deferred resignation’ program to federal career employees is the latest effort by this Administration to drastically reduce the nonpartisan career civil service upon which this country has depended and under which it has thrived for more than 140 years.
2. The continued success of government is based, in large part, on the institutional memory of its career civil servants who are committed to the missions of their agencies and the prospect of working for the American people. These civil servants are professionals and subject matter experts, many of whom have worked diligently and impartially through successive administrations of both major parties to implement changing administration priorities. If these employees leave or are forced out en masse, the country will suffer a dangerous one-two punch. First, the government will lose expertise in the complex fields and programs that Congress has, by statute, directed the Executive to faithfully implement. The government will have fewer qualified employees to execute the statutorily-required tasks that still remain.
[Emphasis added.]
Add this action pending in Washington, D.C., filed jointly by two national unions, the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO (AFGE), and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO (AFSCME): “[AFGE represents] approximately 800,000 federal civilian employees through its affiliated councils and locals in every state in the United States.” Their members include “nurses caring for our nation’s veterans, border patrol agents securing our borders, correctional officers maintaining safety in federal facilities, scientists conducting critical research, health care workers serving on military bases, civilian employees in the Department of Defense supporting our military personnel and their families, and employees of the Social Security Administration making sure retirees receive the benefits they have earned.”
The suit states:
[AFSCME] is the largest trade union of public employees in the United States, with around 1.4 million members organized into approximately 3,400 local unions, 58 councils and affiliates in 46 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. AFSCME members include nurses, corrections officers, child care providers, emergency medical technicians, sanitation workers, school bus drivers, civil engineers, policy analysts, and more, all with one thing in common: a dedication to making our communities stronger, healthier, and safer. Its members working for the federal government make our communities stronger, healthier, and safer by working to ensure aviation safety at the Federal Aviation Administration, criminal justice through the Department of Justice, and more.
The suit notes:
AFGE and AFSCME bring this action on behalf of themselves and their members, whose rights are being violated by the Schedule F Order’s unlawful rescission without notice and comment of a legislative rule duly promulgated by OPM providing civil service protections …
1. This action seeks injunctive and declaratory relief with respect to the Executive Order issued by President Donald J. Trump on January 20, 2025, entitled ‘Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce’ (hereinafter ‘Schedule F Order’).
2. Our nation’s career civil servants are the backbone of our federal government, contributing their impartial expertise, experience, and hard work to further their agencies’ missions and serve the American people across presidential administrations.
3. For more than 140 years Congress has recognized the importance of career civil servants, replacing the patronage system for government jobs with the competitive civil service in 1883 by passing the Pendleton Act and strengthening civil service protections over the subsequent decades.
4. Despite this longstanding recognition of the importance of our professional civil service and protections against its politicization, the recently issued Schedule F Order announces President Trump’s intent to reclassify many career civil servants into a new category of federal employees and strip away their civil service protections so that they can be more easily fired. This scheme seeks to put politics over professionalism, contrary to the laws and values that have defined our career civil service for more than a century.
We are in the midst of a hard-to-believe, excruciatingly stupid dismantling of the very agencies that have been created to serve the public. Let me be clear, I am not naïve. I would never deny the occasional incompetence, inefficiency, wastefulness, even sometimes the perversion of their purpose—I have spent four decades doing battle with the EPA. But shutting down critical medical research, attempting to dismantle school lunch programs, and firing career prosecutors who legitimately convicted the violent offenders of January 6 is sheer madness and a calculated attempt to destroy democracy and curtail legitimate law and order. As we have recently seen in California, a single ember can spark yet another fire. You might, for the moment, cheer the burning of the witch you despise in the office next door, but in the weeks to come, discover your own office on fire.
So, let’s consider this but the first episode of my attempt to chronicle the extent of damage these self-righteous witch hunters are doing. Like totalitarians everywhere, they are addicted to power. They get off on scaring, silencing those who are smarter, kinder, and know better. The mediocre crave authority. They adore vengeance. Forgive me for recalling your early terrors, but think back to the bullies you have met along the way. On that first day at school, on the playground, to those at work, to those you mistakenly imagined you loved.
In my experience, there are bullies and abusers everywhere, trying to wrest power and intimidate us. We are learning once more that it is always so much worse when they come to hold the ultimate power and control a city, a state, a nation.
Donald Trump has surrounded himself with a small DOGE army of the greedy, the arrogant, and the incompetent. And they are busy burning witches.
