Vox’s The Logoff: Trump and Musk’s government purge, explained

Joey Sendaydiego for Vox

Patrick Reis was the senior politics and ideas editor at Vox. He previously worked at Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, Politico, National Journal, and Seattle’s Real Change News. As a reporter and editor, he has worked on coverage of campaign politics, economic policy, the federal death penalty, climate change, financial regulation, and homelessness.

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Welcome to The Logoff. Today we’re focusing on Donald Trump’s (and Elon Musk’s) plan to purge the federal workforce, which has major implications for everyone — even if you don’t work in government.

What’s the latest? The Trump administration last night emailed almost all federal employees with something between an invitation and a threat. The email gave them two options:

Resign effective at the end of September. Until then, you can keep your job and don’t necessarily have to come to the office.
Do nothing and keep working, while subject to new expectations (including in-office work requirements) and without any guarantee of job security.

It’s the latest in a string of actions designed to force out career government employees. (Career employees are the ones who keep their jobs from one president to the next; “political” appointees generally turn over with each administration.) Trump has also issued an executive order to temporarily raise the limit on how many noncareer appointees he’s allowed to have.

Why are they doing this? Trump’s team wants to thin the ranks of career employees and replace some of them with political appointees, shrinking government and giving the president more control of what remains.

If you don’t work in government, why should you care? Because the Trump administration is conducting a giant national experiment, and we’re all the subjects. Career employees bring longstanding expertise and continuity to the countless functions our government performs — everything from keeping airplanes in the sky to reviewing medication to enforcing laws to tracking national security threats.

Driving civil service members out of government en masse is a bet that these workers were never necessary to begin with. Many experts have warned that poses great risks for keeping the government functioning. If the purge is successful, we’ll all find out if they’re right.

And with that, it’s time to log off ...

Another day of space content? Yes, another day of space content! But can you blame me? Scientists just announced they’ve found, and I quote, “the basic building blocks for life” on an asteroid. No, it’s not aliens. But it’s still pretty cool.

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