Laying Off Empiricists

If, as has been widely reported, the Trump-Musk mass layoffs of federal workers are now about to commence, one inescapable consequence will be a rise in the number of unemployed Americans. Happily for Trump, Musk, and their teenaged hatchet men, they might just be able to squelch the bad news about rising unemployment by crippling, through layoffs, the agency of government that measures unemployment: the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The AFL-CIO and a host of major unions have sought an injunction against DOGE for its attempt to seize the private data on millions of Americans collected and safeguarded by the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). But BLS’s long-established collection and publication of such non-private data as the number of Americans out of work could also fall prey to the Muskrats seeking to expunge the work of public employees when their findings might reflect poorly on the president.

Republicans have a history, long antedating their Trumpification, of opposing the BLS for its objective reports on the state of the economy, since those reports have documented downturns and, less problematically, upturns no matter which party is in power. In 1971, President Richard Nixon requested and received a list of the Jews then employed at BLS, as he was nervous about the unemployment levels the Bureau was reporting and figured that purging the Jews there might help him out. (The list was ordered up by his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman.) Since empiricism is the -ism that most seems to vex Trump and right-wing media, such “counting” agencies as BLS have to be viewed as prime offenders.

Counting, as such, seems to be a skill that has been singularly lacking so far in Trump’s and DOGE’s targeting. As my colleague David Dayen has documented in the cover story of the Prospect’s current print issue, the way to reduce the deficit begins with taxing the rich at an equitable rate, and going after cuts in what is by far the largest federal agency, the Pentagon, not to mention its myriad contractors. Instead, Musk and Trump are going after some of the smallest agencies in the government, in search not of redundant employees, but of projects that stand athwart the kind of rigged economies and transactional deals through which they’ve prospered.

Let’s look at the numbers. The Defense Department currently has 763,000 civilian employees. The Environmental Protection Agency, by contrast, has just 17,000 (way too many of them actually scientists); the Labor Department, 15,000 (including the work safety monitors at OSHA); the State Department, 14,000 (way too many of them multilingual); the Securities and Exchange Commission, and USAID, 5,000 each; and the dreaded Department of Education, which Trump has vowed to abolish, 4,000. (The CFPB is even smaller than the DOE.) As a percentage of the current yearly federal budget of $6.8 trillion, axing those particularly targeted employees would reduce federal spending by roughly zilch.

But, again, if the “counting” agencies are among those targeted for decimation, that “zilch” can be promoted as constituting gazillions, which is the kind of number with which Trump is very comfortable. A win-win for our post-empirical emperor.