I guess I’m lucky: Only two of my friends have been fired by the Trump-Musk DOGE juggernaut. It’s horrible for both of them, but I worry less about the guy: his wife has a good state job and they should be OK, at least for a while.
I worry more about the woman: After almost 10 years of federal employment, she took a promotion that required her to move and buy a new house. And because the form letter she got said she was fired for cause, she is ineligible for unemployment compensation. I worry what she will do as she falls deeper into severe depression. That’s on you Trump and Musk. This is not an America I can be proud of.
DOGE has slashed money from the Veteran’s Administration. Would that had been done if either Trump or Musk had served in the military? DOGE has all but eliminated the EPA. Breathe deep kids. It has decimated the IRS during tax season. Enjoy that music while you wait for help. An made it exceedingly difficult for the elderly and disabled to contact the Social Security Administration. No problem; they won’t be around much longer anyway. DOGE eliminated the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. And more. That chain saw has been working overtime since Jan. 20.
But what is so depressing is that the DOGE cuts, despite the human costs, are doing very little to increase government “efficiency.” I doubt either Trump or Musk understands this — it does require knowledge of Econ 101 — but let me try to explain.
In the private sector, “efficiency” results when the same output is produced by fewer inputs, or when more output is produced with the same amount of inputs. For example, if your company produces $10,000 worth of widgets using five workers, you’re doing OK. If those five workers can figure out how to produce $15,000 worth of widgets, or if $10,000 worth of widgets can be produced with only four workers, your company has been made more efficient. Companies can increase efficiency by using better technology or more skilled workers. Reducing the number of workers increases efficiency only output increases or stays the same.
That’s simple enough in the private sector. It’s rarely that simple in the public sector because the output of government is rarely sold in the market and thus does not have a measurable monetary value. What is the value of a clean environment? Can it be monetized? Not easily if at all. Reducing the EPA workforce is easy to do if you wield the right chainsaw, but it’s simply not possible to determine what happened to the value of EPA output or whether there has been an increase in efficiency. The same can be said about VA cuts: Without being able to measure the value of the VA product, we have no way to tell whether the DOGE cuts result in an increase in VA efficiency or not.
I have no idea whether Trump and Musk understand this sort analysis, but I’m not sure it would matter if they did. Their idea seemed to be to slash government employment to free funds so they could give tax cuts for their billionaire friends. I doubt they give a damn about the human costs they have imposed on people. American people.
• William S. Brown is a in Juneau resident and Ph.D. economist who taught university level economics and finance for 23 years until he opened a reel repair business in 2000.
