Federal employees deserve respect — not Elon Musk

Civilian employees of the U.S. government mobilized America to win World War II. They sent Americans to the moon and tracked down Osama bin Laden. They played a key role in developing the COVID vaccine, which saved 3 million American lives.

The well-known 140 stars carved in marble on the CIA Memorial Wall honor the agency employees killed in the line of duty. Did you know that there are also memorial walls at the FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies?

In the name of “efficiency,” the Trump administration is waging a cruel war on federal employees, who now live in chaos and fear. In complying with a Trump executive order, the CIA jeopardized the security of its own agents who have been recruited in the last two years by transmitting their identifying information (first name and first initial of the last name) via an unclassified email.

The administration has put 5,000 FBI agents under investigation because, following orders, they worked on the Jan. 6 investigation. It took a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from disclosing their names and putting those agents and their families at risk from the violent Capitol riot criminals whom Trump pardoned.

Federal employees also received a buyout offer that gave them just days to make a life-changing decision.

Even aggressive downsizing goals could have been achieved without such contempt for federal employees. But President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are intoxicated with power, intense in their hatreds, consumed with a sense of self instead of country — and cruel.

After Musk took over X (formerly Twitter) he began reducing its workforce with abrupt firings, outbursts against employees and the public shaming of a disabled employee (for which Musk later apologized). It was not a path to success. Musk reduced X’s workforce by 80 percent and, guess what? As of October, the company was valued at about 80 percent less than what Musk paid for it.

The federal workforce’s worth is not measured in market value but in the international drug kingpins that the FBI and DEA put in jail, or the dangerous drugs that the FDA blocks or removes from the supply chain, or in well-run national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite. Sure, the federal agencies have made terrible blunders and suffer, as do many large organizations, from inefficiencies and corrupt employees. But, if history is any guide, the Trump-Musk “if it’s not broken, break it anyway” approach is the road to disaster.

Take the six senior FBI agents whom the Trump administration fired. These agents possessed 200 years of collective experience fighting crime and terrorism. No one at the White House appears to have considered the consequences to the nation of losing that expertise.

Something like that happened in the McCarthy period in the 1950s. As described in David Halberstam’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Best and the Brightest,” about the nation’s tragic entanglement in Vietnam, a similar purge unfairly forced out a rising diplomatic star named John Paton Davies Jr., a true Indochina expert. He had grown up in China to missionary parents and later served in diplomatic posts in Indochina during WWII.

Davies had been on a path to become assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs before McCarthyism ended his career. So he wasn’t there to tell the Johnson administration what it would face if it put a land army in Vietnam, to explain North Vietnam’s toughness and our ally South Vietnam’s weakness. If Davies hadn’t been driven out, wrote Halberstam, “it all might all have been different.”

The possibility that a senseless witch hunt may have doomed nearly 60,000 young Americans is a sober reminder of the stakes as Trump and Musk rampage through the federal workforce on their own witch hunt.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”