DOGE update: Last week, some 220,000 probationary workers—those who'd been at their agencies for under a year or two—started getting laid off, a process that should result in 4 percent of the federal workforce being axed once all is done. Many critics have lingered on the fact that 300 of those probationary workers cut were from the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency tasked with ensuring safe travel through the skies, which has been having a mighty bad year given the January 29 plane crash over Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people. But it's hard to tell what roles exactly these workers were performing; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took to X to claim that "zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go" and that the preceding administration had "failed for four years to address the air traffic controller shortage and upgrade our outdated, World War II-era air traffic control system."
Useful functions grinding to a halt: CNN filed some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about Elon Musk's security clearance, as well as the clearances received by those within the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who have been granted access to classified or otherwise restricted networks. "Good luck with that, they just fired the whole privacy team," an Office of Personnel Management staffer responded. (Of course, the government tends to spend an awful lot of time selectively denying FOIA requests under the guise of lots of different excuses; this might be true, or it might be the excuse flavor of the day.)
But the haphazard nature of the layoffs is affecting real, useful government functions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, accidentally let go of staffers working on containing the bird flu outbreak.
