President Donald Trump wants fewer federal workers, and fewer workers is what he got on Wednesday. When a deadly mid-air collision between a commercial jet and a military helicopter happened near Ronald Reagan National Airport, one air traffic controller was working a job usually assigned to two, according to preliminary findings by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Of course, Trump blamed the crash on diversity, former presidents, and more, rather than admit he let his pet billionaire, Elon Musk, force out the head of the FAA on Day 1.
As Trump lays waste to the government’s ability to handle the large-scale tasks it’s well suited for, he’s weaponizing it to do something it’s not at all designed for: attacking individuals and organizations he hates. It’s the logical outcome of MAGA’s politics of grievance.
Take the rescission of over 200 job offers issued by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The bank regulator was already short of examiners—the people who monitor banks and ensure they follow rules and, most importantly, don’t fail. When Signature Bank collapsed in March 2023, a review found that for the previous six years, the FDIC had been unable to sufficiently staff the team that oversaw the bank, due to turnover and personnel shortages.
Making sure banks don’t collapse is not just something the federal government should do. It’s also something the federal government is best at. You do not want a world where banking regulations differ across 50 states. You do not want a world where you find out that the money you had in a Minnesota bank is protected, but the sums you had in a California bank are not. This is likely true for even the most puddingheaded Silicon Valley master-of-the-universe type since the notion of conducting large-scale business banking with 50 sets of rules is untenable.
Or take Trump’s musings on how he’d like to get rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency because “I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems.”
To see how well that would work, look at Louisiana, Florida, and Texas—three MAGA states that, together, have gotten the bulk of FEMA’s direct assistance since 2015.
In 2021, Louisiana was walloped by two hurricanes and two sets of severe storms. For those disasters, the state received just over $3.9 billion in FEMA aid and over $2.1 billion in disaster-recovery grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to data from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Now, this comparison isn’t quite apples-to-apples because Louisiana’s state budget doesn’t follow the calendar year, but heading into the 2020-2021 fiscal year, the state’s 2021 FEMA needs alone were over one-third of the state’s general fund ($9.2 billion) and over one-tenth of its total budget ($36.1 billion).
There is no way a state can take care of its own problems at that scale.
Water is dropped by helicopter on the Kenneth Fire in the West Hills section of Los Angeles on Jan. 9, 2025.
Trump may happily shovel federal disaster money at red states while starving blue ones. (His comments about California’s fires have made that clear.) However, the ability of the government to respond nimbly to disasters requires steady streams of funding and a well-established infrastructure. The rapacious hollowing-out of federal capacity and funding will still mean far fewer resources are available for Trump’s favorites.
So, if the government won’t spend money on keeping its airways, banks, or states safe, where will your federal tax dollars go? Toward things like requiring the attorney general to demand that state and local officials investigate K-12 teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” To be perfectly clear, there is no existing federal law about any such thing, so Trump is demanding that state laws about the sexual exploitation of minors and practicing medicine without a license be stretched to include being nice about pronouns.
In doing this, Trump is seeking to eviscerate the principles of local control, or the idea that the smallest unit of government is the most adept at responding to the needs of its community. That’s why we don’t have a vast swath of federal education policy about what gets taught and how. School boards and cities are better able to make those determinations. Indeed, this flies in the face of Trump’s other education goal: eliminating the Department of Education and returning education policy to the states. (Of course, it’s doubtful he’d allow blue states to fully handle their education policies.)
Besides this sort of thing being stupid and cruel, it’s also unsustainable. How long can the administration hurl resources at things like multiple sloppy edits to the official biography of a groundbreaking female astronomer? Such a small focus—and at the start of a new presidential administration—is pathetic.
This level of vigilance, of forever needing to throw red meat to the red base, requires constant and massive surveillance efforts. The federal government can’t possibly surveil every teacher in every public school to make sure those teachers aren’t being supportive of their trans students. That’s where state and local officials get dragged in. Trump is counting on a culture of fear—that anyone can turn a teacher in for some perceived indiscretion.
Trump is building a government that won’t be able to celebrate the kind of wins we expect from the federal government: stopping bank collapses, keeping aircraft from crashing, ensuring cities rebuild after natural disasters. Rather, the wins will be only how many individual people he has managed to harm. His base was promised terrorized immigrants, resegregation, and the elimination of trans people from public life. And each time Trump manages to use the whole of the federal government to hurt people, they will celebrate wildly.
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