DOGE has eliminated thousands of federal jobs and canceled more than 1,000 contracts. Harvard professor Elizabeth Linos warns, "We're seeing harms that are not going to be easily undone." Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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There's a lot of news happening. You want to understand it better, but let's be honest, you don't want it to be your entire life either. Well, that's sort of like our show, Here and Now Anytime. Every weekday on our podcast, we talk to people all over the country about everything from political analysis to climate resilience, video games. We even talk about dumpster diving on this show.
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Here's a hypothetical question. If he wanted to, could Elon Musk establish a new bathroom breaks policy for more than 2 million federal employees?
Well, he hasn't, but since the Trump administration took office and gave Musk's Department of Government Efficiency a mandate to shrink the government, Musk has wielded an astonishing level of authority over the federal workforce.
After gaining access to the Treasury Department's massive payment system, Musk and his team have dismissed thousands of employees, terminated countless contracts, and targeted two government agencies created by Congress for elimination. Last weekend, federal workers received an email instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week.
Musk added in a social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. That got pushback from several Trump-appointed agency leaders who told their employees not to respond. Much of what Musk has done is under court challenge, but President Trump has said he'd like to see him become even more aggressive.
To help us understand these efforts to drastically reshape the American government, we've invited Elizabeth Linus to join us.
She's the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and director of the People Lab, which does research on how to recruit, retrain, and support the government workforce and integrate evidence-based policymaking into government.
Earlier in her career, she was a policy advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece, pursuing government reform at a time of financial crisis. Well, Elizabeth Linos, welcome to Fresh Air.
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