When I was growing up in Morgantown, West Virginia, I remember very well when that new building went up at the end of Willowdale Road, near the West Virginia University Medical Center and not too far from my friend Doug’s house.
These days, Morgantown—driven by the university in general and by what they now call the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center, in particular—is a sprawling small city, with townhouses and shopping centers and office buildings having swallowed the acres of woods where my friends and I used to play. But in 1970, it was kind of a big deal when a spanking new building like that was conjured into being; this one was of particular interest because it was something different: a federal government building, bringing a little slice of Washington to town.
If you’ve been following the news, you may know that I’m referring to the NIOSH building—the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which for 55 years employed dedicated researchers in Morgantown studying the effects of black lung on coal miners. Black lung, or pneumoconiosis, occurs when coal dust is inhaled and has killed many men before their time; it killed one of my grandfathers in his fifties. Pap, whom I never knew, died way before the federal government managed to overcome the coal operators’ fierce resistance to even acknowledging that coal mining could expose one to harm and established NIOSH through an act of Congress. But once that happened, laboratories were established in Morgantown and six other cities to research occupational safety, in the mines and other dangerous workplaces. Some 200 people worked at the lab in my hometown and from the mobile van they used to travel across coal country to perform checks on miners, sometimes literally right outside the mine gate.
Until Elon Musk.
Those 200 people were fired in early April by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Controversy ensued, and many of them have been temporarily rehired, but they’re slated to be fired again in June. Labs in Pittsburgh and in Spokane, Washington, were also eliminated.
As Musk steps back from DOGE, we’re getting a number of assessments of his “accomplishments.” They’re generally harsh. He vowed to slash $2 trillion in “wasteful” federal spending (the federal government spends just under $7 trillion a year). He recently acknowledged it’ll be more like $150 billion. However, his “cuts” will also cost American taxpayers $135 billion, according to one estimate, because it turns out that some of these bloodsucking deep staters save taxpayers money. But even $150 billion is a grotesque lie. Jessica Reidl of the Manhattan Institute—yes, the staunchly conservative and generally pro-Trump think tank—recently told The New York Times’ David French: “So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust.”
That’s harsh, all right. But it’s not only or even mainly on fiscal grounds that he deserves our contempt. The cuts are leaving thousands of good people unemployed. And they will literally kill people. Coal miners will die prematurely. Children all over the world will die from malaria and other diseases because of the demise of USAID, which Musk called a “criminal organization.” In fact, this is already happening: Children with AIDS in Africa have died because of the elimination of a President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, outreach program. That’s just the beginning of the enormous pain these cuts will inflict across the world. And the richest man on the planet, who grew up amid vast wealth from his father’s emerald-mining operations and has never known hardship or had to rely on a government service in his life (unless you count $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits for his companies), is responsible for every drop of it.
Thursday night, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and Jacob Soboroff hosted a fantastic special from Washington, in which they gathered some 50 federal workers from around the country to talk about what they did, why they loved their jobs, and how this will hurt people. One person, Scott Laney, was a Morgantown-based epidemiologist who spoke eloquently about the dedication of the people he worked with. Keri Murphy of the Commerce Department was working to implement the CHIPS and Science Act—that is, bringing jobs back to America in just the way Donald Trump says he wants. “That’s why I thought I was safe,” Murphy told Soboroff. Tamara Maze of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said: “All federal workers I’ve ever known are in it because we want to serve the country.”
It was important television, and if you have a chance to watch it this weekend, you should. MSNBC, if they’re interested in my two cents, should start a weekly show dedicated to federal workers. I wish they’d started one years ago, in which case stories of these dedicated professionals would have infiltrated the discourse and countered the toxic right-wing propaganda about these workers, whom even most Democrats have rarely bothered to defend. If such a show had existed, maybe DOGE never would have happened. It’s still not too late. As the Chinese say, “The best time to have planted a tree was 20 years ago; the second-best time is now.”
Be that as it may: Musk is a poisonous human being. He may be good at making money (with the help of government subsidies), but he is planet Earth’s greatest walking proof that that skill does not automatically confer other skills, despite how much our culture (and especially right-wing media) lionizes the super-rich. Musk is stupid about a great many things, and especially about government administration and public service. He is incompetent. He is cruel. And he is sinister.
Am I overdoing it? Consider the other big piece of Musk news this week, which came to us courtesy of a chilling op-ed in The New York Times Wednesday, by investigative journalist Julia Angwin. In it, she spun the tale of how Musk and his Muskrats are doing nothing less than compiling a vast database on every one of us: “assembling a sprawling surveillance system,” she writes, “the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.”
Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to describe the details. You see, the databases of most executive branch agencies are siloed off from one another. There is a reason for this—so the CIA can’t get your Social Security information. The DOGE team, with its usual combination of evil intent and clumsy ineptitude, is trying to break down these walls so that the Trump White House can have a thorough file on each of us just a couple clicks away. One whistleblower “alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data.”
House Democrats, I’m told, aren’t yet willing to impute to Musk the malign motivation that Angwin does. But why should we doubt that a man who praises dictators and thinks the neo-Nazi AfD party is Germany’s only hope would hesitate at the idea of a surveillance state? As Angwin meticulously details, what we know about DOGE’s infiltration of those databases points pretty clearly in that direction.
Tesla’s board says it supports Musk as CEO and that The Wall Street Journal’s report that he’s being shoved out is false. Fine. Tesla, which he did not found and which he’s now running into the ground, can have him. Let panels fly off those hideous Cybertrucks. Just please give this destroyer of worlds a smaller world to destroy.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.