I'm a retired professor of entrepreneurship, history and investments who lives in Porto in the winter and spring and Jurmala, Latvia in the summer. I'm a partner in a group of angel investors and have investments in half a dozen startups in Latvia, the USA, the Netherlands and Sweden. I could easily fund a libel case against you, but won't bother purely out of pity for your superficial idiocy.
You may be ok with Musk's openly racist ("before it was cool") 19 year old intern Big Balls haviing your SS number and bank info, but I'm not. FWIW I have a small collection of put options on TSLA since it's shares sell for 14x sales, which are down 60%+ all over Europe. Nobody's buying Elon's Swastikars. Musk is the biggest recipient of corporate welfare in human history. BYD will make TSLA toast.
To get a bird's eye view on what DOGE means, read what Nadin Brzezinski wrote about its impact in rural communities (and BTW, thanks for cutting my capital gains taxes; it comes out of your health care and disaster relief if you're in NC, CA, FL, TX):
Who are we Losing in the So-Called Deep State
Nadin Brzezinski
The hunt for the deep state is something to behold. Since most of us can’t keep up with every agency, I will focus on the United States Forest Service.
They are dear to me because, as a former fire reporter, I saw them working harder than most people I know to keep the fire from ravaging the countryside. While fire is a natural part of the landscape, this will make it far worse. It’s as if the President does not care about raking the forest; I am giving him the benefit of the doubt, probably I shouldn’t, that this is what he calls forest management. It’s beyond raking, though hand crews do some of that when building fire lines. So here is the first piece. I think it’s important you understand who is getting fired:
I’ve seen a mix of DOGE fanboy/fangirl praise and people who are angry at the work DOGE is doing. Figured I’d chime in with a more insider’s look.
DOGE got going with the idea of cutting fraud and waste. I’m sure there is both in the federal government. But DOGE isn’t doing that. They’re just cutting to cut.
At the Forest Service, we lost 3,400 people, mostly recent hires but also some more established workers. The vast majority of these folks aren’t Washington bureaucrats, but people working in rural America. Almost all of them having nothing to do with any ‘agenda’ the new administration is gunning for.
Here’s who we lost:
Trail crews. Biologists. Foresters. Front desk help at ranger stations. Engineers. Surveyors. GIS specialists. Hydrologists. Researchers who study anything from plant and animal species to wildfire behavior. Rec specialists.
Losing these people means forest roads don’t get maintained. Trails will be closed. So will campgrounds. Wildfire prevention projects will be delayed or shelved. Timber stands will be unavailable for logging.
In these rural (and often conservative) communities, the Forest Service and other federal land agencies provide good jobs to places where opportunities are few. Local sawmills will lose business. Communities that depend on visitors who hike, camp, ride and boat will lose income when services are scaled back. In Trinity County, that means more hardship for the poorest county in California.
I’ve talked to several people around the area and I hear similar stories. Partner agencies are worried that joint projects focusing on wildfire prevention are in jeopardy. Farmers, ranchers and loggers are increasingly angry that USDA and other federal contracts are being delayed or scrapped; some of these folks face ruin.
In the words of a coworker who is still with the agency, ‘I voted for Trump. I support the things he wants to do. But I didn’t vote for this.’ (He’s a longtime firefighter now in the communications field).
What he’s feeling is echoed elsewhere. Another colleague says her forest is at 36% workforce staffing. You simply can’t manage a forest with so few people, and that’s where a lot of forests are at.
Elon says DOGE has saved taxpayers $55 billion. The real number is more like $8 billion, and even that number doesn’t square for this reason: it doesn’t measure the cost associated with cuts. You lose services, you lose value.
Think of it this way. You’ve got a car/truck that doesn’t drive as fast or haul are much as you’d like. If it was lighter, it would have less weight to hinder performance, we’re told.
But instead of taking a hard look at the vehicle’s design, a bunch of untrained mechanics start removing parts. A bearing here, a gear there. Take out that belt. Lose a fender and a seat. And who checks transmission fluid anyway? Rip the system out. And lose some of that wiring. On the bright side, you lightened the vehicle by 300 pounds. But now the vehicle won’t start, or when it does, it seizes up and won’t run anymore.
That’s what DOGE is doing. There’s no thought behind these cuts (they’re trying to rehire Energy Department workers they fired who oversaw our nuclear stockpile, as well as scientists who were tracking the bird flu epidemic). No ‘auditing’ is being done. Half the time, these people are making snap judgments based on information they don’t understand, then yelling ‘fraud!’ based on those erroneous conclusions.
The deep state hunt will have impacts. Back in my neck of the woods, our forests will become less healthy, less accessible and, with the delay in seasonal fire hiring, less safe. Winter rain and snow assures a ton of spring growth, but we’re not far from the hot, dry season that will turn these forests into a tinderbox.
I can’t speak for the impact of other agencies’ cuts. But nothing in our forests is being made great again. It’s putting them in greater jeopardy of seeing catastrophic wildfire, where the scenes we saw in Paradise, Lahaina and LA could be repeated with our communities less able to defend themselves.
I’ll close with this: Just because this doesn’t affect you now doesn’t mean it won’t soon. It will. If that bothers you, call your congress reps and senators, especially if they’re Rs. They need to know, and they need to feel some heat. Get vocal before the whole enterprise crashes on our heads.
Oh, there is more. The federal government is freezing hiring. So here is an immediate effect: Career fire crews, which, incidentally, are among the lowest-paid fire agencies in the country, are enhanced with seasonal firefighters. This has been the case for as long as the USFS has performed this mission.
Seasonal firefighters must be trained, whether smoke jumpers, hand crews, or whatever. Hiring them starts about now, or actually in March-April.
From the looks of it, they won’t be hired this year. What could go wrong? That this will affect conservative rural areas, aka Trump’s base, the hardest should tell you how much he cares about that base.
Add to that that Trump wants to eliminate FEMA…once again, what could go wrong?
Then there are the prescribed burns. Those are somewhat new in forest management; however, they precede Trump by a decade or two. They are used to thin fuels before it gets too hot or windy.
Sometimes, controlled burns are a great way to conduct interagency training. However, a controlled burn sometimes gets out of hand, even during training. That happened in the Montezuma fire, one of the fires I covered. The fact that every local agency was on site helped a lot.
Here is the second piece because firefighting will not surprise you. It’s the rest the service does. Pay attention to disaster relief and North Carolina…something about every accusation is a confession.
Terminated, Effective Immediately
At the risk of exposing what a nerd I am, I’ll tell you that when I first opened my Forest Service uniform, I held my badge and cried. I was so proud to be part of the agency whose mission is “caring for the land and serving people”. I thought about how proud my dad would be. He instilled in me a sense of duty, patriotism, and a strong desire to do what’s right, especially when people need it most.
For the past 19.5 months, I’ve been working in disaster recovery for the National Forests in North Carolina. I worked on 6 hurricanes or major storms and a dozen or more wildfires during that time, including deployments to western states.
I also took a temp promotion as the District Ranger for the Grandfather Ranger District two weeks before Hurricane Helene ravaged Pisgah National Forest, western NC, and other states. While my own family didn’t have power or a way to keep food and medication cold, I went in and worked 19 days straight before someone made me take a break.
I led the District to the best of my ability through something none of us signed up for. I had to. People needed us. Our first focus was clearing a path to get to 35 kids and their teachers who were trapped in a facility behind several landslides and giant piles of debris. After that, we focused on supporting search and rescue, clearing roads for emergency access, and helping everywhere we could.
I returned to my normal role on the disaster recovery team in January and started working towards long-term recovery for the Forest and our local communities. On Thursday, I stood on the ruined part of I-40 with a team planning how to stick an interstate back on the side of a mountain. People probably don’t realize that portion sits on National Forest land and cannot be fixed without Forest Service employees. That afternoon we got word that 14 of our employees were indiscriminately fired. All of them were actively working on hurricane recovery.
Yesterday, I received the call that I was being fired. We’ve lost 17 in total from the National Forests in North Carolina. Every single one was working on hurricane recovery projects. The majority of them hold firefighter or incident management qualifications and actively support wildfire operations. The US Forest Service has reportedly lost more than 4000 employees at this point. More than 10% of the agency.
My termination letter said it was “based on performance”. The supervisor that called me said I was the best hire they had ever made. My performance reviews have always been excellent. I love what I do and, like so many of my colleagues, I care about getting it right to meet our mission.
In my time working for this agency, I think I’ve made a difference. Besides growing personally and professionally, I’ve tried to be an example of a strong, caring woman for my daughters. I talk with them about how we can do hard things and we should always “do what we can, with what we have, where we’re at.” When I told them that I wasn’t allowed to do my job anymore, they cried with me. We have all sacrificed for my work. I’ve taught them to believe it matters.
It still matters.
I hope I get to do it again one day.
I am bringing these stories to you because it’s easy to ignore facts when overwhelmed with statistics. There are many more stories, not just from the USFS but from every other agency.
I can’t wait for the Postal Service to be merged with the Commerce Department. While Trump has denied this, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has resigned in preparation for it.
However, the rest of the board is getting ready to sue:
The board overseeing USPS held an emergency meeting Thursday, retained a lawyer and laid out steps to sue the White House if Trump were to carry out these plans, the outlet reported.
Full disclosure: my husband is a postal worker.
Why can’t I wait for this? Any effect on service will disproportionately affect that rural conservative base. All shippers default to the service in last-mile delivery because there is no profit in taking stuff to the boonies. Locally, this likely means people in Julian will have to drive to Alpine to get their mail, which is the best case. Probably El Cajon.
Also, the USPS is the only agency mentioned in the US Constitution. So it will be easier to defend against these corporate raiders.
https://medium.com/@nadinbrzezinski/who-are-we-losing-in-the-so-called-deep-state-426d2aa62a74
