Transcript: Fiasco for Musk as Trump Advisers Erupt in anti-DOGE Panic

Aronoff: Yeah, and I think you only have to look at what happened to X, the everything app, formerly Twitter, or even at Tesla to see the model here, which is to come in, slash as quickly as possible, regardless of how much chaos or real danger it causes. With something like Tesla where you have people dealing with, in some cases, dangerous chemicals, with really harsh industrial working conditions, if you say the rules don’t matter, rules are for losers, then people get hurt. And I think that happened at Tesla, and that’s happening now in the U.S. government with Musk in the reins.

Sargent: Certainly is. And there’s a level of cynicism here that’s really pretty disgusting. Trump and Musk and their propagandists know that they can dig through the federal government, pluck out things that sound obscure like battling bacteria in the Great Lakes or something, and then just say, Fuck, does taxpayer money really need to go to this? Right? But the thing is, in complex modern societies, we need the state to do a lot of things like this. Our well-being depends on it.

Aronoff: On the NOAA firings briefly, one idea I had before reporting this piece was that they were going through cutting things that maybe had the word “climate” in the name or “environment” because they thought they were stupid or wasteful. But it’s actually a lot dumber than that. The people who were fired, who I spoke with, were probationary employees, which includes people who were recently hired, younger people who have very specific skills and are eager to put them to use for the U.S. government, [and] also people who have been in NOAA for a long time either as contractors who were recently brought onto the Fed side or who were promoted recently—so people who were actually doing very well at their jobs and had gotten new positions because of it. That was across the board.