All The Times DOGE S**t Had To Be Cleaned Up

Trump keeps racing to rehire federal workers he fired because — surprise! — we need experts on nuclear weapons, bird flu prevention and park management.

WASHINGTON — Imagine becoming president of the United States and one of the first things you do is fire the people in charge of managing the country’s nuclear weapons.

For good measure, imagine you also went ahead and fired scientists trying to prevent a national outbreak of a deadly bird flu, military veterans who run a national crisis line and environmental stewards who keep the country’s hugely popular national parks clean and safe for millions of summertime visitors.

Oops! President Donald Trump — with the assistance of his buddy Elon Musk, the world’s richest man ― did all of these things, and now he’s backpedaling, scrambling to rehire hundreds if not thousands of federal workers he just pushed out.

After weeks of sowing chaos across the federal government with drastic and arbitrary (and likely illegal) mass firings, the Trump administration is figuring out the hard way, after turning tens of thousands of people’s lives upside-down, that federal employees and the work they do is essential for millions of Americans’ safety, health and general happiness.

From the moment Trump resumed office in January, Musk has been moving at warp speed to dismiss as many federal employees as possible — the White House’s stated goal is 10% of the federal workforce — in his role atop Trump’s newly created commission, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.