Every day brings new stories of DOGE and the Trump administration dealing damage to the federal government—damage that will likely be permanent. The expertise that thousands of federal staff have taken with them after being terminated, taking the “fork” offer to resign, or choosing to escape the mayhem through retirement, new jobs, or otherwise leaving may not be replaceable.
As a Biden-Harris appointee at the Department of Labor, I worked with incredible career leaders who had deep expertise in their fields and the motivation to deliver on behalf of the American people. I saw my role as learning from experts in their fields, helping to expedite critical work, and advancing the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to support workers, retirees, and those looking for work throughout this country.
I’ve been so dismayed to see the current administration callously and carelessly cut expertise from our government. All of us in America—not just terminated federal workers—will feel the effects of these layoffs very soon, as former Secretary of Labor Julie Su and other colleagues have written. In the longer term, the United States will lose out. When former federal staff leave, they often are taking decades of experience in specific areas with them. If our democracy remains, it could take decades to rebuild that expertise.
The current administration is tearing apart our federal government under the guise of efficiency. That’s nonsense. I saw career staff work with serious efficiency at the Department of Labor. For example, while I was at the department, staff frequently met hiring targets within just 80 days. Those of you looking for jobs right now know that such speed is less common than it should be across nonprofits, the private sector, and philanthropy.
I worked with teams that had deep expertise in protecting privacy. And now Elon Musk and DOGE have access to much of our personally identifiable information. Now that our information has been shared widely, how can we ever pull it back—especially if we lose privacy experts from the federal government?
My colleagues and I worked to integrate artificial intelligence into the department in ways that protect workers, in partnership with our unions, and to educate staff on available technology so they could help bring greater efficiency to the government. Is it really going to be more efficient to give a huge government contract to Musk or to private tech companies to integrate AI? How will AI be integrated safely or fairly when those with decades of government experience aren’t there to make sure the models are trained accurately and are doing what we want them to?
With the cuts we are seeing to public health programs, how will America be ready for the next big public health crisis? We will lose our lead as a country doing groundbreaking research that saves lives and lose the mechanisms to get life-saving prevention and treatment to our people.
Based on what we have already seen—from DOGE emailing the wrong groups of people, to invalidating government badges without emailing at all, to cutting government programs that have already been paid for, to cutting line items that are already zeroed out—it’s obvious that people in this administration don’t have expertise for the jobs they actually have, let alone the vast expertise needed across the government.
The damage they intended to do is well underway. The expertise I saw in the federal government may be gone forever, unless we act now. We must all speak out as we can. Litigators must keep up the fight in court. And we need to take a serious look at building a parallel infrastructure in the states to preserve the expertise and functions that this administration is throwing out. We need to do what we can to stop the bleeding now for the benefit of all of us—and for the future of our country.
Surjeet Ahluwalia is a former Biden-Harris Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Labor.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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