Slashing Budgets, Gutting Safety: The Fallout of Musk’s Mass Firings

When ideology trumps expertise, national security and public health pay the price.

There’s cost-cutting, and then there’s playing Russian roulette with national security and public health. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Frankenstein creation of the Trump administration, was supposed to make the federal government run like a lean, money-saving machine. Instead, it has become a slash-and-burn operation, hacking away at federal agencies with all the finesse of a toddler wielding a chainsaw.

The results? Nuclear security experts dismissed. Public health officials fired in the middle of an avian flu outbreak. Critical scientific research halted. The administration’s rapid-fire layoff spree, spearheaded by Elon Musk in his new bureaucratic overlord role, has exposed a dangerous lack of foresight, experience, and common sense. Now, in a humiliating about-face, they’re scrambling to rehire some of the very people they fired. Keeping highly trained professionals in their jobs actually matters when you're running a country. Who knew?

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Nuclear Stockpile Experts? We Don’t Need Those, Right?

In a move that reads like the opening scene of a political disaster movie, over 300 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were unceremoniously dismissed. These aren’t just bureaucrats pushing paper. These are highly specialized experts responsible for maintaining the U.S. nuclear stockpile's safety, reliability, and security.

This is not a job you can fill by posting on Indeed and hoping for the best. The people who work at NNSA spend decades developing the expertise needed to handle nuclear materials, oversee warhead maintenance, and ensure our deterrent capabilities don’t turn into an accidental catastrophe. DOGE, in its infinite wisdom, treated them like interchangeable cogs. Only after the fact did they realize that maybe firing the people who keep our nuclear arsenal in check wasn’t a great idea. Now, there’s a frantic push to rehire them if they even want to return. Would you return to a workplace that just kicked you to the curb without a second thought?

Avian Flu is Spreading? Let’s Fire the People Fighting It!

Not content with jeopardizing national security, DOGE has also made sure public health is equally screwed. At the USDA, officials tasked with tracking and containing the spread of H5N1 avian flu were let go. This is happening right in the middle of an outbreak that has already resulted in the culling of over 160 million birds and sent egg prices skyrocketing.

And here’s the real kicker. This isn’t just a bird problem anymore. The H5N1 strain has now jumped to mammals, with confirmed cases in domestic cats and dairy cows. In April 2024, the first confirmed human infection linked to infected dairy cows occurred in Texas. The virus has already made the jump to people.

Scientists have long warned that H5N1 has the potential to mutate into a strain capable of sustained human-to-human transmission. That is the nightmare scenario. So what did DOGE do? Fire the very people responsible for preventing that nightmare from happening. The USDA is now in full damage-control mode, scrambling to undo the layoffs and bring specialists back. But this kind of disruption is exactly what allows outbreaks to spiral out of control. The avian flu virus doesn’t pause and wait for bureaucrats to fix their mistakes. It spreads. And thanks to DOGE, it may spread faster than it should.

Scientific Research, Stopped in Its Tracks

It’s not just national security and public health at risk. Scientific progress itself has taken a direct hit. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other research-focused agencies, ongoing clinical trials and long-term studies have been halted due to the gutting of research staff.

Some of these studies were investigating lifesaving treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and rare diseases. These projects require years, if not decades, of uninterrupted work. You can’t just pick up where you left off when you lose key personnel and disrupt funding streams. In some cases, patients relying on experimental treatments have now been left in limbo, all because DOGE’s efficiency crusade couldn’t be bothered to consider the consequences of its strategy.

Also, NASA. Because of course Musk went after NASA and Artemis so the focus will be on his pet project, Mars.

When Ideology Meets Incompetence

The most maddening part of all this? None of it had to happen. There was no pressing national emergency requiring mass layoffs of essential personnel. This wasn’t about actual inefficiencies. It was about proving a point. The Trump administration, emboldened by Musk’s tech-bro "move fast and break things" mentality, decided to gut the federal workforce first and ask questions later.

Now, faced with the predictable consequences of their recklessness, they’re trying to walk it all back, pretending this wasn’t an entirely self-inflicted disaster.

This is what happens when you put zealots with no experience in charge of government operations that require precision, planning, and expertise. It’s one thing to run Twitter into the ground by firing engineers who keep the site functioning. It’s another thing entirely to apply that same mentality to nuclear security, disease prevention, and medical research. When the government screws up, real people suffer, and the damage could be long-lasting.

How many more dangerous mistakes will DOGE make before the administration realizes that government isn’t a game? The stakes are too high, and the damage is already too deep. The real world doesn’t come with a reset button, and at this rate, the cost of learning that lesson could be catastrophic.

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Bibliography

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A(H5N1) Virus: Current Situation Summary.” CDC, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/mammals.html

The Associated Press. “Avian Flu Jumps to Cats, Cows, and Now a Person.” AP News, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/10e7b3bcaffe92ab84cadcbcab1f09c6

New York Magazine. “Elon Musk’s DOGE Keeps Accidentally Firing Very Important People.” Intelligencer, 2025. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/musks-doge-bird-flu-nuclear-weapons.html

The Washington Post. “USDA tries to reverse mistaken firing of bird flu response workers.” The Washington Post, 2025. https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/usda-tries-to-reverse-mistaken-firing-of-bird-flu-response-workers/ar-AA1zlrUD?ocid=BingNewsSerp

The Atlantic. “The Musk Terror Reign in Government.” The Atlantic, 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/musk-terror-reign/681731/

Vanity Fair. “Trump and Musk’s Federal Bulldozing Is Endangering Us All.” Vanity Fair, 2025. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-and-elon-musks-federal-bulldozing-is-endangering-us-all