I said some time ago that USDA would not escape being DOGE’d and the purge of government workers has now come home to roost. I would hope that they would consult some of those who could help with the triage but it appears that at least in the first swath of those let go, the ones easiest to fire with the least ability to fight back are being shown the door. That would be the probationary workers and thousands of them have received notice their jobs were terminated. It is immediate too as their e-mail access gets turned off before they get the actual notice they have been let go.

The temporary workers say their notice says that they have been terminated for poor performance. Some had previously received the highest proficiency award. That would be agency and DOGE legal advisors wording the notice to limit legal liability and terminated employee recourse. These people did not do anything wrong and as a whole there were no performance issues. They just had to go and it is an ugly process being conducted. It would appear that the firing is going to add up to a total that should show up in a future jobs report with unemployment ticking up (assuming they did not fire the officials that produce the report).

Current government employees, beyond those still on probation, were offered a severance through September. I last read over 75,000 took it. Who would they be? Likely those who could retire or others who felt that their employment was at risk or those who had some other opportunity identified in the private sector. The ones that couldn’t get a job in the private sector will be the ones that stay.

There was a trickle-down impact beyond the federal level. My neighbor works for the Iowa DNR. He says that the federal firings were the talk of state government too. He says that almost all of their state programs have some federal component to them where funding will be lost that puts them in jeopardy. Either the state will pick up more of these programs or state employees will follow federal ones out the door. He has a little over a year to go before he can retire and he said he will when he can. What you are going to see is a drain of experience where those who know what they are doing because they have done it will leave. The newbies on probation were the ones bringing new ideas and energy.

At least 200,000 probationary federal workers were cut. They are demoting other workers, trying to make them disgruntled enough to leave. Ten percent of the Forest Service and 5% of National Park employees were let go. My senior citizen National Park pass may be worth a little less. Some of the initial firings were being reversed after they found out that critical DOE jobs like guarding nukes, USDA scientists combating bird flu devastating flocks of laying hens and even FAA staff working on U.S. missile defense systems were leaving the public exposed. There will be mistakes, they warned us. Maybe they should better research what these employees do before firing them. When do mistakes become incompetence?

DOGE is cutting programs along with employees. Take the Department of Education for example. School funding is primarily local. That is why we pay property taxes. Then the state provides the next level of funding. The federal government funds things like programs for special needs plus college loans and such. Good luck getting a federal loan to go to college.

So, with the fed’s contribution to funding school systems gone, local governments and schools the country over will have to decide what is important enough to them to pick up the cost to continue them with state and local financial support.

What the federal government is doing in many cases is kicking responsibility for services down to states and local government. The federal budget deficit may go down but state and local budget deficits will increase.

What is fraud and abuse? I am pretty sure that when Elon looks at paying farmers for conservation practices such as no-till and cover crops as a total waste of taxpayer money, my bet his response would be, “What the hell is government paying them for that!?” Calling Lutheran Social Services fraud and waste as they did, lit things up on social media where we live with even our governor defending the work that they do.

Agri-Pulse reported, “the Trump administration’s mass firing of probationary federal employees has swept out workers across USDA, including loan analysts in Farm Service Agency field offices, ag scientists, and about 1,200 staff of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, according to sources.” Newly confirmed Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins sent a letter of gratitude to the U.S. Forest Service commending them for the work that they have done given recent wildfires and then fired 3,400 of them. That was awkward.

A USDA official let go said that the DOGE firings were “butchering the best” at the agency. The issue now is that many farmers working with USDA have no idea where they land in the upheaval of programs and personnel occurring. I did some water-way conservation work last year that the NRCS approved for 50% cost share for dirt work and tiling and it was also submitted by the FSA to be enrolled in the CRP waterway program. I was told that they had to extend the farm bill to get the CRP funding confirmed … which was done. Have not heard anything since, but no money. I have no idea where the prospective cost-share funding for the conservation work done is at. A lot of USDA programs are frozen and layoffs are impacting the FSA, NCRS and USDA loan officers. An acquaintance in Texas bought a new Valley irrigation pivot funded through a young farmer USDA loan. The pivot is arriving but the funds are frozen. If his loan officer was cut, who would you even talk to? There is a lot of this going around.

We have an unsustainable federal debt crisis now looming close enough that it is real. For most of my life it was a generation or two away. It now shows up in the immediate OMB fiscal forecast. If stiffing us on promised payments would balance the federal budget or even make material progress to reach fiscal sustainability I would go along with this chaos and turmoil seeing it as necessary pain for needed gain. If, however, and I will be blunt … that this spending savings instead goes so they can give additional tax cuts to the oligarchs now in control of the country … I will not be happy.