There were a lot of lies put out by the pundits and media shills about what a Trump presidency was going to be like. Members of the press claimed they would be rounded up and put in concentration camps. He was going to revoke gay and interracial marriage. Trump was going to collapse (according to the left-wing media) an already booming Biden-driven economy with a “trade war.” Politicians like Chuck Schumer claimed, with the passage of every piece of legislation, that people were going to die.
Of course, none of this has come to pass. That doesn’t stop them from pushing their hate-filled narratives, but the more they do, the more normal Americans see it for what it is -- lies. Not even well crafted fibs at that.
Perhaps the biggest bundle of these lies was around the dismissal and early retirement of thousands of federal workers. Airports would be shut down. People were going to starve to death, or simply drop dead. Veterans and Social Security recipients were going to lose their benefits. We were told that the State Department, losing 1,300 employees out of the 77,000 employees (not counting contractors) was going to cause international harm. We were even told that the horrible customer service at the Social Security Administration was going to somehow get worse. Then came the lie that the gutting of the Department of Education was going to make our children dumber. The list goes on and on.
The reduction of the federal workforce is, thus far, between 121,000 and 250,000 personnel, with many taking the early retirement option. While the media and Democratic lawmakers assured us that there would be chaos and a body count as a result of these cuts, what was the real impact?
Nothing.
If people were starving, dropping dead, or made homeless, the left-wing media would have made it a nightly news event, complete with a ticker in the lower part of the screen counting the dead the same way they did with COVID. That hasn’t happened. The reason it hasn’t is simple, reality kicked in. These cuts in manpower were a massive nothingburger.
This slashing of jobs has not hurt everyday Americans the way that the Left so desperately desires. Society didn’t collapse. In fact, the government trudged on despite the lawsuits fighting each and every dismissal. Life continued as it always does, as did the ponderous churning of the wheels of the federal bureaucracy.
Local news radio in towns outside D.C. had a daily feature for months about the angst and agony of the job cuts, but now that has become a trickle. Most of what they “reported” was the strife and anxiety of the workers who were worried if they would lose their jobs. Interviewees claimed they didn’t have money set aside for this contingency, despite the fact that Trump made it clear when he was running that this was his intention.
For non-government American workers, it was a stress they had been dealing with for decades. Layoffs in the real world, outside the cloistered enclave of D.C., are common. Most people have experienced them at one point or another. Federal workers bemoaning their new plight didn’t generate sympathy. If anything, it highlighted federal employees' beliefs that they deserved a protected job for life. It actually made most people less compassionate about their plight. Like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, many citizens said, “Welcome to the party, pal!”
There were other cuts that people claimed were going to be harmful. Some of those burdens now will need to be picked up by the states or local governments. PBS and NPR haven’t shut down. They have to compete in the free market like any other media channel. Cuts to NGOs have simply pinched the pipeline of funds being laundered to politicians.
What Americans learned from this exercise was what Trump had been saying all along -- that the government was grotesquely bloated. We learned what we all suspected, that there were entities out there that were raking in money from our taxes that were wasting it, or that we were paying for things that really didn’t benefit the masses. We learned that chopping some jobs, while painful for those involved, didn’t impact regular people at all. In other words, those jobs were wasteful. It is hard to feel sorry for people who were, daily, taking our tax dollars as pay and not doing anything for us.
Don’t get me wrong. Being laid off is stressful. It isn’t the end of the world. I know of several friends who took early retirement, and all have secured positions with beltway bandits… contractors in the D.C. area. If former federal employees were living in refrigerator boxes on the streets or in homeless shelters, you’d be seeing it on MSNBC every hour, on the hour. You don’t because those people are either on unemployment or have gotten other jobs.
All this leaves you wondering one thing: how much more cutting can we do? A lot, I’m willing to bet.
Blaine Pardoe is a New York Times Bestselling and award-winning author canceled by one of his publishers in 2022. His conservative political thriller series, Blue Dawn, is the story of the violent overthrow of the government by radical progressives. His new series, Tenure, is about a Punisher-like hero that goes after the woke. He also authors the bestselling military science fiction series, Land&Sea.
Image: AT via Magic Studio