One of my basic rules of politics, law, business, sports, entertainment, and many other walks of life is that when you can’t admit the real reasons for what you’re doing — or when the rules prohibit you from doing what you want directly — it ends up distorting every aspect of what you do and how you do it. So it is with the Trump/Musk/DOGE effort to slash the federal workforce, whether that be bureaucrats, prosecutors, inspectors general, diplomats, spies, park rangers, air traffic controllers, or the various other categories of people who work for Uncle Sam in civilian jobs (not that Trump is shy about going after generals, too).

Donald Trump and Elon Musk have three main legitimate motivations in their various efforts to run through the federal bureaucracy, making life unpleasant for federal workers, and trying to fire them or get them to quit their jobs:

First, to get the bureaucracy to follow orders. Trump and prior Republican presidents have been frustrated by the determined resistance of many quarters of the federal workforce to carrying out the president’s policies. The same has happened to Democratic presidents, but far less frequently and with decreasing regularity as the agencies have become gradually more ideologically monochromatic. What Trump wants to do is fire anyone who won’t do what they’re told — an entirely legitimate aim when the president is giving directions that aren’t illegal. Anything beyond the president’s power to control is beyond the constitutional powers of the executive branch.

Second, to reduce federal spending and regulation caused by the federal workforce. The more people you employ, the more they can find things to do that cost money. The bureaucracy in departments like Education or USAID has a multiplier effect on spending, and the sheer number of people employed leads to the ever-expanding volume of the Code of Federal Regulations. Much of this goes well beyond simply executing the tasks strictly required by laws passed by Congress.

Third, to reduce the cost of employing so many people. This is the direct cost of the workforce. Much of the pushback against DOGE has argued that we don’t actually spend all that much money on federal employees compared with the budget at large, that we currently have a lot of work already done by outside contractors, and that the savings are limited when you have to pay generous severance or fire trainees rather than permanent employees. It’s true that the federal government — unlike, say, the government of Illinois — isn’t being financially strangled by the costs of pay, benefits, and pensions for its workers (although pensions and retirement benefits shouldn’t be overlooked in the savings from bending downward the size of the workforce).

The problem is that there are formidable obstacles to proceeding, as if the first two reasons, in particular, are your actual reasons for cutting jobs. Civil service protections and, in some cases, union contracts make it frightfully difficult to fire particular people for insubordination, especially when it consists of the many forms of subtle and passive resistance in which bureaucracies specialize. For that matter, it can take time even to identify, let alone document, which people you need to get rid of in order to get the president’s policies carried out. So, we get blunderbuss assaults on whole classes of workers precisely because it’s so hard to just fire the people who refuse to do the job. Trump is, characteristically, willing to say as a general matter that he wants to get rid of people disloyal to his agenda and people creating unnecessary spending and regulation, but DOGE has to do its work indirectly.

At least federal contractors can be judged at the level of whether the contractor as a whole — rather than its employees — is getting the job done as requested. Terminating contracts has its legal obstacles, but they’re of a different sort than the protections for employees.

Many of the job protections for federal workers amount to a blindfold and handcuffs for the politically accountable leadership of the executive branch. This explains why that leadership is now acting as if it’s batting a piñata rather than doing surgery.