We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Shovel: Confronting Trump’s Flood of Sewage
This administration spews a lot of nonsense about fraud, waste, and “draining the swamp.” In reality, they’re blowing up the sewage-treatment plant, spattering everything in the vicinity with excremental effluvia.
By Steve Wishnia
Donald Trump and JD Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky like two petty mobsters telling a bodega owner that they now own 50% of his business, two thin-skinned bullies berating him for “disrespect” because he wasn’t gushing thank-yous for the great deal they were giving him.
That meeting Feb. 28 nakedly showed what Trump, Vance, and the unelected oligarch Elon Musk are doing: The United States government has been taken over by an organized-crime syndicate with fascist sympathies. Trump is clearly siding with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s three-year-old war to conquer Ukraine. In last month’s German elections, Musk campaigned for the neo-Nazi Alternative for Deutschland party, while Vance said the biggest threat to European democracy was political parties refusing to form coalition governments with the far right.
Domestically, without any action by Congress, and under the direction of the never-confirmed-for-any-office Musk, they have illegally fired thousands of workers, from the most recently hired to Cabinet-department inspector generals and members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA). Probationary employees are not supposed to be fired except for a specific cause, such as poor performance—not by a mass email which, some sacked workers told Work-Bites last month, didn’t even have their name filled in. Officials of agencies legally defined as independent are not supposed to be fired except for misconduct.
Firing inspector generals beheads their departments’ ability to investigate corruption. Firing FLRA members effectively cripples the agency, which protects the rights of federal employees, so it can’t act on complaints by workers that they were illegally fired. Meanwhile, the administration is arguing in court that those workers have no legal standing to sue, because they haven’t gone through the administrative process yet.
This administration spews a lot of nonsense about fraud, waste, and “draining the swamp.” In reality, they’re blowing up the sewage-treatment plant, spattering everything in the vicinity with excremental effluvia.
It plans to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which combats financial fraud, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. It has already fired more than half the staff of USAID. That terminated contracts for polio vaccination, Ebola-fever prevention tracing, and providing clean water to 250,000 refugees from the civil war in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It pre-empted U.S. involvement in trying to control outbreaks of Ebola in Uganda and of Marburg virus—a similar but even more lethal hemorrhagic disease—in Tanzania.
Elon Musk, who mourns the demise of apartheid in his native South Africa, doesn’t have a problem with Black Africans dying of catastrophic internal bleeding. Neither do Trump and Vance, who in last year’s campaign hammered the lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s cats.
In one week last month, they revoked temporary protected status for 500,000 Haitian refugees. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the highest-ranking Afro-American in the U.S. military, because he believed Brown had been too much of an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the armed forces. (Hegseth also axed the military’s top judge advocates general, who analyze whether tactics could lead to war crimes.)
At last month’s protests by federal workers, an Environmental Protection Agency worker who asked for anonymity because he’s trying to get his job back said he’d been put on administrative leave “because I worked on environmental justice. It’s considered DEI.”
In other words, if the EPA is trying to reduce air pollution in the South Bronx, where the rates of death and disease from asthma are among the highest in the country—a city Department of Health study from 2021 found that one out of every 20 emergency-room visits by children from the area aged 5 to 17 involved asthma—and points out that the South Bronx is more than 80% black and Latino, it’s “DEI.”
And when they say “DEI,” they pronounce it like it rhymes with “trigger.”
Trump and Musk “don’t believe in protecting the environment, and they don’t believe in workers’ rights,” an EPA worker told a rally in Foley Square Feb. 19.
“They’re after nothing more than the entire public sphere,” Chris Dols of the Federal Unionists Network said.
The administration’s insistence that it is hiring based on color-blind merit is ludicrous, given the crooks, cranks, and cronies they are filling the government with: Ed Martin, who helped organize the rally that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 mob attack on Congress, as federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C.; vaccine-denying quack Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health; and two of Trump’s personal lawyers, Pam Bondi and Emil Bove, as Attorney General and her top deputy. It has packed the Justice Department and FBI with election deniers seeking revenge on Trump’s critics, especially those who investigated or prosecuted him and the others involved in the Jan. 6 attack.
Insisting on hiring only people who insist that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump is like hiring only sportswriters who say the Chiefs beat the Eagles in the 2025 Super Bowl.
These people do not believe in democracy.
One might say this administration is staffed by people who couldn’t change a diaper without smearing diarrhea on the baby’s face, but that wouldn’t be completely accurate. Project 2025 was written by veteran federal bureaucrats and policy wonks, most notably Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought, who know which nodes of the government are the most crucial places to sabotage its ability to defend workers’ rights, fight financial fraud, protect the environment, and limit abuses of power by the executive branch.
They are largely getting away with it so far. There has been minimal institutional resistance, with a thin but grotesquely subservient Republican majority in Congress. Too many Democrats have decided that any significant resistance isn’t worth trying—with honorable exceptions such as Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.).
Sometimes a group of eloquent and persistent loudmouths can spark a movement.
Protests are growing, but still relatively small, with nothing on the scale of Association of Flight Attendants leader Sara Nelson’s call for a general strike in 2019, to end the shutdown of the federal government that had left 800,000 workers unpaid for five weeks.
With multiple lawsuits by unions and others pending, there have been several court rulings against Trump and Musk. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees within another agency,” Judge William Alsup in California wrote in an order Feb. 27.
But the courts move slowly, too slowly to be effective against the tech-oligarch methodology of “move fast and break things.” Trump is using the same strategy he used to beat the multiple criminal charges against him: delay, delay, and delay, in the faith that sooner or later the case will come before a judge willing to put the fix in for him.
Dr. Martin Luther King often said “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But it takes a large and effective movement of people pulling it toward justice before it will bend that way.