DOGE is coming for us, and both the economy and people will suffer

We should all be worried about what Elon Musk is doing with the Department of Government Efficiency. The Musk-driven DOGE has a voracious appetite that will have long-lasting negative consequences for Washington state.

President Donald Trump, a felon found liable for of sexual abuse and the leader of the 2020 insurrection against certifying the presidential election, named Musk, his chief financial supporter and the richest person on our planet, the de facto head of the likely unconstitutional DOGE.

With DOGE, Musk promises to reduce federal spending by $1 trillion this year alone. Economists are highly skeptical. Many worry that the resulting layoffs risk adding to the chances of a recession.

Many casualties of this misguided effort will be in Seattle and the Northwest.

The administration might be considering selling the 37-story Henry M. Jackson Federal Building in downtown Seattle, the nearby 1933 art deco Federal Office Building and the Federal Center South, located south of Sodo.

As my colleague Caleb Hutton reported, the Jackson Building — named for Washington’s long-serving U.S. senator and two-time presidential candidate — houses the Internal Revenue Service offices, U.S. Veterans Affairs and the Coast Guard. It is the Northwest’s largest federal building.

“The Henry M. Jackson Federal Building is a community hub, providing American citizens in the Pacific Northwest with critical access to services provided by their federal government,” said Sukhee Kang, administrator of the General Services Administration’s Northwest/Arctic region.

The nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association worries the Trump administration is also considering closing the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Pioneer Square.

Seattle Times reporter Lauren Girgis wrote that a National Park Service memo obtained by the conservation association said that the Department of Interior was instructed to find “underutilized and unneeded” park leases to terminate as part of a broader effort to “enhance efficiency and fiscal responsibility.”

About 125 national forest workers were fired in Washington last month, part of a broader nationwide reduction of the federal workforce.

Also on DOGE’s Puget Sound hit list are leases for the Small Business Administration in Seattle and the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Renton. 

In addition, leases on the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Center in Dayton, in far southeastern Washington; a similar operation in Puyallup; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office in Port Angeles; the U.S. Geological Survey office in Spokane Valley; federal motor carrier and agricultural inspection operations in Olympia; the Forest Service in Pomeroy, Garfield County; and the Employment Standards Administration Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs in Richland are expected to go.

To be sure, the GSA has sold or closed buildings before. But the shambolic move by Musk, facing minimal oversight except for some judges, is unprecedented.

The Department of Education, led by former wrestling promoter Linda McMahon — which Trump wants to eliminate completely — is facing half of its workforce on the street, unemployed.

In addition, 80,000 nationally will be slashed from the Department of Veterans Affairs, 1,000 from NOAA, whose Western Regional Center is in Seattle, and as many as 45,000 from the Internal Revenue Service.

As of the end of last year, Washington held 80,000 federal employees.

In this ongoing constitutional crisis, nothing is safe: from Social Security and Medicare to environmental protections.

Musk’s agency is seeking personal information on American taxpayers and recipients of Social Security. The latter move prompted the head of the Social Security Administration to resign.

“Elon Musk gets to look at all of our most sensitive data, but no one gets to look at what he is actually doing? That cannot be the standard,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said on the Senate floor.

She continued, “It’s not ‘maximally transparent’ for Musk to decide for himself what he shares publicly about his actions. It is maximally concerning — especially given there are many obvious conflicts of interest — but Elon has not recused himself from a single decision.“

She also criticized the reduction of NASA funding while Musk’s SpaceX received more than $17 billion in federal contracts going back to 2015; his Tesla car manufacturer won federal money, as well — going back to the Biden administration.

In addition, she posted on Musk’s X, the Social Security Administration “clawed back $5,201 from a constituent of mine … who was falsely labeled as dead.”

Regarding cuts to the Forest Service, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., joined Murray and other Washington Democrats, Reps. Kim Schrier, Rick Larsen and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, saying, “Amid extreme weather in the region, now is not the time to gut a workforce charged with wildland firefighting and mitigation for a quarter of the state’s lands. While public safety roles were supposedly exempted, we’re gravely concerned about reports that USFS staff who support wildfire response or mitigation, as well as staff with firefighting certifications that serve in roles with dual purposes, were terminated.”

Cantwell also sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, asking that NOAA employees be exempt from the cuts.

Meanwhile, a DOGE official was named a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, after Musk has overseen the killing of 83% of the department’s funding, shifting the remaining programs to the State Department.

We’re early in this mess and the situation will worsen.

My father fought in World War II as a U.S. Army infantry lieutenant, when such officers in combat sometimes lasted only two weeks. Yet he fought all the way from Normandy to Czechoslovakia. My uncle fought in the Pacific with the U.S. Army in some of the toughest battles. Then he was called back to duty for the Korean War, rising to the rank of major.

I’m thankful that neither lived to see 80 years of American leadership — sometimes misguided but mostly for the good — wrecked in two weeks.

Many of the framers of the Constitution worried about a presidency such as Trump’s.

At the end of the constitutional convention in September 1787, delegate Benjamin Franklin was asked outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia by Elizabeth Willing Powel, “Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Now, Franklin’s statement is being tested as never before.