DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. Here’s a hypothetical question – if he wanted to, could Elon Musk establish a new bathroom breaks policy for more than 2 million federal employees? Well, he hasn’t, but since the Trump administration took office and gave Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency a mandate to shrink the government, Musk has wielded an astonishing level of authority over the federal workforce. After gaining access to the Treasury Department’s massive payment system, Musk and his team have dismissed thousands of employees, terminated countless contracts and targeted two government agencies created by Congress for elimination. Last weekend, federal workers received an email instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they’d accomplished the previous week. Musk added in a social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. That got pushback from several Trump-appointed agency leaders, who told their employees not to respond.

Much of what Musk has done is under court challenge, but President Trump has said he’d like to see him become even more aggressive. To help us understand these efforts to drastically reshape the American government, we’ve invited Elizabeth Linos to join us. She’s the Emma Bloomberg associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and director of The People Lab, which does research on how to recruit, retrain and support the government workforce and integrate evidence-based policymaking in government. Earlier in her career, she was a policy adviser to Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece, pursuing government reform at a time of financial crisis. Well, Elizabeth Linos, welcome to FRESH AIR.

ELIZABETH LINOS: Thank you so much for having me.

DAVIES: There’s a perception in all of this recent activity that the public payroll is bloated – not just inefficient, but just too many people. How does the federal workforce compare with, I don’t know, past decades?

LINOS: Yeah. You’re right that this perception seems to persist. But if you look at the numbers, the size of the federal workforce has stayed relatively constant since the ’60s, even though the population of the U.S. has grown, even though our expectations about what government should do has grown. So if you just look at the numbers, we’re about at, you know, 2 million federal employees – a little over 2 million employees, and that really hasn’t changed over time. If you look in terms of the budget, again, we’re not seeing significant amounts of bloat on the public payroll. In fact, the budget for these workers is about 6% of the federal budget. So in a government that, you know, spends 6 to $7 trillion a year, this is really not a matter of bloat either on numbers or on budget. But you’re right that this belief seems to persist over multiple administrations, both Republican and Democratic administrations.

DAVIES: Now, before we talk about the specific measures that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as Elon Musk’s outfit is called, let’s just talk a little bit about the rules here. I mean, I know that most federal government employees work under the civil service system. Just tell us a little bit about how long we’ve had that, what it was intended to do.

LINOS: Yeah. So we’ve had a civil service system that really prioritizes merit-based hiring of some form since 1883 – since the Pendleton Act. And that was really set up in response to what was called the spoils system. So in the 19th century, the idea was you could get a job in government just by displaying loyalty to the new political administration. And what that led to was lower levels of performance, less merit in government and, ultimately, worse outcomes for residents. And so in 1883, the Pendleton Act basically said, look, we’re going to have a Civil Service Commission that’s going to standardize recruitment. We’re going to promote professionalism, and for the first time, you’re going to need to take an exam to become part of the civil service.

Fast-forward to 1978, where we had another big reform – the Civil Service Reform Act – that basically did a lot of the things that we’re talking about today at a first level. So it created OPM, which is the Office of Personnel Management. It created the Merit Systems Protection Board, MSPB. And both of these agencies were really designed to bring performance and accountability into the civil service. Each of these reforms was really set up to say, look, we need a civil service that can exist and can manage large-scale programs and services regardless of who’s in the White House, because the types of things we ask our government to do go beyond one administration.

DAVIES: What has been the posture of Donald Trump and his administration and his supporters towards civil service?

LINOS: Yeah. It’s hard to really understand what the underlying beliefs are here. But what we’re hearing in public rhetoric is this pervasive disdain for the careers of public servants, and especially civil servants who are – you know, were there before and theoretically will be there after this administration. In some ways, it’s taking us back in terms of rhetoric to the 19th century, where the system of government was set up to be directly loyal to the president. You know, my sense right now is that a lot of the language that is being used by DOGE – and not only DOGE; other members of the Trump administration – are directly set up to discredit public servants and to make clear that this administration does not value the career civil servants.

DAVIES: Speaking in general, what protections does the civil service system offer government employees?

LINOS: So the civil service has various types of employees within it that have different levels of protection. Your kind of classic civil servant who has been working in government for a very long time has some basic protections against being fired without documented evidence of very low performance or without any evidence that is usually part of a larger restructuring or reduction in force, as it’s called. The employees that we’ve seen being targeted right now, at least in the past few weeks, are probationary employees, primarily. So these are employees who have worked in government for one to two years and haven’t reached that level of protection. And so for them, it’s much easier to be fired with fewer protections. But ultimately, at a really fundamental level, the system is set up where if you’re going to be fired from the public sector workforce, there has to be a documented reason related to performance, which, of course, we’re not seeing today.

DAVIES: You know, it’s been a really turbulent few weeks for federal employees. I wonder – you know, you’ve done work with these folks. Have you talked to federal employees? What have they told you about their experience?

LINOS: Yeah. I think it’s a really hard time to be a government worker, for a bunch of different reasons. On the one hand, what I’m hearing from a lot of people who work in government is that the uncertainty is causing a lot of anxiety. So for some employees, they were fired on a Friday and then unfired on a Monday. There are people who are not sure what’s going to happen to their teams, or they don’t have information about what the direction is of the Trump administration.

And, you know, in some ways, that uncertainty is causing a lot more challenges than the facts themselves, as of today. We’ve heard from members of the Trump administration that they are hoping to create a sense of trauma in the workforce in an effort to, you know, induce more voluntary resignations. And so it’s possible that a lot of this, you know, back-and-forth that we’re seeing in terms of producing anxiety, the disdain that we’re seeing in public comments about the public sector workforce, are intended to create more stress right now. You know, a lot of public sector workers are – been working around the country. And they have families and mortgages, and they’re worried about losing their jobs. Entire towns are going to be affected by layoffs at this level.

DAVIES: Is there one employee that maybe you could describe for us, maybe without identifying them by name or position?

LINOS: Yeah. This makes me think of a lot of the employees that I’ve spoken to who were probationary employees. I’ve spoken to someone who, you know, entered government, very, very talented, entered through one of these programs that appears to be cut. For example, the Presidential Management Fellowship Program is a program that is designed to bring in new specialized talent into government, and it seems, you know, as of today, that the program is going to be cut completely. And when I was speaking to a fellow of this program, you know, all I heard was, of course, anxiety and stress and disappointment, but also this broader question around, you know, how can I continue to work in government? It’s not super clear what jobs will be available in other parts of government, like state and local government as well. And so right now people are really scared that they took a chance. They didn’t go into consulting or the private sector or the nonprofit sector. They took a chance on government as part of these pipeline programs, and they moved their families to serve. And right now they just don’t know what’s going to happen next.

DAVIES: We have to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Elizabeth Linos. She’s an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We’ll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROBBEN FORD & BILL EVANS’ “CATCH A RIDE”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we’re talking with Elizabeth Linos, an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, about the efforts of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the federal government, which has prompted the layoff of thousands of employees.

So let’s talk about what’s happened here. Do we know how many government employees have been taken off the pay roll so far by DOGE, more or less?

LINOS: Well, this keeps changing every day, but we have some information from the initial deferred resignation. So as you’ll remember, the first stage of this process was an offer to buy out employees that committed to resigning. At that stage, about 75,000 people resigned or took the buyout offer. But I want to put that number in context. So that might sound like a very large number but, in fact, is very similar to just the natural retirement rate that we see every year in government. And when I say retirement, I do mean retirement. It doesn’t include the regular turnover in terms of resignations or other reasons why people separate. It’s about half of a regular turnover in any typical year. And so from the perspective of DOGE, that first attempt to get people to resign seems to have not worked, at least as planned.

DAVIES: Let’s pause on that for a second. I mean, what does that tell you about, you know, how government employees feel about their jobs and about this buyout offer, if we can call it that?

LINOS: Yeah. So I think what we heard from the DOGE team and others in government was this assumption that if we offered payouts to federal workers, they would all take it because they’re all sitting around doing nothing anyway. There was this belief that this would be an easy exit strategy for people who are lazy or not hardworking or aren’t motivated to do their job well. So if you start with that assumption, you offer people this buyout and then people don’t take it, you would have to question whether or not that initial assumption was right – the people were just sitting around waiting for a buyout. My sense is that this is, you know, at least a first piece of evidence that that’s not what we’re looking at in terms of the federal workforce.

DAVIES: So let’s talk about the next big effort, which was the sweeping purge of employees who were on probation, presumably, because they didn’t yet have the requisite time to get full civil service protection so that they were more vulnerable. You’ve written that this might be one of the worst ways to trim a workforce. Why?

LINOS: Yeah. So before this year, one of the things that we were all thinking about is, how do we bring in specialized talent into government? I want to be clear. Everyone on both sides of the aisle understands that government would be better if we could modernize parts of it, if we could bring in specialized talent, if we could bring in young, early career professionals that have specific skills that don’t exist yet as much in government. So probationary employees are exactly that group of people that we were hoping to attract and convince to go work for government.

These are people who are coming in with specialized skills. They might be early in their careers. Many of them were coming in through programs that were specifically designed to bring in new talent into government. So one of the oldest programs in the federal government is called the Presidential Management Fellowship Program. And that program is taking people with master’s degrees that have a lot of different options on the labor market and convincing them to go work for the federal government. By design, those are two-year programs. So anyone who’s working in government for less than two years is in this category of probational employees. You know, if you’re trying to change the face of government or change the types of services that are delivered, you should be investing in that specialized talent. You should be spending more time convincing people with that skill set to come into government, not gutting those programs right before people actually get good at their jobs.

DAVIES: So if I put these two things together, it seems as if the deferred departure – the so-called buyout offer – was designed and was supposed to get higher-paid, probably more experienced people in government, who DOGE probably thought were not that productive anyway – try to get them to leave. The result seems to have been that the departures were exactly what you’d expect in – on a- in a normal year. So that didn’t really work. But they are trimming a lot of people who, presumably, are bringing new energy and talent.

LINOS: Yes. That’s exactly what we’re seeing. And that’s where it becomes quite clear, at least to me, that the effort to trim the government workforce isn’t really based on some sort of strategic, thoughtful process around where we need more people in government and where we don’t, or a broader kind of ideological framework that says we’re going to invest in, you know, this type of government versus a different type of government. It really is just cutting the people that we can cut, which unfortunately and inevitably means that early-career professionals are more vulnerable.

DAVIES: We have an older workforce, I gather from your writing, in the federal government. What are the implications of that for this massive reduction effort?

LINOS: Yeah. It’s interesting. You know, until this year, until this new administration, the big challenge or the big human capital crisis that we were all talking about in public management is what’s called the silver tsunami – so, you know, baby boomers who were either retiring or about to retire. And depending on what estimate you use, about a third of federal employees are retirement-eligible. So really, we have a significantly older workforce in government. And the big challenge is, how do we bring in young people with, you know, specialized skills and talent and energy to replace a generation of employees that are about to retire.

DAVIES: You know, there was an extraordinary move – and I mentioned this in the introduction – which I think is a measure of Musk’s influence in the government, that he got these emails sent to people last weekend instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they’d accomplished the previous week. There was some pushback. Some agency had said, you don’t have to do that. But, you know, Musk added in this social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. What was your reaction when you heard about this?

LINOS: My first reaction was that this is an effort to make people hate their jobs at some fundamental level. And it reminds me of something that we’ve heard Russell Vought say, who’s the OMB director, in private speeches. And it sounds like he said something along the lines of, we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work. And so when I first saw this email, I thought, yep, that’s how you would do it. If you look at the evidence around what it takes to have happy and engaged and productive team, trust in your leadership and feeling like you’re valued by your manager is fundamental for people to be able to do their job well – not just in the public sector, but in the private sector and the nonprofit sector as well.

So this is a message that very clearly is saying, we don’t think you’re doing anything useful, and you’re going to need to affirm what you do every day to justify your job. You know, if you just take this at a human level, anyone who’s receiving that type of email from their boss is getting the message that they are not wanted and they are not valued. So to me, it seems, you know, part of this broader effort to make people not want to work for government.

The second part, which I think is still up for discussion in the courts is, what does it mean for someone from DOGE, and Elon Musk specifically, to send an email of that nature that implies resignations or layoffs without going through any of the formal processes associated with layoffs and performance evaluations?

DAVIES: You know, I wonder if, you know, workers are – while they’re getting these messages from the top, are having their personal supervisors reassure them at all saying, look, this is not something we’re doing. We – what you do is important. We want to keep doing it. Hang in there. Have you heard things like that?

LINOS: You know, any time you see an administration that is so hostile towards their civil service, of course, you’re going to have people in career positions that are trying to navigate what that looks like for their staff. You know, what we’re hearing, at least on our side, are conversations about how to reassure people that their work matters and that their work is important.

You know, one question that has often come up even before this period is that a lot of what government does is invisible to the American taxpayer. People don’t know exactly what the Department of Energy does unless there’s a problem. People don’t fully understand, necessarily, what happens to make sure our food and our air is safe. And that’s on purpose, right? We hear about government when there’s a problem. But on any given day, there’s millions of people that are trying to keep Americans safe in ways that are invisible. And so one of the questions that has come up as part of this process is, what would it look like if we could, you know, bring those stories to the surface, explain to people and show people what it means to have a functioning government? Would they still want all those programs cut if there was a clear understanding of that – how that would affect their lives?

DAVIES: You know, there have been media reports of people who were discharged with language about poor performance or similar language but who have said in interviews that they’ve had nothing but positive performance reports. Generally speaking, what kinds of rights do they have to appeal these firings?

LINOS: So, you know, under normal circumstances, the way that you would appeal something like this is going through the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board – so the MSPB. This is a independent quasi-judicial agency that is meant to protect federal employees from unfair or improper personnel actions. One of these protections is the protection against being fired for reasons that are unrelated to merit and are more related to political influence or personal bias. And so there is a process within the MSPB to appeal these decisions if a federal employee believes that they’re wrongfully terminated. They do, you know, a bunch of other things as well, including whistleblower protections. But it’s really important that that board is there to manage and analyze those appeals independently.

The purpose of the board is really to ensure that the civil service remains nonpartisan and maintain those protections. And so it seems that some employees might go through that path to appeal these decisions. There are other ways that we might see lawsuits or legal appeals happening, but that’s the traditional way an employee would go about appealing something like this.

DAVIES: We’re going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Elizabeth Linos. She is an associate professor of public policy and management at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She’ll be back to talk more after this short break. I’m Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF TAYLOR HASKINS’ “ALBERTO BALSALM”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. Today, we’re talking with Elizabeth Linos, an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, about the extraordinary measures Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency – or DOGE – has taken to drastically shrink the size of the federal government. He’s laid off thousands of government employees and canceled more than a thousand contracts, and targeted two agencies created by Congress – the Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – for elimination. Many of the steps DOGE has taken have spurred court challenges, but President Trump has said he’d like to see Musk be even more aggressive.

You know, it’s not a new complaint that government is bloated and wasteful, and there have been efforts by past presidents to trim the workforce. Can you talk a bit about that and what kind of results they produced?

LINOS: Yeah, absolutely. So you’re right that this is not a new idea. People have been saying that the government is bloated at least since Reagan. And it’s a common refrain that we’ve heard from multiple administrations, both on the left and the right. When Reagan was in the White House, there was a promise that he was going to cut the federal workforce that simply failed. So, when Reagan departed the White House, there were more people working in the federal government than when he took office. The rate is, as I mentioned before, very similar to today – around 2 million federal employees.

The next effort where we saw that happen more systematically is under the Clinton administration, where there was a big project called Reinventing Government that had some of the same flavors of what we’re seeing today but was different in very important ways. So the purpose of Reinventing Government was to rethink both the size of government and what type of employees we needed, and to push for more accountability and higher productivity and performance in government. But there are a couple of things that were really critical to that process.

One is that it was authorized by bipartisan congressional legislation, so this isn’t kind of a thing that happened overnight by a team that isn’t really clearly a department to begin with. The second thing is that that process, that project, worked over a series of years. So they started first by identifying what they believed to be inefficiencies in government. They involved federal workers in the process, brought in a series of reforms that had to do with, you know, bringing technology and the internet and other things into government.

And so over the course of seven years, there was a reduction in the workforce. About 400,000 federal positions were cut through a combination of departures and attrition, and some layoffs. But it was a much more systematic process to say, where do we need to cut? Where do we not need to cut? And the logic there was quite clear – yes, we might want to cut government. We might want to change what government does. But at a fundamental level, government still needs to function. People still need to, you know, get their payments processed or get their passports. They need to feel like the water that they drink is safe. People need to inspect meatpackers. All of these things that we take for granted as the work of government still needs to happen while you’re making these large-scale reforms.

Now, one thing that’s interesting with that effort is that there has been some evaluation of whether or not that worked in the medium term. And depending on who you ask, even that effort where we saw a reduction in federal positions didn’t lead to the outcome that that administration was hoping for. So what we saw in response to this reduction in the government workforce was an explosion of contractors. And so today, we have something like three times as many people delivering the work of government who are not, in fact, federal government workers than actual federal employees.

DAVIES: Can you think of an example of that – a particular service or a function which got privatized and kind of simply displaced the workforce outside the federal employment?

LINOS: Yeah. So right now there are programs and services where the person who’s actually processing the benefit or the government program is a contractor. So you can think about this in terms of the social safety net, for example. You can think about it in other areas, as well. In many cases, the contractor and the, you know, federal government employee are working in the same building with access to the same data, doing similar kinds of work. But only one of them is on the, you know, formal government payroll and the other is a contractor.

What that means, according to at least some public administration scholars, is that this effort to reduce the workforce led to higher levels of expenses for the federal government as a whole because those contractors end up being more expensive than having more federal employees to begin with. So at the end of the day, even these efforts that were much more thoughtful and much more strategic about reducing the size of government haven’t led to a fundamental shift in what we actually need to be able to deliver the services that people expect. We just replaced a federal employee with a contractor to be able to keep up with the demand and the expectations that the American people have of their government.

DAVIES: You know, in writing about these recent reductions, you wrote the administration seems to be weakening or fully eliminating teams that were doing exactly the kind of work DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, claims to value – focus on data, evaluation and customer service teams that have spent years reducing bureaucratic red tape, modernizing service delivery and bringing in critical tech talent. In other words, there were people out there doing the kind of work that DOGE was supposed to do – how to get more for the taxpayer’s dollar. Some might be skeptical of that statement. Can you give us an example of this?

LINOS: Yeah, absolutely. And again, you know, these things take time. But under multiple administrations, including the last Trump administration, there were people in government who were dedicated to finding inefficiencies in government and finding ways to improve the customer experience for residents. Some of these cases are easy to see after the change has happened. So, for example, if you try to go renew your passport today, you don’t have to take months and months. You don’t have to go to the post office. You can just do that online. The reason you can do that is because there was a team of people in government that were trying to figure out, what are the exact pain points in this long, bureaucratic process? How can we simplify them? How can we create a user interface that is easy for a customer to access online and make it as seamless and as simple as possible? So anytime you see a simplification on the front end, there’s a team of people before working really hard to make that happen on the back end.

There are other examples where previous administrations invested in data and analytics and evaluation support. All of that is really about improving how government functions and having the data to support that. So rather than making decisions based on, you know, an anecdotal experience or keeping the status quo, really investing in this fundamental question – is the program working? How can we improve it? Those teams had a lot of successes that were just about to go live. So, for example, there was a pilot program associated with making it easier to pay your taxes. Everybody in the country complains about the process of having to file your taxes, and they’re quite right. A huge effort was done within government to pilot a new approach that would have made it easier for people to file their taxes for free. It seems like those efforts are all being now gutted, and it’s unclear why that would be the case if the purpose of DOGE is to make government run more efficiently.

DAVIES: The administration’s response to some of the complaints that have arisen, I mean, have – is essentially that, look, extreme times sometimes demand extreme measures. Government spending is out of control. Musk himself has said, yes, we will make mistakes, but we will correct them quickly. What’s your reaction to that? Do you think things could get better with time?

LINOS: I think it’s helpful to remember what we ask of our government. If we say that we can just turn the government off and on again in this way, we’re kind of missing the fundamentals of what is needed for an economy to be able to develop, for people to be able to take risks and innovate in the private sector and the nonprofit sector. And so, yes, of course, we can correct mistakes. But even with, you know, a few weeks worth of this process, we’re seeing harms that are not going to be easily undone. Not only in terms of local economies that are going to suffer, but, you know, for example, data that was regularly collected that is now not going to be collected. It’s really hard to go back and fix that afterwards. And at a fundamental level, it’s taken generations of work to try to convince motivated, specialized talent to work for government. It’s going to be really hard to rebuild that narrative after what we’ve heard over the past few weeks. So I’m worried that some of this harm can’t be undone quickly, and we’re going to have to work collectively to rebuild trust, both within government and in that kind of social contract with residents to fix some of this over time.

DAVIES: Let’s take another break here. We’re speaking with Elizabeth Linos. She’s an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard University School of Government. We’ll be back after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE AMERICAN ANALOG SET’S “IMMACULATE HEART II”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we’re talking with Elizabeth Linos. She’s an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We’re talking about the efforts of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the federal government, which has prompted the layoff of thousands of employees.

You know, earlier in your career, I mentioned that you were a policy adviser to the prime minister of Greece at a time of financial crisis. I mean, I wonder if you can share any of that experience that might offer insight into this effort to reshape the American government.

LINOS: Yeah, in some ways, it’s quite clear that there are a lot of parallels, which makes me think that, you know, this idea that government workers are bad and lazy and unmotivated isn’t really a very new or innovative idea, even as we look across the world. So, as you said, I worked in government during the Greek financial crisis or the global financial crisis, where Greece was at the epicenter. And we had the smartest people in the world thinking about broad-scale public sector reform, whether they were coming from Brussels or the IMF or top economists across the world. And what was interesting during that period was even then as we were asking for these large-scale reforms, the pervasive belief was that government workers – so the bureaucrats that were going to deliver all these large reforms – were lazy and unmotivated and corrupt, and that the government workforce was bloated. And that assumption existed well before we were looking at any of the actual numbers on how big the government was and, you know, where efficiencies needed to be made. That pervasive belief, I think, really hampered the efforts for reform. Because if you think about it, what people were asked to do during that period was to change how they worked, with whom they worked, what they worked on, without any, you know, significant change in the resources that were given to them to do that change. All the while being called lazy and corrupt and unintelligent in the media. And so, you know, this to me was an open question. How can we ask people to change everything about how they work overnight if we don’t understand what they do, appreciate the work that they do, and really invest in giving them the resources to do their work well?

DAVIES: You know, something like 80% of the federal workers live outside the Washington D.C. area. What might be the economic impact of these job cuts on communities where workers live?

LINOS: This is an area where a lot of people are starting to see rumblings of problems in local economies, and we might expect to see larger impacts over time. But you’re absolutely right – most people who work for the federal government don’t, in fact, live in the Washington D.C. area. So there are parts of communities and labor markets that might be drastically affected by this, and this is going to be true across different agencies. So the examples that we’ve started seeing are employees who work, for example, for the National Park Service. There are parts of North Carolina or Arizona where many layoffs are happening and that’s going to affect the local economy. We’re starting to hear more about cuts for the IRS. The IRS has hubs across the country, and so if you work in Kansas City or if you work in Ogden, Utah, you might be affected. Not just because your neighbors and friends are being laid off, but because that’s going to affect the local economy in a way that affects everyone who lives there.

DAVIES: Elon Musk and DOGE claimed, at one point, $55 billion in savings. That’s kind of been picked apart. Do we know how much of that is real?

LINOS: I certainly don’t know how much of that is real, but you’re right that that number seems to be off by a huge order of magnitude. Sometimes that’s just pure mistake. So a lot of articles have come out recently that points to literal mathematical errors in how those savings are being calculated. But there are other parts of that calculation that are a little bit more nuanced. So, for example, some things are listed as savings, even though a contract has already been paid out and therefore, there’s no actual savings to canceling that contract. In other cases, what seems to be happening is that there’s a misunderstanding of how some of these contracts are written, where there is a maximum amount that the government could pay, but the government isn’t paying that amount. And the DOGE team are calculating savings related to that hypothetical maximum amount, not the actual amount that the government has spent.

And so in reality, we haven’t seen anything close to 55 billion in savings at this point. It’ll be interesting to see how that changes over time. One thing that is clear is that the federal workforce budget isn’t going to be the huge moneymaker here or the huge savings-maker here, because that’s not really where most of the budget is spent.

DAVIES: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve covered local government where payroll costs are a huge part of the government ’cause you’re engaged in, you know, direct service delivery, collecting trash and operating libraries. The federal government’s different. I mean, how much of the federal budget is payroll?

LINOS: In any given year, about $270 billion are spent on federal workers’ salaries and benefits. But to put that number in context, that’s, you know, around 6% of total federal spending. So it’s not a very large amount of money when you think about the overall budget of the federal government. Just to put that in perspective, there are specific departments whose contracting budget is larger than that budget. And so you’re absolutely right that at least at the federal level, the payroll is not a huge part of the federal budget.

DAVIES: This effort is really just underway. I mean, it’s been a few weeks, really. Do you have any idea what to expect in the future? Where do you think this is going to go?

LINOS: You’re right that given, you know, what has happened in the past few weeks, it’s really hard to predict, you know, what the federal workforce and what government will look like a year from now. One thing that I’m thinking about in my work is, what does it mean to try to cut the federal workforce in this way? So I imagine one of three things might happen. One is they will successfully cut the federal workforce in a way that immediately reduces the quality of services that the government can deliver. So we’ll see that in longer processing times. We’ll see that in more dangerous health outbreaks. We might see that in worse roads and safety. That’s one option.

A second option is that this will be similar to what happened during the Clinton administration, and it will become very clear that we needed those government workers, and so we’ll expand the federal budget by bringing in more contractors. Contractors are not only more expensive in some cases but also have fewer layers of accountability. So we’ll have less transparency and less accountability for how services are delivered.

And there’s a third option, which is probably the largest threat to democracy overall, which is that we’re going to see a replacement of professional, nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists. And that could have all sorts of ramifications for what the next few years look like.

DAVIES: What’s an example of, you know, one of these cuts that will be apparent to citizens soon?

LINOS: You know, I think it really depends on which citizens we’re talking about. One area that I’m looking at quite closely are cuts to the VA and to anyone who works in related medical fields. That seems to be an area where we might see effects very, very soon, where people are not able to access services that they’ve been promised because of a reduction in the workforce. That could lead to long-term challenges, both in terms of health and mental health, and other services that have been promised to veterans, where we could really see major disruption soon.

There’s kind of medium-term effects that I’m expecting as we look at reductions to the IRS that could affect our ability to collect taxes in ways that has long-term impacts for people. So there’s many ways that this might show up in people’s lives.

In some ways, the areas where we’re seeing a lot of concentrated frustration right now are things that affect people’s lives today. Like, they want to go to a national park and it’s closing earlier because there aren’t enough staff, or the bathrooms are going to be dirty or closed because there aren’t enough staff. But they may not be thinking about what’s happening on the side of the CDC or our protection against future outbreaks, in terms of avian flu or in terms of measles, where that could have huge consequences for – in people’s lives and could have consequences relatively soon but are harder to trace back to these cuts in federal spending.

DAVIES: Elizabeth Linos, thank you so much for speaking with us.

LINOS: Thank you for having me.

DAVIES: Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews “Last Seen,” a book about newly-freed African Americans in the 1860s, who took out ads to find lost children, spouses, siblings and parents.

This is FRESH AIR.

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