Workers Are Not ‘Waste’ And Firing Feds Definitely Will Not Lower Prices Or Reduce The Deficit

For Donald Trump’s hardcore MAGA backers, it didn’t matter what his campaign promises were. They would have voted for him regardless of what he said prior to his election because there is nothing Trump can do to lose their support. The swing voters who actually decided the election, though, were pretty clear about their hope that Trump would bring down prices.

Of course, nothing Trump has been spending his time on will do that. His pro-tariff crusade will raise prices. His warmongering among allies and enemies alike will raise prices. His work to deport and discourage the lowest-paid workers — migrants — will raise prices. His desire to lower interest rates would, if he can indeed successfully politicize the Fed, obviously raise prices given that higher interest rates are the only weapons we have in the fight against inflation.

Apparently forgetting that it is not opposite day, almost everything Trump is trying to do will raise, not lower, prices for consumers.

At first glance, it might seem like firing thousands of federal workers through Elon Musk’s indiscriminate DOGE cullings is a rare exception within Trump’s inflationary policy portfolio. After all, inflation is caused by too much spending in the economy, and unemployed people tend to spend less money (which is why the Federal Reserve focuses so much on unemployment numbers in deciding whether to raise or lower interest rates).

Upon a closer examination, though, even firing a bunch of federal workers and intimidating those who remain will do little to lower prices. Some federal workers, especially those with science backgrounds, can actually earn more in the private sector and chose federal work out of a sense of patriotism and the idea that federal jobs, up until two months ago, were among the most stable positions with health care benefits available anywhere. These workers will end up spending more than they were before, and thus exacerbating inflation.

Many fired feds will not be able to find equivalent work, of course. Even so, given that, currently, about 163.31 million people are employed in the United States, trimming tens of thousands of federal workers from that huge total will not result in a noticeable effect on consumer spending.

What about the deficit, though? Surely firing a bunch of workers on the government payroll will at least help balance the federal budget?

Nope, not really — actually, exactly the reverse! In the first month of Trump’s second term, federal spending increased compared to the same period a year prior under President Joe Biden. Lawsuits are expensive, and a substantial portion of people who get fired for no particular reason tend to file them. At any rate, federal workers’ salaries account for less than 5% of federal spending, and Trump himself is quickly eating up whatever paltry savings that could be realized by all these firings by spending tens of millions in taxpayer dollars on nearly weekly golf trips.

I don’t know if you have ever had employees, but the general idea is that you pay them less than the value of what they generate through their labor. Now, decades of Republican propaganda aside, the government is not a business, so a lot of federal workers do not actually generate revenue. Yet, the same principle applies whether you are trying to generate revenue or provide services to an entire nation: workers create value through their work.

There is no evidence whatsoever that we have dozens, let alone tens of thousands, of federal workers drawing huge salaries to do next to nothing. There is one such example sitting in the White House, but the rank-and-file of the federal workforce is comprised of dedicated, patriotic, hard-working Americans.

Federal workers are not “waste.” The entire concept of an employee is that the employer gets more out of the employee’s labor than the dollar value of what the employee is being paid by the employer. There is no reason that the federal government would be the sole employer anywhere in the world that wanted to hire people to do nothing in order to throw money away. I don’t know if you have ever applied for a federal job, but I have: they are hard to get, and the competition is fierce among many qualified people. Our government is not recruiting a bunch of layabouts.

Firing good federal workers will not lower prices, will not reduce inflation, and will not trim the deficit. All it will do is weaken institutions that could otherwise serve as a brake on an increasingly authoritarian president.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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