Editorial: Trump's gutting of federal workforce threatens national security

The Seattle Times, The Seattle Times on Feb 21, 2025

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Monitoring shipping traffic in Puget Sound. Maintaining the Navy's submarine force. Preventing power outages throughout the Pacific Northwest.

These imperatives rely on highly trained professionals based in Washington state. And, as federal government employees, all have been thrown into chaos and uncertainty, thanks to President Donald Trump's continuous onslaught of executive orders.

Congress, including Washington's delegation, must do everything it can to bring awareness to and safeguard critical jobs within the government.

Elon Musk, Trump's billionaire consigliere, is bringing Big Tech's "move fast and break things" approach to core functions of the government. Here in Washington, as elsewhere, that means offers of unfunded buyouts to longtime employees and purges of those still probationary.

For example, the offers extend to employees of the Coast Guard's Vessel Traffic Services, an air traffic control-like operations center that prevents potentially devastating collisions of mammoth container ships, ferries and other vessels. On the other side of the state, those offers also landed in the inboxes of staff that keeps the electricity grid balanced at the Bonneville Power Administration, as well as safety engineers and other employees at the environmentally vulnerable Hanford Site. Similar cuts within the forest service raise the risk of wildfire with fewer people to fight them, here and elsewhere.

Zooming in on BPA, Randy Hardy, a former CEO there, estimates Musk's Department of Government Efficiency will reduce the 3,100-employee staff by 10% to 20%, raising the probability of blackouts in the region from about 1% up to 20%. That is a very real security threat.

This is especially preposterous when you consider that Bonneville is self-funding — that is, utilities and their ratepayers provide the dollars BPA uses to generate power and carry it through its transmission network. Trump and Musk are cutting jobs that are paid for.

Time to sound the alarm. Washington Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse introduced legislation last fall to recruit and retain the BPA workforce with better pay. We should hear their voices now, as this workforce is hacked and pulled apart.

Safeguarding the nation from foreign threats is also being jeopardized. The 14,000-strong workforce at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton is one of just four such facilities in the country that can maintain the nation's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines.

In recent weeks, employees there have been hit with head-spinning executive orders. They too are invited to take Musk's offer to retire, likely reducing a force of highly trained welders, electricians and many more specialists. They are crucial to defense of our nation's Navy, which is countering threats from China, Russia and the Middle East, including an ongoing shooting war with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Congresswoman Emily Randall, D-Bremerton, who represents the 6th District including the shipyard, says Trump's orders, which have also led to the elimination of Employee Resource Groups, add up to workers there feeling "devalued."

"It doesn't feel like responsible defense policy to demonize the people who are keeping us safe," pointed out Randall.

None of this is to say that trimming waste in government is a bad idea. But instead of a surgery to trim the fat, Trump and Musk are bringing a meat cleaver to cut off vital workforces at the knees, without careful evaluation of the effects.

Their hatchet job is especially devastating for the earlier retirements it will bring. Recouping the institutional knowledge base walking out the door from federal service is impossible. Congress — Democrats and, yes, Republicans alike — must continue to fight these draconian cuts and others across the country to keep America, and Washington state, safe.