Back to Work at the Roach-Infested Mold Dungeon

Former telework employees report lousy office conditions at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A bit of unexpected news yesterday: Donald Trump pulled the nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations, citing the importance of protecting Republicans’ congressional majority.

“As we advance our America First Agenda, it is essential that we maintain EVERY Republican Seat in Congress,” the president said. “With a very tight Majority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat. The people love Elise and, with her, we have nothing to worry about come Election Day. There are others that can do a good job at the United Nations.”

Trump added that Stefanik would be able to join the administration at a later date. But the implication here is remarkable. Stefanik won her most recent re-election just five months ago by 24 points. What has the administration seen in the latest data to make them worry that an open special election in that district this year could fall to a Democrat? Happy Friday.

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A sign marks the South Building of the U.S. Department of Agriculture on October 7, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by J. David Ake/Getty Images)

Whiny, Entitled Federal Workers Demand Mold-Free Cubicles, Potable Water

by Andrew Egger

The Trump administration’s government-wide policy proclamation of “remote work is over, y’all figure it out” has heaped an endless stream of indignities on the D.C.-based federal workforce. The latest of these: Remote-work employees returning to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s mammoth South Building this month were faced with disgusting working conditions, including mold in previously empty offices, undrinkable water in drinking fountains, roaches in the bathrooms, and notices about an ongoing “asbestos project” posted in shared spaces.

A union representing some of these employees circulated a letter documenting many of these concerns this week, saying they were requesting the agency provide “clear and enforceable health and safety protocols,” “requests for enhanced cleaning protocols,” and “confirmation that assigned workspaces are safe before occupancy.”

One USDA employee now working out of the South Building told The Bulwark that he’d spent “about two hours on my second day scrubbing moldy surfaces with my own cleaning supplies from home.” He also passed along a few pictures, which I should probably apologize for including in a morning newsletter: If you’re squeamish or eating, maybe skip on by these!

Employees also report that some are skittish about speaking out about their conditions—reasoning that the new administration’s “solution” to such a problem would simply be to place the building up for sale and lay them all off.

The White House declined to comment, directing questions from The Bulwark to the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Agriculture also declined to comment.

It’s just the latest of the logistical shocks created by Trump and DOGE’s rapid scheduled disassembly of the federal government. These sorts of headaches go far beyond the USDA: NPR reported this week that “federal workers have been ordered back into offices only to face shortages of desks, computer monitors, parking and even toilet paper.”

The administration has billed all this as necessary to increase “efficiency,” conjuring images of feckless bureaucrats who abused telework privileges to laze around or even take second jobs. In reality, it’s a barely veiled attempt to get workers who would be difficult to fire to quit—the more, the better. It’s in keeping with remarks made last year by Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought: “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, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. . . . We want to put them in trauma.”

“We think a very substantial number of people will not show up to work” due to the back-to-the-office requirement, Trump said in January. “And therefore our government will get smaller and more efficient.”

But the philosophy underlying that approach—that all damage to the government is good damage, because it means less spending overall—has not survived even brief contact with reality. Trump and DOGE have endured a constant barrage of bad news cycles over haphazard cuts to agencies like the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and have suffered in approval polls as a result.

Elon Musk, the architect of much of this cutting, has been obliged to change his tune about the work. He and several of his DOGE lackeys sat for an interview last night with Fox News’s Bret Baier, an obvious attempt to put a friendly face to their increasingly unpopular work. Far from bragging about putting parts of the government “through the wood chipper,” Musk insisted they were being downright conscientious: “We want to be careful in the cuts. We want to measure twice, if not thrice, and cut once. And actually that is our approach.”

But this is a change in rhetoric, not in reality. The damage continues to spiral across the federal government. Who knows how long it will take to rebuild, should we ever get the chance?

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Lucky Us

by William Kristol

Those of us born in America in the latter half of the twentieth century have been lucky. We’ve lived our lives in a free country, in the shade of peace won by great victories in the two world wars. We saw the collapse of a powerful enemy at the end of the Cold War. We’ve benefited from new immigrants and new technologies. We’ve enjoyed an expansion of our freedoms and an increase in our prosperity.

We’ve been fortunate to live at this time, in this place. So we tend to assume that good fortune will continue to be ours. We tend to forget, as Shakespeare’s Juliet explains, “O fortune, fortune! all men call thee fickle.”

We tend to take our good fortune for granted, and to be far too confident, even complacent, about the future.

We tend to forget that authoritarianism of various sorts is the historical norm.

We tend to forget that history is full of instances in which demagogues, bullies, opportunists, sycophants, and liars rule the roost.

Or to put it otherwise: In the big sweep of human history, something like today’s Trump administration is the norm. Decency, humanity, legality, sobriety, responsibility—those are the exceptions.

I offer these melancholy observations not because they’re particularly original or insightful. They’re not. They’re commonplace and common sense.

But I offer them because I’m struck by how difficult it is for us to escape the wishful thinking that follows from our experience of good fortune.

Take, for example, the saga of the law firms and the Trump administration.

At first I was told by many people—intelligent, worldly, experienced people—that the Trump administration’s attempt at bullying and extortion couldn’t and wouldn’t work.

Well, it’s working.

Now that the law firms are capitulating, I’m being told they’re foolish to do so. Don’t they know that giving into bullies is self-defeating? Don’t they understand that paying extortion doesn’t work?

Won’t it?

At least in the short and medium terms, I suspect the law firms that capitulate will do fine. Maybe in the long run the extortioner turns on his victims. But in the long run we’re all dead.

Meanwhile, it’s unpleasant to have to pay protection money. But, especially if the mob controls the police department, it may be prudent. Especially if the alternative is the destruction of your business. You buy some time and you do pretty well.

But what happens when this administration is no longer in power?

Well, what will happen? For one thing, this Trump administration could be followed by . . . another Trump administration. Or another Trumpist administration.

But even if it’s not: Will those who have capitulated and acquiesced in the Trump era pay a price afterwards, when the Abigail Spanberger–Mikie Sherrill administration takes over in 2029? Probably not. The new administration will unwind a regime of autocratic favors and illicit preferences. It will try to restore a fair playing field for all. But it’s not going to go after Paul Weiss, or to discriminate against Tesla, or try to undo thousands of Trump’s pardons.

This is the Authoritarian Asymmetric Advantage: The authoritarians break the rules, and the liberals restore the rules. The authoritarians cheat, and the liberals try to play fair. The authoritarians enjoy their ill-gotten gains, and the liberals try to restore a level playing field for all.

But let’s put off worrying for now about this deep problem. Let’s just focus on getting to a non-authoritarian future. This means using what resources we have to defeat the authoritarians who have the levers of power. This won’t be easy. It will require us to be as tough-minded as those who defeated earlier autocrats. As President Reagan put it: “If history teaches anything, it teaches that simpleminded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly.”

So: No appeasement of authoritarianism. And no wishful thinking about how easy it will be to defeat.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• What Happens When the Government Starts Reporting ‘Alternative Facts’? The truth, MONA CHAREN warns, is the last weapon of the opposition.

• Trump Is Going To War With VOA. It’s a bigger deal than you think. VOA’s STEVEN HERMAN joins JIM SWIFT on Bulwark+ Takes.

• A Self-Important, Garbled Vision for the Future… Palantir CEO’s attempt to reinvigorate our ‘national culture,’ CORBIN BARTHOLD writes, just conveys exhaustion and emptiness.

• Rachmaninoff: The Last Great Romantic… ALGIS VALIUNAS on what the Russian piano virtuoso lost and found in America.

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Quick Hits

END OF AN ERA: You know what’s cool? A future where America has no allies is cool.

Here was new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday: “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over. The time will come for a broad renegotiation of our security and trade relationship.”

Allies are good. We’d rather have a given country eager to cooperate with us on things than nursing grudges against us or actively plotting ways to do us harm. But in our bewildering times, certain obvious, basic truths like these about geopolitics are now widely rejected by the doofs who hold power. And foreign leaders are just about out of patience. After suffering relatively stoically through the first Trump term in the hope that things would quickly return to normal, they’re now openly pricing in a future where America can’t be counted on not to periodically lose its entire mind.

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WEAPONIZING CRUELTY: Sometimes there’s a method to the madness. The Trump administration released two pieces of anti-immigrant propaganda yesterday that are worth briefly unpacking.

The first was DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s visit to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison yesterday, where migrants recently deported from the U.S. without due process are being held. “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem spoke to a camera in front of a crowded cell of shirtless men. It was an ostentatious display of power intended both to thrill the MAGA base and to scare other potential migrants from coming to the U.S.—either legally or illegally. After all, it’s not just gang members who have been disappeared to El Salvador: Plenty of reporting suggests non-criminals legally seeking asylum in America have been swept up in the federal dragnet too.

The second was the latest entry in what you could call the administration’s Leering Cruelty Posting Series. The official White House X account shared a meme yesterday depicting a Studio Ghibli-style cartoon illustration of a sobbing Hispanic woman being placed in cuffs by a military man in front of an American flag. It was grotesque, but it was also bait: The woman in question was Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, who had previously been convicted of trafficking fentanyl and deported to the Dominican Republic, and who had later reentered the country.

Basora-Gonzalez, in other words, is the sort of person who everybody can agree should be deported as quickly as possible. By ratcheting up the cruelty on display in her case, the White House is nakedly trying to make her the face of their deportation regime—luring outraged critics to focus on her rather than on, say, the lawful residents the administration is disappearing because they wrote op-eds the administration doesn’t like.

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