DOGE’s Latest Cut: Glenn Youngkin’s Balls
And the Virginia governor is not the only one sacrificing self-respect. Take a look at what the U.S. did at the U.N. yesterday.
However bad you think DOGE’s decapitation of USAID was, this report from the Washington Post’s Matt Bai suggests it was even worse:
Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs—such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa—would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.
But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, [DOGE bros] Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments—a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries such as Congo.
Happy Tuesday.
Glenn Youngkin to Fired Federal Workers: Time to Be Productive For a Change
by Andrew Egger
DOGE’s haphazard blitzkrieg of federal firings is falling harder on some places than others.; Virginia, with its 144,000 federal employees, has been among the most deeply disrupted.
But fear not, DOGE’d-off workers of the Commonwealth! Gov. Glenn Youngkin has a message for you: Your days of leeching off the public may have come to an end, but with a little elbow grease and pluck, you just might successfully transition to actual productive work in the private sector.
That was the gist of Youngkin’s strikingly tone-deaf press conference yesterday, focused on the cheerful theme VIRGINIA HAS JOBS. “Listen,” Youngkin said, “we have a federal government that is inefficient, and we have an administration that is taking on that challenge of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse and driving efficiency in our federal government. It needed to happen.”
But that doesn’t mean, Youngkin suggested, that you can’t root out the wasters, fraudsters, and abusers with a little empathy. “We have a lot of federal workers in the Commonwealth,” he went on, “and I want to make sure that they know we care about them and we value them and we want them to find that next chapter.”
To that end, Youngkin said, he was announcing a new “resource package” at VirginiaHasJobs.com for fired federal employees, including information on “virtual job fairs,” advice on how to apply for unemployment, and helpful tips on updating their resumes. (Sample passage: “Start by analyzing each job posting to identify the key skills and qualifications they are seeking. Customize your resume for each position by highlighting the most relevant skills and experiences listed in the job description.”)
It’s hard to imagine many fired workers finding this particularly helpful or, for that matter, empathetic. As Axios notes: “The website largely just encourages job seekers to search LinkedIn or Indeed for posted jobs.” The cherry on top was that the event was hosted by major Virginia employer and subprime lending giant Capital One: Laid off from your career helping impoverished people abroad? Perhaps we can interest you in a bright new future in predatory loans right here at home!
Online attempts yesterday to soothe Virginia’s laid-off federal workers weren’t going much better. Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Sears, who is running to replace the term-limited Youngkin, released a direct-to-camera video acknowledging “concern about the federal government workforce transition,” and sharing five links to “additional resources to assist.” All five links led to broken “404 Page Not Found” website errors.
Youngkin and Sears are in a bind. On the one hand, they’ve got a monsoon of irate constituents to manage, justifiably upset that their life’s work, livelihoods and, in some cases, dream jobs have been obliterated by some 22-year-old former SpaceX intern wielding a Grok account and a spreadsheet. But they’re constrained in their response by the central rule of today’s GOP politics: Anyone who suggests that the emperor has no clothes is met with an instant monsoon of rage and bile from the president’s most fervent supporters calling for their instant ejection from the party. So they’ve seemingly decided the best way to proceed is by trying to convince federal workers that getting laid off is the best thing that could have happened to them.
State Democrats, for their part, are hoping to harness anti-DOGE angst as they try to recapture the governor’s mansion this year. Youngkin “is shamelessly trying to play both sides by pretending to support federal workers while kissing the rings of Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” Democratic Party of Virginia Chairwoman Susan Swecker said in a statement yesterday. “He cannot have it both ways—he either supports the commonwealth he was elected to serve, or he aligns himself with the wannabe autocrats who are actively hurting Virginia’s workers and economy.”
Regardless, it’s looking like an ignominious final stretch for a governor who—after his unexpected victory over former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2021—seemed to be at the vanguard of a winning new electoral vision for the party. Youngkin billed himself as a genteel Ron DeSantis, marrying a firm stance against “wokeness” on cultural issues with competent, technocratic economic governance: MAGA in a corporate-retreat fleece vest.
What’s happening at DOGE is certainly technocratic. It feels, in a way, like a corporate takeover. But that doesn’t make it “competent.” It’s the opposite of genteel. And yet, the governor feels obliged to grin and take it. He’s not the one being fired, anyway.
At the U.N., the U.S. Joins the Jackals
by William Kristol
Belarus. Burkina Faso. Burundi. The Central African Republic. Equatorial Guinea. Eritrea. Haiti. Hungary. Iran. Israel. Mali. The Marshall Islands. Nicaragua. Niger. North Korea. Russia. Sudan. And the United States of America.
This is the roll of dishonor in which the government of the United States took its place yesterday. These were the 18 nations that, on the third anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, voted in the United Nations General Assembly against a resolution condemning Russia’s aggression and war crimes and calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops.
The resolution passed with the support of 93 nations, including all of Europe except Hungary, our allies in Asia—including Japan, South Korea, and Australia—and Canada and Mexico. Sixty-five nations abstained.
“This is a moment of truth,” Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Mariana Betsa told the U.N. on Monday, “a historic moment not only for Ukraine” but “for the entire democratic world.”
So it sadly was, if only because it codified the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine and of the defense of democracy against aggression and autocracy more broadly.
Almost a half-century ago, on November 10, 1975, the United States also found itself in the minority on a vote in the United Nations. Then our government opposed General Assembly Resolution 3379, which claimed that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Almost all of the 72 nations that voted in favor of the resolution were not democracies. Almost every one of the 35 votes against came from democracies.
The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said that the United States “does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”
Moynihan, a Democrat serving in a Republican administration, expressed the overwhelming sentiment of both political parties and of the nation as a whole. And indeed the United States never acquiesced. Sixteen years later, the U.S. led the successful effort at the U.N. to repeal the resolution.
In 1975, we were in the minority at the U.N., but on the side of justice and honor. Yesterday, in the midst of the largest and most consequential European war since 1945, we took the side of the jackals.
Quick Hits
ROLLING IT BACK: Elon Musk blinked first in his first intra-MAGA staredown, and boy is he unhappy about it.
Just days after multiple Trump cabinet secretaries instructed their workforces to ignore Elon’s government-wide demand that employees send his team five bullet points about their recent work or resign, the Office of Personnel Management on Monday told agencies that compliance with the email had been voluntary after all.
It was an awkward development for Musk, who derives his power from the perception that his forward momentum is unstoppable. Just before, he’d been riding high as Tycoon of Terminations; now he suddenly found himself whining online about how the request hadn’t been much of an ask. “The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!” he nattered. “Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers. Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?”
Reminder: These “managers,” in this case, include MAGA luminaries like Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel.
Having abandoned his first deadline, Musk tried again Tuesday, posting: “Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.” This time, he means it!
“Subject to the discretion of the president” is an interesting way to put it. Trump seems to be only half paying attention: “What he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’” the president told reporters Monday. “And then if you don’t answer, you’re sort of semi-fired, or fired. Because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.”
ARE WE THE BADDIES?: Glenn Youngkin isn’t the only Republican officeholder struggling to deal with DOGE fallout. Georgia Rep. Rich McCormick, who suffered through a viral town hall full of livid voters last week demanding to know why he wasn’t standing up for workers at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control, is now offering some guarded criticism of Elon Musk’s “move fast and break things” approach: “I think we’re just moving a little too fast,” he said Monday. “We should have impact studies on each department as we do it, and I’m sure we can do that. We’re moving really, really rapidly, and we don’t know the impact.”
As they say: Move fast and break things and conduct impact studies.
Yo, Marco, you missed this one: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Mark 8:36 (I think it's in red in some Bibles for some reason.)
At the UN yesterday, the USA unequivocally let the world know that this time we are the AXIS powers. May we never live down the shame.