"If you fire all of the people who know what they're doing or are willing to tell you the truth when things go wrong, then what you're left with is a group of yes men."
Key Takeaways:
The Trump administration has shown a disturbing pattern of prioritizing loyalty over expertise in government.
They’re weaponizing information to strengthen Trump’s power, not to solve problems.
By purging experts across government, the Trump administration is shifting risk to the American people.
This week, news broke that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez was under pressure from Health and Human Services Director RFK Jr. to revoke approvals for COVID vaccines. She refused. Now Kennedy says she’s been fired but she’s refusing to resign. There have been a wave of resignations at the CDC in protest.
It’s the same pattern all across the Trump administration. Take the turmoil at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which started earlier this month with revised job reports that showed the economy was far weaker than previously thought. Trump responded by firing Erika McEntarfer for writing the report. Now he’s appointed E.J. Antoni, the former chief economist of the right-wing Heritage Foundation which wrote Project 2025. And now Trump claims he’s fired BLS Commissioner Lisa Cook, a former MSU professor, although the courts have said he doesn’t have that legal authority.
"And so what this does is it puts us in a situation now where businesses and the rest of the world have to wonder if they can still trust the economic data coming from America,” says University of Michigan Professor Don Moynihan tells Executive Editor
.He notes that a hallmark of authoritarian regimes is rewarding loyalty above competence in government.
"The pattern is consistent. Even if you don't know the acronym of the agency, which is that people who know what they're doing are being replaced by loyalists,” Moynihan says.
Whether it's the availability of vaccines, the reliability of economic data, or the ability of agencies like FEMA to respond to natural disasters, Americans are effectively being left to fend for themselves without the previously dependable support of government services.
"The Trump administration is just shifting a lot more risk onto you and your family,” Moynihan says.
Tune in for this important discussion of what happens when government is being sabotaged from within. And subscribe to
’s Substack, Can We Still Govern?Trump Shoots the Messenger
One basic character of the politicization necessary to create an authoritarian regime is that public employ…
