JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Thousands of federal jobs are being eliminated at a frantic pace. President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has adopted a slash and burn approach to the firings.
Business analysts say DOGE is not being methodical. Not efficient. Doing things with little concern about the impact on public health and safety, let alone the impact on the economy and the fact that people’s lives are being destroyed.
Could the same thing happen here in Florida? There are concerns.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking a page right out of Elon Musk’s playbook. DeSantis announced he wants to set up a DOGE-like task force in the Sunshine State.
He wants to cut spending and target bureaucracy. He is setting up a panel that will review about 900 state positions, university spending, local government spending and the need for about 70 state boards and commissions.
The governor’s rationale, “For too long, nobody has cared about the taxpayers, much less the next generation, who is ultimately going to have to pay for all of the mismanagement that we have seen over these many, many years.”
State Democrats fired back saying hold your horses. If there’s a problem, it’s because you Republicans have been in charge and have been doing things wrong here in sunny ole Florida.
Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried scoffed, saying, “Republicans have been in total control of Florida’s government for nearly 30 years, and he wants to talk about government waste?”
The GOP has held the governor’s office since Jeb Bush was elected in 1998 and has controlled both chambers of the Legislature since 1996.
Advocacy groups say what DeSantis is doing is nothing short of political theater.
Jared Nordlund, Florida state director of UnidosUS, a Latino civil-rights organization, had this to say:
“Florida faces real, urgent problems to solve—families struggling with the highest rise in the cost of living in the country, high school students unable to read at an 8th-grade level, a fifth of seniors experiencing homelessness, red tide polluting our beaches and policies that are increasingly hostile to communities of color and working people. Yet, instead of addressing these urgent issues, the governor is laser-focused on cutting ‘bloat’ from a bureaucracy he and his own party built, mismanaged and weaponized against Floridians.”
Back to Musk and DOGE nationally.
The DOGE buzzsaw continues to spin at a dizzying speed. There is little regard for how the mass layoffs will undermine essential government functions. In some cases, the department does not even pay attention to who is being fired.
How do you fire the staff that handles America’s nuclear weapons, the scientists trying to fight the growing and worsening bird flu outbreak and officials responsible for supplying electricity?
It’s because the rapid dismantling of the U.S. federal bureaucracy is nothing short of chaotic and potentially dangerous. Some observers say there is absolute incompetence among the decision makers.
It’s because they employ a blunt force approach toward the wholesale firing of workers who are classified as “probationary workers.”
Wouldn’t it make more sense to look at individuals and the specific jobs they do? Wouldn’t it make more sense to see who among these workers are essential and are doing their jobs well?
Wouldn’t it make sense to see which jobs are unnecessary and which jobs duplicate efforts? Wouldn’t it make sense to look at the workers who are not productive and trim that part of the workforce?
Oh, and let’s not ignore the fact that while Elon Musk and his young aides at DOGE wield their ax and send out those sanitized “termination letters,” the Trump administration may be on the precipice of running up one monumental bill.
Why? Many of these federal workers say they are being fired illegally.
No one is arguing that there is no government waste. No one is arguing about the fact that taking a long hard look at a bloated government bureaucracy is long overdue. But there is an effective way to do it.
Then there is this. Of course, there is fraud that needs to be uncovered. Yet Musk provides no evidence of so much of the fraud he talks about. Is Musk misreading the facts? Or is it that Musk doesn’t care about the facts?
And then there’s this: Who is making a lot of money from government contracts all the while when taking that chainsaw mentioned earlier to these government offices? Perhaps one of the world’s richest men? C’mon. More questions need to be asked about that!
No one wants taxpayer dollars wasted. Everyone wants necessary government services available. Everything needs to be proportional.
The response to make that happen needs to be proportional and done rationally without upending this nation’s or state’s needs and people’s lives.
Political analyst Sean Freeder joins me to talk about the issues surrounding DOGE -- both DeSantis & Musk style -- on this week’s Politics & Power. Watch at 7 p.m. or 9 p.m. Tuesday on News4JAX+ or catch it on demand anytime on the News4JAX YouTube channel, News4JAX+ or News4JAX.com.