The TOI correspondent from Washington: A massive purge, the likes of which America has never seen and is often attributed to communist and dictatorial regimes abroad, is underway in Washington DC.
Thousands of government officials, including career civil servants who have served for decades across administrations, are being cashiered and marched out of their offices.
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When they are not resigning, they are being fired and escorted from their offices after their security clearances and access to systems are withdrawn.
In some cases, whole agencies — such as USAID, the foreign aid arm of the US government — are being shuttered down. Other government department websites are being wiped out. It’s a bloodbath without blood — for now.
Depending on one’s viewpoint, the perpetrators of the purge, directed by President Trump and executed mainly by Elon Musk, are being seen as revolutionaries freeing Washington DC from the stranglehold of the old order/establishment or bandits ransacking the capital.
The face-off played out in a surreal manner on Friday when Musk literally asked for the keys to the treasury to see how government money was being spent, and an unelected bureaucrat who was the gatekeeper resigned rather than submit to Musk, who is also unelected but works under the directive of the President.
David Lebryk, the highest ranking official in the Treasury department, announced his retirement on Friday, reportedly after a dispute with Musk’s aides over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year. Lebryk, a respected bureaucrat with 35 years in the government, held the keys to the Treasury’s Department’s payment systems that disburses more than $6 trillion annually to households and businesses, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds.
Musk defended his incursion into the government and the way it spent money, which has long been the domain of Congress and its elected lawmakers, saying, “This is the critical battle to restore power to the PEOPLE from the massive unelected bureaucracy!”
“If your elected representatives cannot overcome the bureaucrats who control government, then you live in a BUREAUcracy, not a DEMOcracy!” he wrote on X. Republican lawmakers were largely silent over their powers being usurped while Democratic lawmakers were apoplectic but seemingly powerless for now.
Elsewhere, there is large scale ongoing purge at the Justice Department and FBI, where scores, perhaps hundreds of officials and investigators, associated with probes into Trump, were summarily sacked and escorted out of their offices. David Sundberg, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, and a career FBI agent with more than two decades in the Bureau, was among those fired.
In some agencies, officials who resisted termination were physically evicted from their offices. Phyllis Fong, a 22-year old government veteran who was inspector general of the US Department of Agriculture, was among those who was literally turfed out of office on Thursday.
President Trump essayed what was virtually a “good riddance” to bureaucrats and officials in what he has long seen as a entrenched welfare establishment that has become a “Deep State” protecting vested interests.
“We’d love to have them leave. We wanna clean it out. People have been trying to reduce the federal government now for 40 years, 45 years, and they haven’t been able to do it. And this is a way of doing it very nicely. It’s sort of a buyout too.” he said in remarks defending his administration seeking pre-emptive resignations from government employees.
