The Trump administration’s mass firings of federal employees last week sparked anguished denunciations from the affected workers and many others in Philadelphia.
Congressman Brendan Boyle, a Democrat, spoke at a union rally outside Independence Hall and called the sudden dismissal of some 400 IRS workers in the city “a blow to these families, to our local economy, and to every taxpayer.” City Council officially condemned Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for trying to shutter federal agencies and the president’s efforts to “overreach” his executive powers.
“The amount of money DOGE is claiming to save from these firings is a drop in the bucket,” compared to the additional revenues brought in by dismissed IRS employees, read one typical comment on Philadelphia Reddit. “This isn’t about saving the government money. It’s about saving his billionaire donors money. They want their return on investment.”
Yet there’s also support for the slashing approach to shrinking the federal workforce, even in left-leaning Philadelphia.
While some say they think the cuts could have been done more carefully, those on the right and center-right who spoke with Billy Penn said they broadly agree with President Donald Trump’s impulse to cut government substantially.
“Do I think there’s waste in government that we need to address? Absolutely,” said Drew Murray, a Republican ward leader and former City Council candidate. “Do I see merit in what President Trump and Elon Musk are doing? Yes.”
“This is what he campaigned on,” he added. “And as much as I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, I find it refreshing that a president who campaigned on a certain policy is actually saying, ‘I’m coming in and I’m going to do what I said I was going to do.’ ”
“Government continues to grow”
Murray and others were quick to say that they sympathized with the workers who lost their jobs, most of whom were probationary employees who had less than one year on the job or had been recently promoted.
“It’s happened to many of us over time,” said Matt Wolfe, a Republican ward leader in West Philly and a lawyer specializing in election law. “It’s a devastating thing, both financially and to your emotions.”
But the cuts are badly needed, they said, and had to start somewhere.
“Anybody who thinks that the federal government is a lean, mean fighting machine is naive. There’s lots and lots of bloat there,” Wolfe said. “So if you’re going to be looking hard at the workforce, the first thing you’re going to need to do is eliminate the probationary employees.”
He noted that some are already being hired back — at the FDA, for example. And he said the firings will only eliminate a tiny portion of the “inefficiencies” that he and others argue are rife in the federal government. But “it was something that they needed to do if they were going to have more flexibility down the road to make the workforce more efficient,” he said.
In the business world, layoffs and downsizings are a familiar occurrence as companies try to become more efficient and respond to changing economic conditions, said Andy Bloom, a communications consultant and former operations manager at CBS radio stations 94WIP and 1210WPHT.
“I’ve been downsized out of work, and there was no big protest nationwide about the jobs being cut in media,” said Bloom, who also writes for Broad & Liberty, a conservative news site based in Media, Pa. “The one industry that it doesn’t seem to happen with is government. Government continues to grow practically year in and year out, regardless of the economy.”
The number of federal employees has increased from about 2.7 million a decade ago to a little over 3 million this past January, according to data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis. The increase has been particularly sharp over the past 2½ years, with 172,000 added since June 2022.
Less chainsaw and more scalpel, please
Defenders of the cuts point out that presidents of both parties have for decades been pledging, and occasionally acting, to reduce waste and overspending in government.
A task force created by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s eliminated 426,000 federal positions, mostly from the Defense Department, and claimed $112 billion in savings, Bloom noted in a recent article. President Barack Obama also made efforts to cut waste and reduce government spending.
Obama “did many of these cuts without congressional approval himself,” Bloom said. “This is just people reacting to the fact that it’s Donald Trump, and then we have Elon Musk.”
Wolfe likewise argued that the outrage among left-leaning Philadelphians in part reflects their deep-seated antipathy to anything the current president and his deputies do.
“ ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ is real, and they’ve simply transferred it to Musk. It’s not a winning message nationally, but it’s very real, and there’s very real polarization,” Wolfe said. (Some commentators have similarly described reflexive right-wing fears about former President Joe Biden as Biden Derangement Syndrome.)
The work of Clinton’s cost-cutting effort, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, was very different from what Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE is doing. The Clinton task force eliminated jobs gradually over seven years, followed standard processes to change laws and remove federal regulations, and was never sued.
Murray, a former Democrat who describes himself as a centrist, said he would prefer that the Trump administration acted more deliberatively.
“I wish the approach was more like with the scalpel, or maybe somewhere in between a scalpel and a chainsaw. I’d rather see Elon Musk and President Trump have a little more empathy,” he said. “I hated the image of Elon Musk coming out with a chainsaw.”
Murray is chair of a civic group, the Philadelphia Crosstown Coalition, and vice president of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association. His interactions with government have taught him that changing it is an inherently slow process and requires compromises, he said.
“Having a business mindset going into something like this is good, but you have to have these checks and balances,” he said. “You can’t come in like it’s your company. It’s not Tesla. You can’t just say I’m gonna fire all these people.”
Bloom agreed, to a certain extent.
“In the end, they have to follow the Constitutional procedures for getting budgets approved, for zeroing out agencies, for zeroing out budgets. They have to follow the Constitution,” he said.
“Some of this is being done too quickly,” he said. “It’s certainly being done different than it’s ever been done before. But we’re also in a different situation.”
An existential moment?
What’s different now, and makes it so crucially important to shrink government quickly and deeply, is the immense U.S. national debt, according to Bloom.
“In 2000 when Bill Clinton left office, the national debt was about $5.7 trillion or 56% of the country’s gross domestic product,” he said. “Today, the debt is over $36 trillion and it’s accelerating at an exponential rate. We will hit $37 trillion by June, and the debt is now over 130% of GDP.”
“We’ve heard about existential crises, climate change, white supremacy — all of these are quote-unquote ‘existential threats to democracy.’ Well, I can tell you what really is an existential threat to democracy, to the country, and that’s if we continue to pile on debt at a pace that so far exceeds our gross domestic product that we have no chance of being able to catch up. That is how countries fail,” he said.
“So do we need to do some unconventional things to get the debt down? Yeah, I think we do,” Bloom said.
Wolfe echoed that sense of urgency. “The federal debt is simply way too high. We can’t continue to do that and survive as a country,” he said. “One of the many ways that we’re going to have to [address the debt] is by reducing, or making more efficient, the federal workforce.”
They rejected the idea of increasing taxes on wealthy Americans or other groups to raise revenue and pay down the debt. “If we want to maintain our quality of life, if we want to maintain our national security, we can’t just keep raising taxes,” Wolfe said.
Federal revenues, chiefly from the personal income tax and Social Security and Medicare taxes, increased from $4.3 trillion in 2015 to $4.92 trillion in 2024, when adjusted for inflation, according to U.S. Treasury data.
As a percentage of the gross domestic product — a measure of the whole U.S. economy — revenues decreased from 18% to 17%.
For Murray, the big problem that needs to be addressed is the high cost of living. He blames the inflation of the past few years on excessive government spending, whether in the form of federal employee salaries or other expenditures.
“The Inflation Reduction Act [passed in 2022, as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic] had the opposite effect, because they just kept putting money into the economy artificially. When the money supply increases, you have an inflationary period, and we had record inflation,” he said.
“Obviously the government has roles. They should pick up our trash. They should pave our roads. They should keep us safe. They should make sure that the capitalists don’t get too much power, right? We don’t want monopolies,” he said. “That’s the role of the government. It’s not just to infuse the economy with money.”