At some level, reading some sort of purpose over or onto the ongoing vandalism of the American state is doing a favor to the vandals. Picture a parent holding a screaming toddler on a crowded bus, looking that toddler in the eye, and calmly asking that yowling little booger to explain himself. A tantrum is a tantrum, and it is the nature of things like that to be both unreasonable and unreasoning; in this case, the noisy and furious protagonist of the tantrum is, depending upon your perspective, either the single worst and dumbest member of one generation or the single richest person on earth.
None of this is what you want, but it also just is what it is: incomplete and unreasonable people demonstrating the limits of their capacity to self-regulate in a way that makes everything worse for everyone else, without really offering the tantrum-author much beyond the satisfaction of turning all that un-understood inner chaos outward. You can't give a child melting down like that what they want, because they do not know what that is. And so thinking about it at all means that you are already thinking about it more than the person thrashing around at the center of it.
There are some identifiable things at work, here, but identifying and understanding them only really does so much. It is true that the ongoing degradation and dismantling of the administrative state is grounded in and done in service to a number of stale, stupid, extremely well-entrenched political delusions—that the public sector and everyone working within it is inherently inferior to the more ambitious and adventurous members of the private sector, that any money spent on the public good is wasteful by definition and fraudulent as a matter of course, that all public endeavors are somehow fake or at any rate not as real as the profit-driven work done by corporations or the hardy pioneers in the drop-shipping or shitcoin spaces. It is also true, in a more specific sense, that it is fueled by Trump's signature combination of abstraction and omnidirectional spite, which dictates that everything that does not personally benefit him is not just useless but an intentional and intolerable insult. But there's only so much to do with any of that knowledge. Yes, absolutely, this is a lopsided snowball of elite idiocy idly rolled downhill from on high, but the fact that it is all so shoddy and stupid and careless does nothing to mitigate the fact that it has arrived some time later as an annihilating avalanche for everyone living below.
If there is anything to find at the bottom of all this, it's a bet that none of this actually matters. Certainly none of it matters to the people overseeing the vandalism, who are finally and solely interested in themselves. The gamble, which is endlessly and compulsively escalated, double-or-nothing, is that none of this matters in a way that will get them in trouble. The idle sadism of it all is real, but what interests them most is the pursuit of getting away with it, and the proof of their suspicion that they really can do whatever they want. Certainly that is much more urgent and interesting to them than, say, funding cancer research or international food aid or whatever. It is the only aspect of any of this that is not abstract to them.
And all of it, just as a matter of scale, really is abstract. The number of people who will die without that international aid is too big to hold in your mind even if you try to do it. The amounts of money being spent are big in the way that national-scale federal expenditures tend to be, which is something that conservative politicians have used to argue against the existence of those expenditures for generations. What is a reasonable price to put on a cure for cancer? What is the difference between $48 billion and $27 billion? What, for that matter, is a 20- or 50- or 80-percent reduction in some multi-billion dollar departmental budget? It is absolutely central to this whole debased project that all of this is difficult to grasp. The people overseeing it are absolutely not thinking about it, but the extent to which they are able to evade the consequences of their actions depends upon the actual scope and scale of their bad acts being hard to comprehend.
In terms of head counts, the numbers are more legible: a department that once had 1,000 people and now has 150, or one that shrinks from 1,700 to 300, effectively no longer exists, not in the way and for the purpose that it once did. None of this really reflects anything you might call a justification; Elon Musk believed that a huge number of federal employees are "literally fictional individuals," just as he believed that some percentage of Twitter's payroll was taken up by "ghost employees," and the fact that he was wrong about the Twitter bit seems somehow only to have made him more convinced it was true in the federal government. But all of it reflects a simple and sociopathic calculation, which is that even if these programs are not staffed by Literally Fictional Individuals, they are also fundamentally not real enough for anyone to care about in a way that might get you in trouble for wrecking it.
This, too, is a lot to get your arms around. I find myself, in idle moments, thinking about truth-and-reconciliation commissions and constitutional conventions and uh some other political things that I have never seen before. I believe that those things will be necessary on the other side of this moment, and I know there are examples of them from other places and, long ago, from here. But I also don't know what they would look like. I don't know what the other side of this moment would look like, either, beyond the certain knowledge that it cannot and must not look like the moments that preceded it.
If the goal is only to go back to 2015, you will once again find yourself in 2025 in due time. I know that. I just don't know the rest of it. The mind does not so much reel as unspool—letting out line endlessly as the hooked and invisible thing running beneath the surface hauls ass for the horizon.
But there are some moments when this program becomes easier to see. I have never had millions of dollars and never will, but I have followed professional sports over a period in which player salaries and team valuations have shot up toward incomprehensibility. And while I cannot really fathom those numbers, either, I can at least understand them in that context. I can't really understand Juan Soto's salary or the Dallas Cowboys' valuation in absolute terms, but I can grasp them in a relative one. And that has helped me understand some of what is being done to the administrative state in a way that, while obviously dumb, has helped me understand a little bit more about what is being lost.
It's a truism, and also a load-bearing aspect of the campaign to wreck and subvert every civic thing, that mostly people can't really see or understand what the federal government does. The visible part of it, most of the time, is men in suits and violence workers in uniform or, more recently, in the tactical plainclothes mufti favored by ICE. The more benign aspects charged with making public life more just and livable—with making civil society feasible, and in a less abstract sense with fighting constant rearguard actions against the powerful interests invested in making it significantly and profitably unfeasible—are forever underfunded and invisible. It is axiomatic that Trump and Musk and their acolytes do not know or care anything about any of that; when they assert that these aspects of the state are wasteful or fraudulent they are projecting, first and foremost, but also expressing an ideological perspective that has nothing to do with anything those agencies or programs do. Being proven wrong on this, as they have repeatedly been, only serves to make them more sure of it. For someone like this, it is much easier to burn something valuable down in a desperate act of destroying the evidence than it is to admit that they were wrong about it.
As the vandals have gone about trying to make it impossible for those agencies and programs to do anything, they have made clear not just how essential these invisible functions are, but how efficiently they are run. The dumb but legible economics of sports have put this in perspective for me. A CDC program "brought to a standstill" by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s proposed cuts will "save" $150 million a year; I can understand this number, because it means that the cost of employing 200 people working to make sure that Americans are not exposed to the most popular and damaging neurotoxin of Kennedy's generation is roughly equal to the Houston Astros' payroll this season. A federal grant program called Ready To Learn, which was dedicated to creating children's programming and games, saw all $23 million of its funding eliminated; I can understand that number, because it means that the amount of federal money dedicated to that goal is something like what Anthony Santander will receive from the Toronto Blue Jays in 2027. A University of Washington scientist who studies air quality saw her grant zeroed out as part of the Musk-led DOGE cuts; "there's three years of work behind it," she told the Seattle Times, "and they canceled it to save $866." I can understand that figure, too, because it is just a little bit less than a single seat in section 115 of Yankee Stadium for tonight's game against the Mets.
For most of my life, the amount that professional athletes get paid was held up as an injustice and an affront to every American stuck making less to work a less cool job. This was always pretty stupid, and lately it has come to be understood as such. The numbers involved are still decently tough to comprehend, but the reasoning behind it is easy enough to see. That kind of talent is rare, and that scarcity makes it valuable. From there, it is just a matter of fitting that value into the broader context of the thing. Fans, and Americans in general, are conditioned to understand this, even if they are also conditioned to resent it; it helps very much, in this case, that this is the sort of thing that can be understood one exceptional individual and transaction at a time.
This is another part of the bet, and the principle upon which this whole hideous gamble is leveraged: that any expense, when committed to something as abstract as the common good, will seem preposterous and wasteful in a way that it won't when it's dedicated to one deserving individual. It is how the vandals justify taking everything that they can take; the mystification of it, the impossibility of those outlays, is how they believe they can get away with it. But if you know how to put the unconscionable and abstract into context in the way that fans all learn to do—when you learn that the federal government once (but no longer!) valued children's educational programming at more or less the same figure that the Athletics applied to Luis Severino—it all gets a bit easier to see.
