On Saturday, Elon Musk, the billionaire charged by President Donald Trump with cutting government waste, alerted the public to a massive inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy: Government employees would soon be distracted from their actual work by a request from on high. In aggregate, hundreds of thousands of man-hours would be squandered. But Musk wasn’t putting a stop to this wasteful time suck of a requirement. He was the one imposing it.

“All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posted around noon on his social-media platform, X. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Soon afterward, the Office of Personnel Management sent such an email to all federal agencies. The subject line: “What did you do last week?” Workers were told to respond by tonight with five bullet points “of what you accomplished.”

As someone who hates government waste, I sympathize with any Americans who are cheering this initiative because they believe it will expose workers who accomplish nothing. But those Americans are cheering, albeit unwittingly, for massive inefficiency—just the latest example of the chaos DOGE has created across the federal government, undercutting its own aims.

[Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump]

Consider America’s roughly 14,000 Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic controllers. If each of them spends just 10 minutes opening their work email, finding this request, drafting a response, proofreading it, and sending it off, that adds up to 2,333 hours of work. Can you think of a more cartoonish example of government waste than using 292 workdays’ worth of man-hours to clarify that, last week, air-traffic controllers monitored airplanes?

I actually can think of a more cartoonish example, in that it is even bigger in scale: Some 74,000 U.S. Postal Service letter carriers deliver mail on foot, making roughly $29 an hour on average. If they spend 10 minutes each, or 740,000 total minutes, drafting emails, that works out to nearly $360,000 in labor costs. For what? And how long will it take other workers to read “I was delivering letters” 74,000 times?

Any American can identify many more categories of federal employees whose job duties are known to all. We know what TSA agents do. We know what nurses do. An efficient process would obviously exempt all such categories.

Other federal employees of course have less legible job duties, and I do not doubt that some of them accomplished next to nothing of value last week and ought to be fired. But there is no reason to believe that any of those employees will be truthful about their own uselessness, or that untruthful emails will be detected as such. This gambit is more likely to reward bullshitting persuasively via email than actual service to taxpayers.

The effect of Musk’s order on other Trump-administration leaders adds to its costs. Various news outlets have reported that officials at multiple agencies—including the Departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security; the FBI; and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—instructed their employees not to respond to the email, in part out of worry that employees would have to share sensitive information. Put another way, people charged with keeping Americans safe had to spend time and attention preempting a potential security risk that Musk introduced rather than attending to other dangers.

On X, Musk has made various attempts to defend his initiative. They only intensified my doubts. “The passing grade is literally just ‘Can you send an email with words that make any sense at all?’” Musk wrote. “It’s a low bar.” Even the most worthless bureaucrats can clear that bar. So why set it? Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reported, “some federal workers were on leave … and unable to access their emails. Others, in the Defense Department, were on duty tours in remote locations, like jungles, without access to computers.” In other words, some valuable federal employees will fail to clear the bar through no fault of their own.

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

“The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!” Musk also wrote, as if checking email is a reliable measure of productivity in all public-sector jobs. If you’re a NASA employee doing maintenance on a remote telescope, or a Department of Labor employee traveling to far-flung coal mines to assess their safety, or a Coast Guard employee patrolling a patch of ocean, or an NSA employee trying to hack the personal device of a foreign general, checking email irregularly could as easily show that you’re working hard as that you’re hardly working.

Plus, if the idea is to catch folks who don’t check email at all, wouldn’t publicizing the gambit on X undermine that strategy by alerting those workers to it? So much of what Musk says about this matter doesn’t make any sense, even on its own terms. One X user posted a screenshot of a cheeky prompt for Grok, the Musk-generated AI chatbot: “Make up 5 things I accomplished at work this week that they can’t really verify, I work for the government, keep it brief.” Grok generated five items, illustrating how easy it is to game Musk’s initiative. But Musk himself, encountering that post, commented, “That’s all it would take for real,” with a laughing-crying emoji, as if it didn’t undermine his approach.

Watching Musk, a man recently focused on electric cars and getting humanity to Mars, direct his inventiveness toward the public-sector equivalent of TPS reports is vexing. Improving federal efficiency is a worthy project. Trump will have no incentive to deliver on it if his base credulously cheers gambits as wasteful and poorly defended as this one.

Federal workers are scared. They don’t know who to trust. As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have hacked away at federal agencies over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen workers who have outlined how the administration is pushing a new ideology and stoking paranoia within the government’s remaining ranks. My sources work, or until recently worked, across six different agencies, including the State, Commerce, and Defense Departments and USAID; most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or they feared being targeted. “People are terrified,” one worker told me, “not for losing their jobs but for losing democracy.”

The workers described a fundamental transformation in the character of the government: Many workers say they live in a constant state of fear, unable to trust their colleagues, unable to speak freely, reflexively engaging in self-censorship even on matters they view as crucial to national security. One team that works on issues related to climate change has gone so far as to seal itself off in a completely technology-sanitized room for in-person meetings—no phones, watches, computers, or other connected devices. (Representatives for the Commerce and Defense Departments, USAID, DOGE, and the White House did not respond to my requests for comment.)

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

The widespread paralysis has been driven not just by the terminations and the crippling of entire agencies—which workers say has followed no apparent logic or process—but by executive orders and internal communications. Take the first diplomatic cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on January 21, the day after the inauguration. The message, which was sent to all members of the State Department, and which outlined various priorities, takes an “Orwellian” tone, as one State Department employee described it to me. Next to a priority labeled “Stopping Censorship and Prioritizing Truth,” Rubio wrote that although the State Department has been “combatting malign propaganda from hostile states” since the Cold War, the agency has also recently worked to promote “censorship, suppression, and misinformation” targeting Americans—perhaps motivated by “an excess of zeal or misguided attempts to control discourse.” The email, a copy of which I obtained, goes on:

This Department will forever stand in support and defense of Americans’ natural and First Amendment rights to free speech. We will combat genuine enemy propaganda, but always and only with the truth: that America is a great and good and just country, whose people are generous, and whose leaders now prioritize our core interests while respecting the rights and interests of other nations. Above all, programs that lead or in any way open the door to the censorship of the American people will be terminated.

My sources were disturbed by the idea that the administration would dictate “the truth” and accuse workers of censoring Americans. (What censorship Rubio is referring to is unclear, and a State Department spokesperson, who replied to my email inquiry without giving their name, said only, “As a general matter, we do not comment on internal personnel matters.”) Those working on behalf of Trump have already hidden information and engaged in censorship themselves, deleting scientific data and prompting researchers to scrub terms related to gender and sexuality from their work, in addition to purging information related to climate change and more. Because of this, one worker said, colleagues at his agency have considered replacing the generic word including with such as in reports, given the word’s proximity to inclusion, or excising terms like vulnerable groups, which are often used to refer to children, out of concern that they could be flagged under the administration’s sweeps to eradicate anything pertaining to diversity.

Transitions of power always lead to changes in priorities, but that is not what the workers say they are witnessing. Instead, the new Trump administration is engineering what some feel could be described only as ideological obedience.

Secretary Rubio’s message is just one example of the many ways the Trump administration has made these red lines apparent. Many Republicans have spoken out against any group or agency that could be perceived as censoring conservative voices. Shortly after the election, for instance, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an operation for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda established by President Barack Obama, shut down after a Republican-controlled House didn’t re-up its funding. Federal workers I spoke with now say that neither they nor their colleagues want to be associated in any way with working on or promoting disinformation research—even as they are aware that the U.S. government’s lack of visibility into such networks could create a serious national vulnerability, especially as AI gives state-backed operations powerful upgrades. Some are even discussing whether they should revise existing technical documents to scrub references to “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As one source told me, “If this administration is dictating the truth and dismantling disinformation efforts, you can’t bring it up anymore. You just don’t want to put a target on your back. Whether it’s intended or not, self-censorship emerges.”

Federal workers told me that this self-censorship started with issues related to DEI. On the third day of the Trump administration, the Office of Personnel Management instructed agency heads to email their employees a notice asking them to report one another for violations of President Trump’s executive order. Both the fear of being reported by colleagues and the fear of being punished for not reporting colleagues quickly led to a pervasive loss of trust and communication, my sources told me. Many employees stopped speaking openly in meetings in front of unfamiliar co-workers. Pronouns were dropped from emails; pride flags were taken off desks; references to Black History Month and promoting women in STEM were excised from office discussions, they said. Several workers told me they believed this was the intention: “Make people question what is safe—Where can I speak? Who can I speak to? How can I speak? You create a culture of chaos, fear, and confusion,” Stephie-Anne Duliepre, a former Science for Development fellow at USAID, told me. “I think that was the strategy because it was effective: wearing people out, stripping people’s will or faith that if they ever speak up they would be safe.”

This feeling may be by design. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of Project 2025, said in private speeches obtained by ProPublica that “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Some federal workers who collect health and medical data from Americans to support a wide array of downstream research, including cancer-drug discovery, are discussing whether to continue recording if patients are transgender, or information about pregnancies and abortions, an employee told me. The absence of that information will limit the kind of research that scientists can do, like studying how a drug affects pregnant women, or gender-based health disparities. But the workers are wrestling with whether having these data will put Americans in danger of being targeted by their own government, the employee said. Although workers have often asked patients about illegal behavior in the past, including illicit drug use, this time feels different: “It’s not just because it’s illegal in some places,” the employee said, referring to abortions. “It’s because it’s political.”

[Read: DOGE has God-mode access to government data]

Climate change has become another perceived taboo, sources told me. At the Department of Defense, the direction has been explicit. On January 27, several staffers received an email from superiors, according to a copy I reviewed, stating that the director of Army staff was working to suspend any activities “associated with, but not limited to the following areas: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory, Climate and climate change, Transgender, and Abortion policies." In other cases, workers are drawing their own conclusions. Some are discussing how to reframe climate-related policy documents, or even research on issues that could have downstream climate implications, into other kinds of energy and environmental issues that are more in line with the Trump administration’s priorities. (Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to pay “particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources,” for example.)

For any communications related to climate and other sensitive topics, the team that has stopped bringing internet-connecting devices to in-person meetings has also shifted from email to Signal messages, a worker in the group told me. “All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,” the worker told me. “Now I am being treated like a criminal.”

During my conversations, many workers referred to George Orwell’s 1984, and its portrayal of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a minor government bureaucrat, to explain the scope and scale of their experience. They referenced the Ministry of Truth, doublethink, and Newspeak as they described what was happening. Six terminated workers at USAID conveyed to me how the agency’s rapid dismantlement represented an example of the worst of what could happen in this environment: DOGE swept in, Trump froze virtually all aid spending, and Musk began blasting USAID publicly as a “criminal organization.” Agency staff were slow to grasp the full scope of what was happening and to react—they told me that they wish they’d organized protests or sounded the alarm to the outside world more quickly. Under the new regime, the staff became more afraid to talk to one another in large groups and stopped connecting their personal devices to the government Wi-Fi for fear of being surveilled. “USAID is a canary in a coal mine,” a terminated USAID worker told me. “It felt like being hunted by your own government.”

President Donald Trump’s firing of the country’s most senior military officer on Friday night rattled the foundations of the armed forces. It also intensified an already furious game of “who’s next” among senior lawmakers and Washington officials, who have been trading information about the commander in chief’s likely targets.  

Trump fired Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., known as C. Q., who was only the second African American to serve as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president then tapped a relatively unknown officer to replace him—retired three-star Air Force General Dan “Raizin” Caine, who reportedly impressed the president with his swagger and bravado when they met in Iraq in 2018.

Brown’s dismissal, coupled with Caine’s improbable elevation, added to a sense of bewilderment that has prevailed across the national-security establishment in recent days, as the administration purges the upper echelons of career officers and civil servants. Trump also appears poised to remove several other top military leaders—focusing on Black and women officers—and replace them with his handpicked successors. And at the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies, senior officials, as well as personnel who had only been on the job a few years, were bracing to be fired, multiple officials have told us.  

Many of the personnel actions seemed aligned with the Trump administration’s pledge to rid the ranks of “woke” officials whom the president thinks were promoted not because of their credentials, but due to their race or gender.

At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was replacing Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who is the first woman to serve as the chief of naval operations, as well as General James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force. A draft list of other officers who might be fired circulated this week on Capitol Hill among a small number of lawmakers on the armed-services committees in the House and Senate. The list isn’t final and is subject to the whims of the president and the defense secretary, cautioned two people familiar with it, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters

Brown and Franchetti are on the list, as are other senior officers. A White House official told us that the futures of those officers were being evaluated but that the president hadn’t made a final decision.

A list has also circulated with the names of officers who might be promoted to replace those being removed. People who know those officers told us many were highly capable, and that they were serving in roles meant to groom them for promotion. But moving them up the ranks now was potentially premature and a break with military protocol.

If confirmed by the Senate, Caine’s appointment would break with a generation of norms and traditions governing promotion in the senior ranks of the military. In nearly 30 years, no one has risen to chairman without first serving as a member of the Joint Chiefs. Caine, who retired last year, would leapfrog all of the current members.  

Nothing in his résumé suggests that he was destined to become the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. armed forces. He has not commanded a large number of troops. He has never led a branch of the military. His last job was as associate director for military affairs for the CIA, from 2021 to 2024. The job is a liaison position that has more clout inside the Pentagon than it does at Langley. One thing Caine apparently did have going for him: a memorable encounter he reportedly had with Trump.

According to a New York Times profile, Caine impressed the president when they met, in 2018, because he claimed that the Islamic State could be defeated in a week, not two years, as Trump said his advisers had told him. Trump has told the story on different occasions, and while the details have changed, the conversation stuck in his memory. As, apparently, did Caine.

In a statement, Hegseth indicated that the military purge was not limited to top leaders, noting that the Pentagon was “requesting nominations” for judge advocates general—lawyers—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado and former Army Ranger, wrote on X that “the purge of senior officers at [the Department of Defense] is deeply troubling, but purging JAG officers worries me the most.” Those lawyers, he noted, interpret the law and determine the constitutionality of actions that commanders take.

Replacing those officers with “loyalists is so dangerous,” Crow said.

During his first term, Trump intervened in several military justice cases that revolved around the line between acceptable combat behavior and war crimes. In the most infamous, he reversed a decision to demote Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had been convicted of posing with the dead body of an Islamic State prisoner. (Gallagher had been found not guilty of the prisoner’s murder.) Trump’s decision allowed Gallagher to retire as a SEAL.

Challenged by then–Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley about the importance of military ethics and laws to combat troops, Trump responded that he didn’t understand “the big deal,” according to Milley’s recounting of the conversation to The Atlantic.

“You guys are all just killers,” Trump said, according to Milley. “What’s the difference?”

The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer.

In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”  

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”

Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms. During her confirmation hearing, Trump’s education-secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, said she did not know if schools could lose funding for teaching Black-history classes under the order. The legality of the order over K–12 curricula is unclear, but the chilling effects are real nonetheless.

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color.

The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.

“This is really taking us back to a kind of pre-civil-rights-movement vision of America,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the former head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told me in an interview last year, before Trump won the 2024 election. “A backlash is a pushback. This is really much more of a demolition effort.”

As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This analysis is perceptive in the sense that the exact reverse is true—we are now in the second decade of a years-long temper tantrum sparked by the election of Barack Obama—not to mention the failed attempts to elect a woman to succeed him—and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like Beattie.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

Other MAGA figureheads have promoted similar ideas. In 2020, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell published a book arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had revoked “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.” Because of the Civil Rights Act, white people had fallen “asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Caldwell’s assessment has grown in popularity among prominent conservatives. The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has described the Civil Rights Act as having “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon,” and he has attacked Martin Luther King Jr., Wired reported, as part of a “broader strategy to discredit” King and “the Civil Rights Act.” On his social network, X, the South African–born Musk, who is playing a key role in the Trump administration, regularly promotes scientific racism, the pseudoscientific ideology that holds that race determines individual potential. Some of the staffers Musk has hired to dismantle the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws seem to share those ideological predilections. One DOGE staffer resigned after the Wall Street Journal revealed he maintained a pro-eugenics social media account where “he appeared to have a special dislike for Indian software engineers.” He was reinstated after receiving public support from Trump and Vance.  The problem conservatives trying to undermine anti-discrimination law seem to have with an “official hierarchy of races” is not that one exists but that, in their warped conception, white people are not on top, as they should be.

This ideology is apparent in the rote blaming of diversity by some conservatives for every catastrophic event—as they did following a midair collision over the Potomac River. Or a freighter crashing into a bridge in Baltimore. Or doors flying off Boeing planes.The contention, overt or implied, is always that unlike white men, whose competence can be assumed, the non-white people with desirable jobs are undeserving. The irony, of course, is that many of the white men making these assumptions are themselves unqualified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is best-known for being a reality-television star.  

Even so, the Great Resegregation seeks not a return to the explicit racial separation of Jim Crow, but rather an embrace of ostensibly “color-blind” policies intended to sustain a de facto segregation that is more durable and less overt, one in which Black access to the middle and elite strata of American life will be ever more rare and fleeting. The numbers of Black doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, showrunners, and generals would no longer rise. And there would be no more Black presidents. The real but fragile advancement of the Black poor into the Black middle class would be stalled or reversed. Most Black people would be confined to, as Trump memorably put it, the menial “Black jobs” they were meant for, save for those willing to sustain the self-serving fiction that they are among the good ones.

The demolition of multiracial democracy began a dozen years ago, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rolled back voting-rights protections adopted in the 1960s to enforce the rights enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment. Those protections made America, for the first time, a democracy for all its citizens. They diversified Congress, and led to the election of the first Black president. The Roberts Court has steadily eroded those protections, insisting that they are no longer necessary, even as racist ideas once considered beyond the pale return to the mainstream. These changes have had the predictable outcome of increasing racial disparities in voting.

The Roberts Court has treated policies meant to rectify racial discrimination as themselves racist. The Court shut down what remained of public-school integration efforts. It overturned affirmative action in higher education. These decisions have eroded diversity in the classroom. But they’re just the beginning for the resegregators, who intend to ensure that America’s traditional racial hierarchies are persistent and stable.

One clear example comes in the world of higher education. Because giving all Americans equal access to elite higher education is a step toward broader societal integration, such efforts must be shut down. To this end, conservative groups are suing colleges even in states such as California, where affirmative action in public universities has long been banned, claiming that the fact that their incoming classes have become more diverse rather than less is evidence of reverse discrimination. At least two conservative justices have objected to color-blind, class-based affirmative-action programs. This approach suggests a topsy-turvy understanding of racial discrimination, in which a diverse classroom is one in which white men have been discriminated against, based on the conviction that white men are by definition the most competent possible candidates.

[Read: Donald Trump is very busy]

When Trump officials speak of a society that is color-blind and merit-based, they do not appear to mean meritocracy or color-blindness in the traditional sense. Instead of individual meritocracy, they seem to be advocating a racial meritocracy, in which the merit of an individual hire or admission can be assessed not by their individual accomplishments but by how well the group they are associated with fits a particular role. In this way, the Great Resegregation seeks firmer moral ground than the racial apartheid of the past. Racial disparities can be framed not as the result of discrimination, but as a fact: that white people are just better and more qualified. And by withholding federal funding from places that engage in scientific inquiry on social inequalities or offer historical instruction that could be seen as portraying America as “fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory,” the Trump administration can make the causes of those inequalities illegible.

What the proponents of the Great Resegregation seek is a counterrevolution not merely in law, but also in culture. The civil-rights revolution of the 1960s changed hearts and minds as well as laws, and one of those changes was that racially exclusive institutions became morally suspect. Notably, Trump officials are not willing to state their aims explicitly; they feel obligated to pay lip service to ideals of color-blind meritocracy and mislead about their intentions.

“My view is that the diversity ethos has really sunk deep roots,” the Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy told me. “There are a lot of people across a wide variety of ideological positions who would not like a racially homogeneous, all-white outfit. Even people who say they’re against affirmative action, they would feel somewhat nervous or somewhat embarrassed or somewhat guilty about that.” Trumpists seek to not just repeal protections against discrimination, but reverse the “diversity ethos” that has enabled America’s tenuous strides toward equality.

And that progress is not only fragile but remarkably incomplete. Neither schools nor workplaces have ever been particularly integrated. Public-school integration stalled long ago. Even prior to the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing affirmative action in admissions, enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at elite universities had stalled at percentages far below their share of the student-age population. Occupational segregation has remained stagnant since the ’90s. Black workers with or without college degrees are concentrated in professions that pay less than those of their white counterparts, despite a rise in Black people obtaining college degrees. Corporate DEI efforts never made much progress on integration to begin with, in part because many of these efforts were more about branding and limiting liability than equal opportunity, and now the federal government will be dead set on reversing whatever headway was made.

“The segregation we see in the labor market right now is three to five times worse than we would expect if race wasn’t a core factor,” Justin Heck of Opportunity@Work, an organization that advocates for workers without college degrees, told me. “We’ve seen it go down a little bit in the years leading up to 1990. But the current world looks the same as it did in 1990. It’s been stagnant or worse, or slightly worse today.” Heck is one of the authors of a 2023 study on occupational segregation published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

There are perhaps two exceptions. One is the federal government, where until now, anti-discrimination laws have been strictly enforced. Trump’s cronies have tried to discredit the federal workforce precisely because it is often more meritocratic, and therefore more integrated than the private sector. “It’s harder in a federal-government job to get a position simply through an informal network,” the political scientist Ashley Jardina, who also worked on the NBER study, told me. “Whereas in the private sector, especially in building trades, for example, a lot of people are getting their jobs through their social networks, which are incredibly segregated.”

That is why Trumpists are so focused on “ending DEI” in the federal workforce. They see anti-discrimination and inclusion as a ladder of upward mobility for people they do not believe should have one. Under Trump, a workplace or college that is perceived as too diverse might come under legal scrutiny, effectively enforcing racial quotas. For example, Andrew Bailey, the attorney general of Missouri, is suing the coffee chain Starbucks on the basis that after adopting DEI programs its workforce has become “more female and less white.”

The second place where America has grown more integrated is media and entertainment, arenas highly visible to the public. This has depreciated the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “psychological wage” of white racial identity—making those who once held an unquestioned hegemony over American culture feel like something has been stolen from them. And this shift helped fuel the nationwide backlash to diversity efforts that Trump rode to office.

[W. E. B. Du Bois: Strivings of the Negro people]

The slight but substantive integration of characters in film, television, and other forms of entertainment has itself led to a visible backlash, subjecting actors, writers, and other creative workers of color to harassment whenever they participate in a high-profile project, especially in the genres of science fiction or fantasy. An integrated cast, writers’ room, or development team is deemed “woke,” by which critics simply mean integrated, and therefore suspect. A woman, LGBTQ person, or person of color in a leading role is deemed unqualified, or worthy of rejection just because of who they are. What may seem like silly internet controversies are in fact demands for a resegregation of creative workplaces.

“I think probably part of why we observe more integration in some spaces and others also just has a lot to do with the demands that capitalism places on having a market,” Jardina told me. “It earns money for media organizations and studios to diversify their shows and their casts, because there’s a market for that, in the same way that there isn’t in a lot of industries.”

In other words, the exceptions to America’s persistent segregation have taken place in America’s most public-facing professions, among those assigned to interpret the world around them. What people consuming American media see, for the most part, is a mirage of a more integrated America that has yet to come into being. In virtually every other arena—the private-sector workplace, housing, schooling—America remains profoundly segregated, with opportunities limited by class and race.

This is why Trump’s funding freeze has targeted DEI despite no evidence that the government has lowered its standards on behalf of women and minorities. Asked to provide a real example of lowered standards in the military during his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was unable to. The U.S. military has long led the way in demonstrating how a diverse workforce yields American excellence—one reason some conservatives are fixated on its relative egalitarianism, which they deride as “wokeness.” Hegseth recently said he believed that “the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength." The Nazis and Confederates learned otherwise.

Of course he himself is an illustration of lowered standards—Hegseth has no demonstrable expertise for the job he was given—but because he is a white man, his qualifications for the job are assumed, as a result of the Trumpist concept of racial meritocracy. This is why the funding freeze is targeting research on inequality. It is why private companies are threatened with government lawsuits and prosecutions if they seek a broader pool of applicants. It is why the Trump administration’s deportations do not target merely undocumented criminals but also immigrants on Temporary Protective Status. It is why Trump’s loyalists are dismantling any and all government programs that might conceivably even the playing field between those born with plenty and those born with little.

For all the big talk about putting an end to “social engineering,” the Great Resegregation is itself a radical attempt to socially engineer America to be poorer, whiter, less equal, and less democratic. Much as the old Jim Crow measures kept many southern white people impoverished and disenfranchised alongside the Black southerners they targeted, the Great Resegregation will leave wealthy white elites with a firmer grip on power and the working classes with fewer opportunities and a weakened social safety net. The only people left with more will be those who already had more than they needed to begin with.

The sacking of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, as well as the judge advocate generals of the Army, Navy and Air Force on Friday night was completely legal—and appalling.

The consequences of this Friday-night massacre will be long-lasting and damaging. The JAGs embody the deep respect that the United States military has had for the rule of law. Although they merely advise and do not command, their role is a crucial one. The decapitation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Navy, and the firing of the second-most-senior Air Force officer was bad enough.

The replacement of General C. Q. Brown, a highly decorated and cerebral officer, as chairman by a retired lieutenant general was bizarre and unprecedented. By law the role of chair should be filled, unless the president deems an extraordinary exception necessary, by a four star who has led a service or a combatant command. Lieutenant General Dan Caine was relatively junior, and he spent 2009 to 2016 as a reservist. The skills he acquired as a special operator, moreover, are the antithesis of what the most senior military officer in the country needs. The United States armed forces, composed of millions of men and women on active and reserve duty, operates fleets and divisions and air wings. Its leaders need the ability to handle military movements and the political skills to deal with coalition partners in large-scale operations, skills that are acquired on the conventional side of the house, not in shadow warfare.

Caine, in other words, is not qualified for the job. If he indeed told President Donald Trump that ISIS could be wiped out in a week or four if only the military were unleashed—as Trump has claimed—he has, moreover, exceptionally poor military judgment. If the Israel Defense Forces, deploying substantial air power and five divisions of mechanized infantry, could not wipe out Hamas in a year-long campaign in the tiny area the group controlled, the United States Air Force could not, and cannot, do the same thing to a wily jihadist military organization spread over several large Middle Eastern countries in less than a month.

When confronted with civilian superiors behaving outrageously, the response of the American soldier, sailor, air fighter, or Marine is to stiffen, look rigidly ahead, and follow lawful orders. But they reflect. And what they are assuredly thinking today is that the Trump administration is determined to purge the military’s leadership; that it has no respect for the rule of law, including the law of armed conflict; and that it is willing to put them under the command of political generals of doubtful caliber. To say that they will find this demoralizing is an understatement.

Worse yet, a minority will applaud this. I have spent my entire career in the company of soldiers, including senior officers, and I have never encountered a group of more honorable men and women. There are, however, in all ranks, as in the rest of humanity, a certain proportion of toadies, opportunists, zealots, and fools. These will now be encouraged to curry favor with political authority, and if there is one thing that the Trump administration has shown itself desirous of, it is brownnosing. That will, in turn, undermine military performance. Promote the bootlickers, sow distrust among the decent ones, and military disaster awaits.

This episode tells us a great deal, none of it too surprising, about the secretary of defense, beginning with the firing itself, conducted on a Friday night and without the courtesy of personal meetings. Pete Hegseth may think of himself as a warrior type, but that was the corporate behavior of a coward. He did not publish his reasons for the firings other than mouthing a platitude or two about the public service of his victims. It was the behavior of a leader who is desperately weak.

He may not yet understand the damage that he has done to himself. It will escape no one’s notice that his two most prominent victims were a Black man and a woman, and that he has raged against women in the military. His unwillingness to explain himself means that the worst construction will be put on his actions. Whereas in a normal administration one should give some benefit of the doubt to leaders making hard calls, he deserves, and will receive, none.

That goes for his tattoos too. On one bicep is Deus Vult, “God wills it,” a motto embraced by some white-nationalist groups (which is why he was removed from duty after January 6). His defense is that it is merely a celebration of the Christian-warrior ethic, a slogan attributed to the Crusaders by contemporary chroniclers.

When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they spent two days killing the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Thomas Asbridge writes in his history of the Crusades that the city was “awash with blood and littered with corpses. In the midsummer heat the stench soon became intolerable, and the dead were dragged out beyond the walls, ‘piled up in mounds as big as houses’ and burned.” Six months later, Jerusalem still stank of death.

If celebration of that kind of thing is not what he means, he should make that clear, but of course he will not. A man as petty, thoughtless, and cruel as his boss, he will both feel aggrieved by reactions to his cruelties and ignorant of their likely consequences.

The firings coincided with other assaults both on the American government—the announced firing of more than 50,000 probationary workers in the Pentagon—and on Ukraine, where the United States leaned on Kyiv to withdraw a motion in the UN that would denounce Russia in favor of one, introduced by the United States, that would make no mention of invasion, atrocities, or aggression. In both cases, there was tremendous self-harm, to the civil service on the one hand and to American foreign policy on the other, as Russia gets consequential gifts without paying for them.

What is to be done? To some extent, the administration is setting up the conditions for its own failures as it causes chaos, alienates constituencies, and cripples essential governmental functions. Some of these actions will be illegal and must be confronted in the courts and beyond; others, like Hegseth’s, will be lawful but still enormously destructive, to which other responses are warranted.

At the very least, the public deserves to know the names of the members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whose staffers have cut a swath through governmental departments but hide their identities from view. A sense of accountability in courts of opinion as well as law—and if not now, then in the future, when, inevitably, the wheel turns and they are no longer in positions of power—may help temper some of their worst excesses.

Unlike Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or J. D. Vance, I have had children serve in uniform in wartime. The parent of a service member looks with a particularly keen eye at who is in command. C. Q. Brown is the kind of general I would have been proud to have leading them, confident in his professional abilities and his moral compass. To understand the fury that many of us who know him feel at this moment, look at the video of his message following George Floyd’s murder. At a time of racial tension unlike anything since the civil-rights movement, he spoke with dignity, restraint, and the deepest kind of patriotism—the patriotism of a Martin Luther King Jr. or, more to the point, a General Dan “Chappie” James Jr., the first Black four-star general, one of the World War II Tuskegee Airmen.

The worst of the MAGA movement are the neo-Confederates, ignoramuses (to be charitable) about this country’s history—hence their outrage at the renaming of forts called after traitor generals from the Civil War—and in many cases, tapping into deep veins of bigotry. With this move, Pete Hegseth will henceforth labor under the presumption that he is among their number, a man unfit to lead anybody, much less the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, it is a consolation to know that this country produced C. Q. Brown—and that there are many more like him out there.