Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Elon Musk is targeting federal agencies, slashing workforces, and crippling programs that support millions of people around the world. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic join to discuss how Musk and President Donald Trump are carrying out plans to purge thousands of employees from the federal government.

This week the Trump administration dismantled USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. “USAID has the thought leadership, the technical ability, to run aid programs at a large scale that nobody else has,” Anne Applebaum said last night. Removing the agency “means probably the collapse of food-aid programs across Africa, probably the collapse of aid to help refugees. USAID runs vaccination programs for children all over the world; it will mean children will not get polio vaccines.”

The takedown of USAID may also have an effect on the ongoing war in Ukraine, Applebaum explained. The agency has a role in restarting the Ukrainian energy grid, as well as in helping provide seeds and technology to Ukrainian farmers. “USAID thinks not only in terms of humanitarian aid, it also thinks more broadly about economics,” she continued. “Ukraine plays a big role in world food production; they want Ukrainian farmers to be back working.”

With Musk leading the takedown of USAID, “it’s a test case for ‘Can agencies just be abolished without Congress having any say?’ but it’s also a test case in cruelty,” Applebaum said. “Are Americans willing to accept a high level of cruelty and death just on the president’s whim?”

Meanwhile, pushback among Democrats has been limited. “Democratic strategists are warning [the party] not to make this their issue because Democrats have to be saying ‘We’re making your lives better, voters,’” Michael Scherer said last night. “If they’re seen as the party of defending a bureaucracy both [that] people don’t know about [and] that helps people very far away, they’re way off their message of eggs and butter.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Eugene Daniels, the chief Playbook and White House correspondent for Politico; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News; and Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Darren Beattie may not be a household name, but you are almost certainly familiar with his long-standing ideas and preoccupations. Beattie, a speechwriter whom Trump fired in 2018 and appointed to a top State Department job this week, is a fixture in far-right conspiracist circles.

Over the years, Beattie has reportedly spoken alongside white nationalists, alleged that the FBI orchestrated January 6—his preferred term is Fedsurrection—and repeatedly posted online that various Black personalities and politicians should “take a KNEE to MAGA.” In his new role as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, he will help shape the tone of America’s public messaging abroad, oversee “the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Global Public Affairs,” and participate “in foreign policy development,” according to the State Department’s website.

Beattie’s ascent is another sign that the new administration has no interest in catering to norms established by its critics or perceived political foes. What was a scandal in Trump’s first term is grounds for a promotion in his second. Beattie’s 2018 firing came after CNN reported that he had spoken at the 2016 H. L. Mencken Club, an event whose attendees have included prominent white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Peter Brimelow. Beattie then launched Revolver News, a right-wing website that trumpeted his appointment and described him as “a relentless force in exposing the left’s DEI agenda, their censorship schemes, and the J6 entrapment operation.”

Many of the site’s articles are standard conservative fare: attacks on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats alongside criticism of powerful technology companies that purportedly censor the right, including Revolver itself. Other content on the site veers sharply into conspiracism: It often posts external links to content from the likes of Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonym of the pro-authoritarianism writer Costin Alamariu, who has posited that “Black Africans” are so genetically ”divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries,” and Steve Sailer, another prominent booster of pseudoscientific racism. Beattie has also used Revolver as a platform to advance his nationalist views, including pushing for mass deportation and “America-first trade policy.”

[From the September 2023 issue: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Beattie is a “well-regarded” and “beloved” figure in Trump world, as Semafor and Politico describe him, respectively. (Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson both praised Beattie in text messages to Semafor’s Ben Smith.) His appointment will likely be seen as a win for the nationalist wing of the Republican Party, which has been fighting against tech-right figures including Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sacks for influence in the Trump administration. While the tech-right and nationalists have been aligned in many areas, they vocally diverged on H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants in a very public internet fight in December. More recently, as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer reported, Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE, the team he leads within the Trump administration. Bannon, who sits squarely in the populist-nationalist camp and is friends with Beattie, has aggressively criticized Musk and other tech elites and said publicly that he wants to impede their influence.

True adherents to the nationalist-populist wing of MAGA are almost nonexistent in Trump’s Cabinet. For as long as he is in his acting role in the State Department, however, Beattie joins a small but powerful group of nationalist Trump appointees. The immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller, who is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and his fellow conservative intellectual Michael Anton, who is also at the State Department, are among this cohort.

The ascendant intellectual wing of the nationalist right will be particularly pleased with Beattie’s appointment. Prior to his time in the Trump administration, Beattie received a Ph.D. in political theory from Duke University, where he wrote his dissertation on the prominent German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and he has contributed to The New Atlantis, a publication with a reputation among the right for its rigorous critiques of technology.

If nothing else, Beattie’s eccentricities—buttoned-up intellectualism on one hand, crude and offensive polemic on the other—demonstrate one underlying truth of Trump world: It’s a big tent. Kiss the ring, and you may just be welcomed back.

This afternoon, FBI personnel braced for a retaliatory purge of the nation’s premiere law-enforcement agency, as President Donald Trump appeared ready to fire potentially hundreds of agents and officials who’d participated in investigations that led to criminal charges against him.

A team that investigated Trump’s mishandling of classified documents was expected to be fired, four people familiar with the matter said. Trump has long fumed about that investigation, which involved a raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate that turned up hundreds of classified documents he had taken after he left the White House four years ago.

David Sundberg, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, is also being fired, these people added. Sundberg is a career FBI agent with more than two decades of experience, and he oversees some of the bureau’s most sensitive cases related to national security and counterintelligence. Current and former officials told me they are worried that those investigations could stall, at least temporarily, if a large number of agents are suddenly removed. A spokesperson at the Washington Field Office declined to comment.

Trump’s retribution is not limited to those who investigated him personally. Administration officials are reviewing records to identify FBI personnel who participated in investigations of the January 6 assault on the Capitol by his supporters, people familiar with the matter told me. That could potentially involve hundreds if not thousands of agents, including those who interviewed and investigated rioters who were later prosecuted. Shortly after taking office, Trump pardoned about 1,500 of the rioters and commuted others’ sentences.

There is no precedent for the mass termination of FBI personnel in this fashion. Current and former officials I spoke with had expected Trump to exact retribution for what he sees as unjust and even illegal efforts by the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate his conduct. But they were stunned by the scale of Trump’s anticipated purge, which is taking aim at senior leaders as well as working-level agents who do not set policy but follow the orders of their superiors.

[Read: Trump’s ‘deep state’ revenge]

This afternoon, some FBI personnel frantically traded messages and rumors about others believed to be on Trump’s list, including special agents who run field offices across the country and were also involved in investigations of the former president.

Trump’s efforts to root out his supposed enemies might not withstand a legal challenge. FBI agents do not choose the cases assigned to them, and they are protected by civil-service rules. The FBI Agents Association, a nonprofit organization that is not part of the U.S. government, said in a statement that the reports of Trump’s planned purge are “outrageous” and “fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI Agents.”

The mass firings could imperil the nomination of Kash Patel, whom Trump wants to run the FBI in his administration. Just yesterday, Patel had assured senators during his confirmation hearing that the very kinds of politically motivated firings that appear to be in motion would not happen.

“All FBI employees will be protected against political retribution,” Patel told lawmakers. “Every FBI employee will be held to the absolute same standard, and no one will be terminated for case assignments.”

Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee to run the Justice Department, had likewise assured senators during her own hearing that government personnel would not be subject to political retaliation for doing their job.

Since taking office two weeks ago, Trump has issued executive orders aimed at his perceived enemies, including former intelligence officials. And he has pledged to end what he calls the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement. How exactly he plans to do that, and the degree to which his own self-interest informs his definition of weaponization, is now becoming clearer.

Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer contributed reporting to this article.