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.

During Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, repeatedly asked the soon-to-be director of national intelligence whether Edward Snowden was a traitor for releasing thousands of classified documents that revealed clandestine U.S. sources and methods. And repeatedly Gabbard declined to condemn Snowden beyond the tepid acknowledgment that he’d broken the law. Even at that, she praised him for exposing a secret program.

All nine Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, and every Republican senator except Mitch McConnell, nonetheless voted to confirm her to lead America’s 18 intelligence agencies. Among her responsibilities, she will be delivering a daily brief to the president that curates analysis of the country’s most urgent problems.

Gabbard has hardly demonstrated the judgment necessary for the task. In 2013, overwhelming evidence, including expert U.S.-intelligence analysis, showed that the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on his people. Gabbard was unwilling to believe it, perhaps because the conclusion did not accord with her preconceived ideas about the Syrian civil conflict. This is the stance of someone likely to either miss or reject warnings of emergent threats. And it’s not the only sign that the Trump administration is putting American security at risk.

Gabbard’s appointment is just one factor leading American allies, including but not limited to the “Five Eyes” states (the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in addition to the U.S.), to worry about whether they can securely share intelligence with the Trump administration. The Five Eyes extend the geographical reach of U.S. intelligence coverage and provide assessments that can increase or even usefully challenge U.S. findings. This input plays a part in calibrating the confidence that U.S. agencies have in their own conclusions. Australia’s intelligence services, for example, were the first to understand the risks that Huawei components posed for Western telecommunications networks. Their findings drove investigations in the U.S. and U.K. that led allied countries to strip Huawei hardware out of their 5G networks.  

[Shane Harris: Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system]

Without allied cooperation, Washington will soon be operating on a fraction of the insight it once had into foreign threats. And the U.S. will need that supplemental intelligence more than ever, because the Trump administration has hobbled its own premier intelligence-gathering agency by offering career-terminating buyouts to all CIA employees. Those who leave will take with them decades of experience running agents, understanding how foreign governments operate, building trust with international counterparts, and spotting meaningful anomalies.

Turning over the entire intelligence workforce will set the United States back incalculably in terms of its ability to both understand the world and act effectively against its adversaries. Consider Iran, an opaque, authoritarian foe whose powerful supreme leader is 85 years old. When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dies, events will unfold quickly on the ground: internal power struggles in Tehran, opportunistic maneuvers in the region. The U.S. government will not want to be on a learning curve at that moment—it will need experienced hands who can penetrate, analyze, and influence developments in real time. Instead the Trump administration is choosing to put the United States at a deficit.

The same is true in the global influence stakes. U.S. adversaries, including Russia and China, are engaged in information operations that actively seek to polarize and inflame American society. The new U.S. administration appears to be ceding that ground to them. The State Department office that combats foreign state-sponsored disinformation had already closed. Now the Department of Homeland Security has put staff members who work on foreign influence operations on administrative leave. The FBI has closed its foreign influence task force. The National Security Agency will likely be next: Gabbard has evinced both a flawed understanding of its governing legislation and a deep suspicion that the agency endangers civil liberties. But hostile governments will be the ones endangering America’s civil liberties, and manipulating its public discourse, if the U.S. allows them to participate unrestrainedly in its domestic political space.

America’s foes are surely observing the chaos in Washington and looking for espionage opportunities. They will find them. Four weeks into Donald Trump’s new administration, lax security practices have created all manner of risk. The CIA has provided employee data on unsecured systems. Staff members from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downloading onto private servers information that foreign governments would pay dearly for (or use other espionage techniques to obtain). DOGE is apparently cavalier about exposing American citizens to danger—and about the government’s duty of care in protecting the identities of those who protect the country. The Bureau of Fiscal Services recommends that DOGE’s access to Treasury’s payments system be monitored as an insider threat.

[Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

This administration is still in its early days. The courts or Congress could reassert their constitutional prerogatives and slow or stop some of these actions. But the upheaval that has already occurred in the departments responsible for national security, together with the deficiencies of judgment displayed by some of the president’s Cabinet appointees, has already made America more vulnerable and less equipped to understand the threats it faces.

The Onion has headlined a satirical article “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.” Americans will be lucky if that’s all their adversaries do.

Today The Atlantic is announcing the hires of Nick Miroff and Isaac Stanley-Becker as staff writers, and Alex Hoyt as a senior editor. Nick and Isaac both join The Atlantic from The Washington Post: Nick covering immigration and the Department of Homeland Security, and Isaac reporting on politics, migration, and national security.

Below is the full announcement about these hires from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

I’m writing today to share the excellent news that Nick Miroff, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Alex Hoyt are joining The Atlantic—Nick and Isaac as staff writers; Alex as a senior editor. All three are immensely talented journalists operating at the top of their game.

First, Nick: Nick is one of America’s foremost reporters on immigration and knows more about the innermost workings of the Department of Homeland Security than, quite possibly, the department itself. Nick comes to us from The Washington Post, where he spent 18 years as a reporter covering Latin America, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and DHS. He spent seven years as the paper’s Latin America correspondent, based in Havana and Mexico City. He was also part of the Post team whose coverage of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech won a Pulitzer Prize. I am very happy that he has agreed to join us, and to cover immigration, at so crucial a moment in American history.

Next, Isaac: Isaac is a fantastically talented reporter and a natural magazine writer. He also comes to us from The Washington Post, where he has covered an impressive range of stories across politics, immigration, and national security with a focus on holding powerful people and institutions to account. His reporting has taken him to German border towns, where he tracked the international spread of conspiracy theories, as well as to the Arizona desert, where he revealed how a Saudi-owned company pumped unlimited supplies of the state’s groundwater to grow alfalfa as feed for dairy cows in Riyadh. He was twice part of teams that won the Pulitzer Prize—in 2022 for coverage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and in 2024 for documenting the role of the AR-15 in American life. Isaac holds a Ph.D. in history from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His first book, Europe Without Borders: A History, was published last month.

Finally, Alex: Alex is an extremely skilled editor who brings great literary expertise, a genuine love of magazines, and a keen eye for what makes a distinctive feature. He was most recently an editor at GQ, where he worked on profiles, essays, and reported features. Previously he was the editor in chief of Amtrak’s The National magazine, where he brought the writing of contributors including Jacqueline Woodson, Lois Lowry, and Leslie Jamison to millions of train passengers across America. Alex is actually returning to us; he started his career as an Atlantic fellow in 2010. We’re very glad to welcome him back to the team after his journalistic peregrinations.

Please join me in welcoming them to The Atlantic.

Best wishes,

Jeff

The Atlantic announced a number of new hires at the start of the year, including managing editor Griff Witte; staff writers Caity Weaver, Ashley Parker, and Michael Scherer; and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

The extraordinary evolution of American leadership over the past decade can be grasped from just two moments. In 2016, Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lectured Donald Trump, then an upstart presidential candidate, on the Middle East. “The Palestinians are not a real-estate deal, Donald,” Rubio quipped during a primary debate on CNN. “With your thinking,” Trump retorted, “you will never bring peace.” Turning to the audience, Rubio got in a last word: “Donald might be able to build condos in the Palestinian areas, but this is not a real-estate deal.”

On Wednesday, President Trump sat alongside the king of Jordan and reiterated his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza from its inhabitants and rebuild the area. “We’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it,” he said. “It’s fronting on the sea. It’s going to be a great economic-development job.” Sitting on Trump’s left was Rubio, the secretary of state tasked with carrying out the plan he’d once publicly derided. In the span of 10 years, U.S. foreign policy had transformed from the domain of expert-brokered consensus to the province of personality-driven populism.

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

In his first term, Trump could be dismissed as an accident of the Electoral College, someone to be humored domestically and internationally before the resumption of traditional elite-managed American governance. Today, with Trump returned to office and a host of like-minded leaders ascendant around the globe, he looks less like an aberration from the old international order and more like the apotheosis of a new one. But what will that new order look like? The past few weeks, during which Trump has hosted multiple leaders from the Middle East, rattled sabers with traditional American allies, and proposed his radical plan for Gaza, provide some early clues.

A new era of American empire

While Trump was out of office, a mythology arose that cast him as not simply a dissenter from military misadventures abroad, but a fundamentally anti-war figure dedicated to American restraint. Promulgated by prominent commentators such as the right-wing pugilist Tucker Carlson and the libertarian gadfly Glenn Greenwald, this narrative helped Trump present himself as the “peace candidate” to a war-weary electorate. “Why do they hate Trump so much?” asked the John Jay College professor Christian Parenti in an influential essay. “To the frustration of those who benefit from it, Trump worked to unwind the American empire. Indeed, he has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.”

In reality, Trump supported the Iraq War before he turned against it, failed to pull out of Afghanistan during his first term, and escalated American arms sales and drone strikes in the Middle East while in power. Since returning to the White House, he has governed not as a neo-isolationist, but almost as a neo-imperialist, calling for the United States to “get Greenland,” musing about making Canada the 51st state, and demanding that America take over Gaza. He has also fast-tracked arms sales to Israel and likely soon to other states in the Middle East, while his border czar recently threatened military action in Mexico. Trump’s team has signaled its desire to wind down the war in Ukraine, in accordance with the preferences of most Republican voters. But otherwise, “Donald the Dove,” as the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once dubbed him, has once again failed to report for duty.

[Read: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

On balance, Trump’s personnel choices align with this aggressive posture. The small but capable neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party and its leftist sympathizers can fairly point to Vice President J. D. Vance and several notable hires in the Pentagon as fellow travelers. But those calling the shots at the top are far more hawkish—Trump, Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—and the administration’s policy to date has largely reflected their inclinations.

A Middle East policy that includes the Palestinians, but not the Palestinian national cause

Trump’s first administration famously brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf Arab states without including the Palestinians in the process. The success of this endeavor disproved decades of conventional wisdom that Israeli normalization in the region would not happen without a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians. For a time, the momentum of the Abraham Accords looked as though it would carry all the way through to an Israeli agreement with Saudi Arabia, leaving the Palestinians in the cold.

After October 7 and the ensuing brutal war in Gaza, however, the Palestinians can no longer be sidelined from the discussion. Trump has responded to this new reality by attempting to include them in his diplomacy while sidelining their aspirations for statehood. He has downplayed the prospect of a two-state solution and, with his Gaz-a-Lago proposal, called for millions of Palestinians to leave the decimated Strip in favor of “beautiful communities” in third-party countries “away from … all the danger.” Speaking to Fox News, Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff made the logic behind this thinking explicit. “Peace in the region means a better life for the Palestinians,” he said. “A better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you are in today. A better life is about better opportunity, better financial conditions, better aspirations for you and your family. That doesn’t occur because you get to pitch a tent in the Gaza Strip and you’re surrounded by 30,000 munitions that could go off at any moment.”

Trump is not wrong that Gaza is a “demolition site” and that its people desperately need something better than the decades of war they’ve experienced while caught between Hamas and Israel. And contrary to the claims of many activists, the preferences of the Palestinian people are not always congruent with the demands of Palestinian nationalism. If given the chance, many Gazans would jump at the opportunity to escape the trap they find themselves in, even if it means moving abroad. But to address Palestinian material needs without regard to their historical and national ones is to bracket a core component of Palestinian identity and ignore what makes their conflict with Israel so intractable. Perhaps Trump’s gambit will once again confound the experts with its outcome. But for now, his policy seems more like an answer provided by someone who failed to read the entire question.

The eclipse of the rules-based international order

For decades, American foreign policy has been guided by the assumption that the United States is the benevolent shepherd of a global system, underwriting international security and trade through positive-sum alliances and international institutions. “We’ll lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” President Joe Biden declared in his 2020 inaugural address. “We’ll be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security.”

Arguably no concept was invoked more frequently by his foreign-policy team than the “rules-based international order,” the notion that there ought to be evenly applied standards for all state actors. Like most ideals, this one was often observed in the breach, with critics regularly pointing to perceived American hypocrisy, most recently in Gaza.

But the postwar order has been under severe strain for some time. Russia, a revisionist power, flouted it with an expansionist assault against neighboring Georgia back in 2008, resulting in little pushback and ultimately leading to the war on Ukraine. China, a rising power, subverted Hong Kong, menaced Taiwan, and sterilized Uyghur Muslims in camps, all while the liberal international order effectively shrugged and made its next purchase from Temu. Even those who purported to venerate the rules-based order regularly made a mockery of it. The United Nations, the avatar of internationalism, stood by haplessly as all of these events unfolded—that is, when it wasn’t actively abetting them, as when the members of its human-rights council rejected debate over China’s treatment of the Uyghurs. South Africa took Israel to The Hague over the war in Gaza, while simultaneously backing Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

Trump, by contrast, has never felt constrained by such ideals in the first place, having long preferred power over pieties. He has expressed admiration for dictators, used American muscle to extract concessions even from allies, and dismissed the protests against his approach from bureaucrats, nongovernmental organizations, and international institutions as the grumblings of the “deep state.” With Trump’s return to Washington, critics of the flawed U.S.-led rules-based order are discovering what a world without it looks like.

Freed from the need to justify his actions in traditional terms, the president has enacted policies no predecessor would have countenanced while moving to purge any internal dissenters. He has dismantled USAID, putting desperately needed American assistance around the world in jeopardy, including George W. Bush’s anti–HIV/AIDS program, PEPFAR; proposed relocating Gazans from their land, feeding far-right dreams of ethnic cleansing; and sanctioned the International Criminal Court.

[Read: The cruel attack on USAID]

Whether one considered the rules-based order a faulty but essential engine of collective prosperity or a sclerotic hypocritical holdover from another era, it now appears to be in decline. Trump is transitioning the old order to a new regime remade in his image—one where statecraft is entirely transactional and the strong, not international lawyers, write the rules. After all, how many divisions does the United Nations command?

Yesterday, during Trump’s meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, he was asked “under what authority” he was permitted to take the “sovereign territory” of Gaza. The president responded: “U.S. authority.” In the Trump World Order, no more explanation was required.

60,000 people demonstrated in Brussels against the new Belgian government's policies which affect pension reform, unemployment and hospital funding.

It took the Trump administration—and, really, Elon Musk—all of 10 days to dismantle USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. On January 24, a memo from the State Department ordered virtually every foreign-assistance program funded by the United States government to halt work for 90 days. Four days later, the State Department said that lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue, and that special waivers could be granted to select programs. Nevertheless, soup kitchens stopped handing out food, clinics suspended care, and truckers paid through aid programs stopped delivering medicine.

Then came the purge. Early yesterday morning, the Department of Government Efficiency, a Musk-led group that has been announcing what stays and goes in Washington, told employees not to come to work. Musk posted on X an hour later, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” More than 1,000 employees—including some in war zones—were locked out of their work accounts. Earlier today, Politico reported that nearly all of USAID’s Washington-based staff will soon be placed on leave, and ABC News reported that staff on foreign assignments are being evacuated.

USAID, which has distributed aid to hundreds of millions of people around the world for 60 years, estimates that it has extended children’s life expectancies by six years in many of the countries it works in. But its $40 billion in annual spending—about 0.7 percent of the U.S. budget—has been criticized for inefficiencies, and many Americans accuse the government of spending too much on foreign aid. Some of those critiques are arguably fair. In 2022, for example, USAID spent more than $100,000 on theatrical productions in Ireland and Colombia. (That said, Americans also tend to drastically overestimate the amount we spend on foreign aid.) USAID was established by Congress as an independent agency, and by law, only Congress can dissolve it. The White House, though, seems determined to do away with it as an independent agency; yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he is now the acting head of USAID. If the agency is successfully subsumed by the State Department, it could, in theory, continue in a slightly diminished form—or be totally gutted. When reached for comment, a State Department spokesperson referred me to Rubio’s recent statements to the media. One of them read: “USAID may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law.”

So far, the administration has framed the foreign-aid pause as temporary. But even if much of USAID’s work is allowed to resume in a few months, the intricate global-health ecosystem being torn apart will not be easily repaired. Famine and disease—two of the issues against which USAID has made the most progress—don’t stop when funding does, and can spread disastrously in even a short window. Prior to the stop-work order, at least 220,000 people worldwide got their HIV medication every day at clinics supported by the U.S. government. Juli Duvall-Jones, who oversees an HIV clinic in eastern Ivory Coast, told me that the pregnant women her clinic serves are no longer receiving their daily treatment, meaning that some children will almost certainly contract HIV during birth or through breastfeeding. People who are exposed to HIV have only 72 hours—less than the amount of time many clinics have now been closed—to begin a medication regimen called post-exposure prophylaxis that can help prevent infection. A pause of any length in USAID-funded anti-HIV efforts will cause more people to contract the disease. Missing doses of treatment can make it less effective. Without treatment, the disease kills young people in about 12 years, and older adults even faster.

[Read: Melinda Gates on why foreign aid still matters]

The head of one aid group, who, like several aid workers I spoke with, asked that neither she nor the group be named for fear of permanently losing their USAID funding, told me that her organization—which, among other projects, treats severely malnourished children and babies in Sudan—is now scraping by on money diverted from other projects. Most aid efforts operate on extremely thin margins, so any pause in funding is felt almost immediately. “We can sort of keep it going for a few days,” she said. But once the money runs out, these children will lose the supplemental oxygen, fortified foods, and 24/7 medical supervision they need. Many, she said, will die in two to six hours.

As the 90-day pause drags on, longer-term consequences will start to become clear. In Uganda, the national government has stopped spraying insecticide and distributing bed nets to pregnant women and young kids; during the country’s next rainy season, which spans from March to May, malaria cases and deaths may spike. The Center for Victims of Torture, a global nonprofit, has furloughed most of its staff and stopped rehabilitation programs in Jordan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, including one for women among the estimated 100,000 raped in a recent war in Tigray, Ethiopia. Scott Roehm, CVT’s director of global policy and advocacy, told me that many of the center’s clients attempted suicide prior to getting help. He fears what will happen to people who have to stop their treatment—and those who never get help at all.

Right now, it seems unlikely that all or even most of USAID’s programs will resume at the end of April. Yesterday, Donald Trump said Ukraine should give America its lithium in exchange for aid, suggesting that programs that don’t give the U.S. an immediate win may be cut for good. The longer the pause lasts, the more devastating the effects will be, not just for aid recipients but also for Americans. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a monitoring tool funded by USAID, has been offline since Friday. Without it, aid workers may struggle to intervene early enough to prevent mass starvation, and farmers have lost a major tool for anticipating agricultural shocks. Michael VanRooyen, an emergency physician who has led humanitarian work in Darfur, Rwanda, and Ukraine, estimates that an extended pause in food aid could kill hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children. USAID workers leading the agency’s response to an active Ebola outbreak in Uganda were among those locked out of work systems. Without their involvement, the U.S. could miss signs that the outbreak is growing or changing—or even that a new pandemic is brewing.

Democratic lawmakers have started pushing back on the demolition of USAID. Yesterday, Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, said in a statement that “dismantling USAID is illegal and makes us less safe,” and placed a blanket hold on nominees for State Department positions until USAID is back up and running.

[Read: The constitutional crisis is here]

But if the agency is restored—next week, next month, or years from now—restarting its work won’t be as simple as turning the flow of cash back on. After the week USAID has had, staff might be hard to come by. According to one group of development workers tracking the fallout, the aid freeze has caused nearly 9,000 Americans and far more people around the world to lose their jobs. Many may decide to pursue work outside the humanitarian sector, which typically offers low pay and benefits. Even if the pause ends quickly, the federal government has given workers little incentive to return. Musk has called USAID “a criminal organization,” “a ball of worms,” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

Whoever does come back to work will need to get back in touch with the people who lead local organizations (many of which have or will have gone defunct), the world leaders with whom they once partnered, and the people who shuttle supplies around the world. Susan Reichle, a foreign-assistance expert who served in every presidential administration from George H. W. Bush’s to Trump’s first term, told me that the pause has already broken trust that could take years to repair. “USAID staff are having to meet with ministers of health, ministers of power, ministers of education” to tell them that work has stopped, Reichle said. “And they can’t tell them if or when those partnerships will ever continue.”

Having a measured, humane debate about the way the U.S. distributes humanitarian aid is possible. It is in the country’s interest to spend aid money effectively. And the way the United States distributes global aid could certainly be improved. But the instant retraction of much of the world’s food and health-care infrastructure will create damage that cannot be undone. After three months, “many of those people will be dead, or so severely harmed and malnourished that it causes them irreversible and deep suffering,” Lawrence Gostin, the faculty director of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me. A pause on saving lives means exactly that.

The U.S. federal government manages a larger portfolio of risks than any other institution in the history of the world. In just the past few weeks, wildfires raged across Southern California, a commercial flight crashed over the Potomac, a powerful Chinese-developed AI model launched to great fanfare, the nuclear-weapons Doomsday Clock reached its closest point ever to midnight, a new strain of avian flu continued its spread across the globe, and interest rates on long-term government bonds surged—a sign that investors are worried about America’s fiscal future. The responsibility of managing such risks is suffused throughout the federal bureaucracy; agencies are dedicated to preparing for financial crises, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and all manner of other potential calamities.

When one of those far-off risks became a real-life pandemic in the final year of Donald Trump’s first term, this sprawling bureaucracy, staffed mostly by career civil servants with area-specific expertise, helped limit the damage, often despite Trump’s own negligence and attempts to interfere. This time, things may turn out differently. Trump is committed to dismantling the federal bureaucracy as we know it—and, with it, the government’s capacity to handle the next crisis. Like an individual who chooses to forgo health or fire insurance, most Americans won’t feel the negative impact of this effort as long as everything in the world runs smoothly. What happens when the next crisis strikes is another story altogether.  

No country was fully prepared for what became one of the deadliest pandemics in history, but it is hard to think of a leader who handled COVID more poorly than Trump. He spent the crucial weeks leading up to the outbreak downplaying the severity of the virus, at one point referring to it as the Democrats’ “new hoax.” His administration never developed a national plan for getting the virus under control and reopening the economy, leaving the states to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, the president undermined his own public-health agencies at every turn, telling states to “LIBERATE” their economies, refusing to wear a mask, and, at one point, suggesting bleach injections as a potential therapeutic. A February 2021 analysis by The Lancet, a British medical journal, found that the U.S. could have avoided 40 percent of the deaths that occurred under Trump’s watch if its death rate had matched the average among America’s peer countries.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

The administration’s pandemic response did include one shining success: Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership that produced and distributed high-quality vaccines in record time, saving countless lives. But that triumph is the exception that proves the rule. The idea for the program came from Robert Kadlec, an assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Peter Marks, an FDA official—two seasoned public-health experts who had served in top government roles for years beforeTrump took office. The project was then championed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, who had been appointed by Trump after working off and on for the department since 2001; managed by Gustave Perna, a four-star general who had served in the military for more than 40 years; and staffed by bureaucrats with decades of public-health experience. (This success story has, of course, become distasteful to mention on the right, because it involves vaccines.)

These are exactly the sorts of experienced public servants whom Trump is trying to push out of government. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order known as Schedule F; if upheld in court, it will give him expansive new power to unilaterally fire federal employees. In the meantime, his administration is finding creative ways to begin its purge of the federal government. Last week, the administration “reassigned” at least 20 career lawyers at the Department of Justice, allowing them to be sidelined without being officially fired; sent home 160 members of the National Security Council; and offered the remaining 2 million federal employees an ultimatum: Resign voluntarily and receive a severance package, or stay and risk being fired at some point in the future. As Axios reports, the White House expects 5 to 10 percent of the federal work force to take the buyout. Those bureaucrats who remain will, by and large, be reporting to Trump loyalists.

If Trump’s plan succeeds, the inevitable result will be a government that finds itself hamstrung in the face of the kinds of risks that it is designed to manage. (Almost unbelievably, Trump has also floated the idea of abolishing FEMA.) Imagine how much worse the pandemic would have been if Kadlec and Marks, the architects of Operation Warp Speed, had been pushed out of government before March 2020. Imagine if Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, had been in charge of the nation’s public-health apparatus, and surrounded not by scientific experts but by hard-core Trumpists. How many more Americans would have died?

For now, that question is a thought experiment. Soon, it might not be. In recent weeks, public-health officials have begun warning about the rapid spread of a new variant of the H5N1 virus, also known as bird flu, which infected 67 Americans last year and appears to be becoming more transmissible. Rather, officials were warning about it; last week, the Trump administration instructed federal health officials to temporarily halt all public communications, including reports about the escalating H5N1 crisis, “as the new Administration considers its plan for managing federal policy and public communications.” Kennedy has already cast doubt on the safety of H5N1 vaccines and implied that the virus itself was partly a creation of the U.S. government.

[Kristen V. Brown: Trump has created health-care chaos]

Pandemics are only one example of a broad swath of risks facing America today. Tensions between the U.S. and China are high, the AI arms race is well under way, wars have broken out across the globe, and climate-change-fueled natural disasters have become ever more common. None of this means that a major crisis will inevitably strike next week, or even over the next four years. But Trump’s actions make that possibility far more likely, including by exposing the country to risks that might have previously seemed arcane. On Thursday, the U.S. experienced its first fatal crash of an American airliner in 16 years. This was barely a week after the Trump administration dissolved the federal Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a body that advises the Transportation Security Administration on airline safety, and fired the head of the TSA, whom Trump himself had appointed during his first term. As the aviator and Atlantic contributor James Fallows points out, dismantling the board was likely not directly responsible for the crash, but it represents “the thoughtless destruction of the taken-for-granted institutions that have made modern aviation as safe as it is.” Trump, meanwhile, in a moment that revealed how he might respond to future crises, immediately began blaming the incident on a push for DEI initiatives within the Federal Aviation Administration.

In a crowded field, this might be the most alarming aspect of Trump’s second term. At first, most people won’t notice an agency gutted here or a program slashed there. But those cuts will make disaster more likely, and when that disaster strikes—whether during Trump’s presidency or his successor’s—the government will be far less capable of handling it. What we don’t know is how bad that crisis will be, and whether Trump will still be in office to face the consequences.