(Bloomberg) -- Brendan Demich and his team of research engineers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Pittsburgh were racing to complete a virtual reality program to help train miners on what to do in an emergency underground.
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They feared that soon, time would run out, and Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency would throw them out of work.
“You’re calling on an incredible day,” Demich said while speaking with a reporter on the phone on May 2. The night before, his group had finished a stable version of their simulator, which could teach thousands of workers how to assist each other in the event of a mine collapse, explosion or fire.
“Nobody else in the world is doing this kind of thing,” Demich said. “And it’s basically going to get shelved.”
Hours later, Demich, along with nearly everyone else at his agency, learned he was out of a job.
The fallout from DOGE’s campaign to downsize the federal workforce is continuing to unfold. After a wave of summary firings, layoffs and buyout offers, thousands of federal employees are expected to leave their jobs in the weeks ahead. Many are warning that the ways in which Musk and the Trump administration made the cutbacks are likely to lead to unintended consequences.
Following a monthslong crusade that tore at the roots of the federal bureaucracy, Musk signaled on Wednesday night that his time leading DOGE was at an end. In a post on X, the social-media platform he controls, the world’s richest person thanked President Donald Trump for the opportunity to reduce “wasteful spending,” adding that DOGE’s mission “will only strengthen over time.”
Even before entering government, Musk had a track record of reinventing his businesses through severe job cuts and cost-saving measures. His tactics echo a brand of harsh corporate capitalism that won plaudits in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jack Welch valorized layoffs as he built General Electric Co. into a conglomerate. So did Sunbeam Corp. turnaround guru Al Dunlap, whose approach earned him the nickname “Chainsaw” — the very tool Musk brandished on a stage earlier this year as he boasted about DOGE.
Just as Dunlap, who died in 2019, and Welch, who died in 2020, were lionized for improving efficiency by thinning the ranks, Musk and DOGE have demonstrated a “wish to really disembowel and downsize what the government historically has done,” said Rita McGrath, a management scholar and professor at Columbia Business School.
Yet trying to reduce headcount in the way DOGE has is likely to be costly, McGrath said. Institutional knowledge, social networks and shared sense of mission will have to be rebuilt if the government is to function, she said.
“There doesn’t seem to have been any thought at all devoted to that part,” McGrath said.
DOGE has claimed $175 billion in savings, but its “Wall of Receipts” — a list of contracts, grants and leases canceled since Inauguration Day — only accounts for 42% of that number. And DOGE’s numbers can be fuzzy: They often assume that contracts would be maxed out, they don’t include offsetting costs, and independent fact-checkers have found double-counting and data-entry errors.
In a Bloomberg interview at the Qatar Economic Forum last week, Musk walked back his pre-election claims that DOGE would cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal budget. Permanent spending reductions would depend on approval from Congress and the executive branch, he said.
“We are simply advisers,” Musk said. “In that context, we’re doing very well. We cannot take action beyond that because we’re not some sort of imperial dictator of the government. There are three branches of the government that are to some degree opposed to that level of cost savings.”
Musk has criticized the spending bill recently passed by the House, saying it increases the deficit and works against the aims of DOGE.
The Department of Health and Human Services earlier announced a “restructuring” that would see it shed 20,000 employees and largely shutter sub-agencies including NIOSH, which conducts scientific research to support workplace safety regulations and policy. The union says roughly 300 NIOSH employees have been reinstated, less than one-third of the pre-DOGE workforce, and that those changes leave the institute’s ability to fulfill its normal responsibilities effectively crippled.
The cutbacks have stopped NIOSH from carrying out basic functions such as certifying respirators used by miners and firefighters, said Demich, who is chief steward for Local 1916 of the American Federation of Government Employees union, which represents agency workers in Pittsburgh as well as Spokane, Washington. While his team left behind a working version of the mine-safety program, it wasn’t clear what its fate would be.
“To think we’re not going to be able to provide that service a month from now is devastating to the team,” Demich said. “We wanted to provide whatever we could, theoretically, before we walk out the door. We’re hoping someone sees the value and reverses this.”
Musk’s approach to DOGE has been framed by a general disregard for government work. The first “fork in the road” email encouraged federal workers to “move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” Musk has said some public workers should be replaced with artificial intelligence.
Other groups at NIOSH have also had their work all but shut down.
In Cincinnati, an agency office that does research informing safety standards and regulations for firefighters has been curtailed by executive orders and DOGE cuts. Researchers there have been trying to preserve years’ worth of data and scientific findings, said Micah Niemeier-Walsh, an industrial hygienist in the Firefighter Health Program specializing in exposures during lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle fires. She also was told May 2 that her job was being eliminated.
NIOSH scientists have been banned from presenting research at conferences and collaborating with outside experts. In February, DOGE put $1 limits on the agency’s credit cards, depriving staffers of basics like pens and paper.
“The effort to prevent us from doing our important work began months before the reductions in force started,” said Niemeier-Walsh, who is also the vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3840.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was “working hard to ensure that the critical functions under NIOSH remain intact.”
“The Trump administration is committed to supporting coal miners and firefighters, and under the Secretary’s leadership, NIOSH’s essential services will continue as HHS streamlines its operations,” she wrote in an email. “Ensuring the health and safety of our workforce remains a top priority for the Department.”
Last week, Demich and Niemeier-Walsh helped lead a union rally on the plaza outside HHS headquarters, calling on Kennedy to reverse the job cuts. “This isn’t just a staffing cut; it is an attack on millions of workers across the country,” Niemeier-Walsh said. The layoffs are “cutting the science that makes those jobs survivable.”
Among those pressing Kennedy is Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, who credited NIOSH workers with helping to prevent illnesses and deaths that have plagued workers in the industry for decades, including members of Roberts’ own family.
“I wish we had had a NIOSH in the ’60s,” he said, “and I wish it was much larger than it is now.”
In an interview, Roberts said he had spoken briefly with Kennedy, at the behest of Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, urging him to undo the reductions.
Workers from across the government said that after this year’s cutbacks, a diminished and demoralized bureaucracy was being made less productive and more vulnerable to calls to do away with it completely.
“It seems like we’re being set up to fail,” said Brittany Coleman, a civil rights attorney and union steward in Dallas whose office in the Department of Education was closed.
Coleman’s division saw its offices nationwide cut from 12 to 5. Previously, she said in an interview, workers in the unit handled about 50 cases a year. The cuts mean the remaining workforce will have to take on more than 300 cases annually.
“We were already bare-bones anyway,” Coleman said. “It’s not sustainable, long-term.”
Musk has also paid a price for making himself the face of Trump’s government overhaul. Sales of Tesla Inc. electric vehicles have suffered because of consumer ire over Musk’s DOGE activities, and this week, another SpaceX Starship rocket exploded in flight, increasing the pressure on him to get focused once again on the enterprises that built his massive wealth.
Still, workers who were turned out of their roles by DOGE said the ethos he brought to the government will remain.
“The concept of DOGE is still there, the ideas behind DOGE are still there,” said Niemeier-Walsh, the former NIOSH staffer. “It’s not going away.”
--With assistance from Gregory Korte, Nancy Cook, Joshua Green and Dana Hull.
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