President Donald Trump's hiring freeze coupled with Elon Musk's crusade to purge the government may come back to bite them, a legal analyst said Thursday.
Trump signed an executive order imposing a hiring freeze on the government. Meanwhile, Musk is identifying employees who should be removed or forced to resign.
"The Atlantic's" Tom Nichols said if empty positions cause problems, Trump has blocked himself from fixing them. most Americans simply don't fully understand how government works, he added.
"There's this goofy notion that somehow, again, as you said, people are just sitting around, watching Netflix and plodding around their homes," said Nichols. "It's such an inane approach to reducing the federal workforce, which can be reduced."
ALSO READ: 'Making America less safe': Democrats warn of disaster as Trump purges the CIA
While it's possible to reduce the federal workforce, he said there is a smarter way to do it that doesn't destabilize the government. At the same time, there were likely many federal workers aiming to retire and now they're taking the forced resignation agreements that give them extra money — costing the government more in the end, he said.
"Then you're going to have situations and agencies where people have retired in place, and you can't replace them because you don't have hiring authority because, of course, that's the point of this, is to just empty out offices," said Nichols.
Doing that takes away from agencies that many American can't live without.
"This could affect every agency from, you know, stuff that deals with nuclear weapons all the way down to, you know, whether your checks get delivered every month from the government," he said.
Host Katy Tur said that among those employees who were offered resignations included air traffic controllers at first, but after the plane crash in Washington, D.C., they were exempted.
"You don't want to keep pulling sticks out of this giant Jenga pile to start trying to figure out where the one place is where things start to come unraveled, and the whole thing falls down," said Nichols.
"It's so clunky," said Tur. "It's not done with any precision. And part of it is, you know, it's kind of like if you're going to do a takeover of a tech company. Just fire as many people, like Elon Musk did with Twitter. Just fire everybody. See what stops working, and then I can rebuild that thing and make it work again."
"The federal government isn't like a tech company. It's much more complicated and convoluted," she added.
Tur also argued many more things are at risk than if a social media page works.
"I mean, this is like, are you going to get your Social Security check?" she said.
See the discussion below or at the link here.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
