(End of the American Dream)—The largest and most bloated bureaucracy in the history of the world has been thrown into a state of complete and utter chaos. I have no idea how all of this is going to end, but it sure is entertaining to watch. President Trump is firing people left and right, and Elon Musk is storming around Washington D.C. like a bull in a china shop. I think that the words “shock and awe” don’t even begin to describe what we are witnessing. Nobody has ever dared to go into these ultra-powerful government agencies and start turning the tables over.
When I decided to write this article, I was feeling quite overwhelmed, because there is just so much going on right now. This is going to be a very long article, and I will take it one step at a time. With all that being said, let’s take a look at some of the highlights…
The U.S. Treasury
If you want to understand what is really going on in any organization, you need to follow the flow of money.
So Elon Musk has been wanting access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted him that access on Friday…
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to three people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.
After getting in, Musk discovered that payment approval officers at the U.S. Treasury were simply rubber-stamping all payment requests that were submitted to them…
The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
Not even once.
Can you imagine having that job?
You get paid six figures to simply approve every single payment request that comes to you.
That literally sounds like one of the cushiest jobs in America.
Every single year, more than 6 trillion dollars is disbursed through the U.S. Treasury’s payment system…
The sensitive systems, run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually. Tens of millions of people across the country rely on the systems. They are responsible for paying Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
Typically, only a small group of career employees control the payment systems, and former officials have said it is extremely unusual for anyone connected to political appointees to access them.
In a typical year, over one billion payments are made by the U.S. Treasury, and not a single one was ever being denied.
Hopefully Musk and his team will be able to set up a system that will filter out fraud, theft and corruption.
If they are able to do so, I imagine that the savings will be substantial.
OPM
The Office of Personnel Management is the largest HR department on the entire globe.
For a moment, I would like for you to imagine a bureaucratic nightmare in which thousands of “Karens” are running around making insane workforce policies for the entire government.
That is essentially what the Office of Personnel Management is.
Literally one of the very first things that Musk and his team did on January 20th was to take command of the Office of Personnel Management…
“A team including current and former employees of Musk assumed command of OPM on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office. They have moved sofa beds onto the fifth floor of the agency’s headquarters, which contains the director’s office and can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort, one of the OPM employees said…. The sofa beds have been installed so the team can work around the clock, the employee said.”
This was a brilliant move.
The employee data that the Office of Personnel Management has in their systems will be extremely helpful as Trump and Musk decide who they want to keep and who they want to terminate.
In order to keep current OPM employees from sabotaging those efforts, Musk and his team have decided to lock those employees out of those systems…
Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
We are being told that workers at OPM look like they have seen a ghost, and now it appears that Trump is preparing to dramatically reduce the size of their workforce…
Trump administration officials are taking major steps to cut down the size of the workforce and federal programs at the Office of Personnel Management.
During an internal meeting Friday morning, Trump administration officials directed OPM senior career staff to begin making plans to cut the agency’s workforce and programs by 70%. Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting confirmed the details of the meeting to Federal News Network.
Sources who provided information to Federal News Network on the condition of anonymity said the political leadership at the agency also directed OPM leaders to stop work on anything that is not statutorily required.
USAID
There are very few government agencies that are more corrupt than USAID.
And that is saying a lot.
When officials from Musk’s team went over to USAID headquarters, they were physically prevented from entering.
In response, the representatives from Musk’s team “threatened to call US Marshals to be allowed access”…
Two top security officials at the US Agency for International Development were put on administrative leave Saturday night after attempting to refuse officials from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access systems at the agency, even after DOGE personnel threatened to call law enforcement, multiple sources familiar told CNN.
According to sources, personnel from the Musk-created office physically tried to access the USAID headquarters in Washington, DC, and were stopped. The DOGE personnel demanded to be let in and threatened to call US Marshals to be allowed access, two of the sources said.
The DOGE personnel wanted to gain access to USAID security systems and personnel files, three sources said. Two of those sources also said the DOGE personnel wanted access to classified information, which only those with security clearances and a specific need to know are able to access.
In the end, Musk’s team won. If you go to USAID’s website now, you will find that it has been shut down…
The website of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) went offline Saturday evening amid reports that the Trump administration was preparing to curtail USAID’s independence by placing it under the direct oversight of the State Department.
An error message on USAID’s website read: “This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in www.usaid.gov. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.”
USAID’s X account was also taken offline.
Many of the worst examples of government waste come from USAID.
They have been getting tens of billions of dollars of government funding per year, and that has allowed them to “play Santa Claus to the world”…
Not only is USAID paying for stupidity like sending condoms to the Taliban, along with all manner of money poured out overseas, but their 2025 budget request is asking for $42.8 billion. That’s a “B” followed by an “illion.” That’s a lot of American taxpayers’ dollars to let USAID play Santa Claus to the world. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, we can’t afford it. We’re broke. Our national debt situation is untenable, we may well be past the point of no return, and we can’t keep paying for things like condoms for terrorists anymore.
In addition, lavishing USAID with so much money has also been very good for the Democratic Party.
On his Twitter account, Robby Starbuck detailed how this works…
USAID essentially functions as one of many money laundering machines for Democrats in DC. Here’s how it works:
• Activists create obscure NGO
• Dems fund it lavishly
• NGO does bare minimum (or actively hurts the United States)
• Activists get paid and donate to DemsNot only that but USAID helped spread their gender ideology nonsense and brought millions of illegals into our country.
That’s why Democrats are freaking out about the possibility that USAID’s being shut down by President Trump. It needs to be done.
There are rumors that President Trump has decided to bring USAID under the authority of the State Department and that it will no longer be independent.
I think that is a great idea.
The EPA
It appears that the EPA could soon be getting a lot smaller.
Last week, over 1,000 EPA employees were notified that “they were deemed to be on probationary status” and could soon be fired…
More than 1,100 employees at the Environmental Protection Agency received notice this week that they were deemed to be on probationary status and warning they could be fired immediately, according to an email obtained by CNN.
Probationary employees receiving the email have been working at the agency for less than a year. The emails began to go out late on Wednesday afternoon, according to an EPA union official.
The same message will be sent to other agency workforces, a White House official said. Across the US government, the latest data shows there are more than 220,000 employees on probation.
The FBI
Everyone knew that big changes were going to happen at the FBI.
And now those changes have begun.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that “at least eight senior FBI executives” were being terminated…
A top Justice Department official on Friday ordered the firing of at least eight senior FBI executives and a sweeping examination of the work of thousands of other bureau employees, including all those who worked on investigations tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
The directive from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said those field agents and FBI support staff could face “additional personnel action,” suggesting that the number of firings could swell in the coming weeks.
I was stunned to hear that, but the purge at the FBI certainly didn’t stop there.
An NBC News reporter named Ken Dilanian later reported that “more than 20 heads of FBI field offices” were being let go…
Ken Dilanian with NBC News reported that a number of the FBI’s “top executives” were told they would be out of a job by Monday. Friday, Dilanian reported a “purge” was underway that could see the heads of up to 20 of the FBI’s 55 field offices relieved.
Dilanian reported, “The purge is bigger than first understood, we are told, and includes more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including the ones in Miami and Washington, DC.”
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Apparently a total of 88 agents and managers were literally “walked out of their offices” on Friday…
88 is the number of FBI agents and top managers who ACTUALLY were walked out of their offices today, including those at the Washington Field Office, Palm Beach, and Miami FBI offices. That number also includes special agents in charge of various field offices around the country.
Of course what we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
Vast numbers of federal workers that have been working at home since the pandemic began are going to have to start showing up at the office each day.
If they choose not to report, they will gladly be given their walking papers…
President Trump on Wednesday warned that federal workers will have to show up to the office “or be terminated,” framing his administration’s so-called buyout offers to 2 million employees as an effort to shrink the government.
“We’re requiring them to show up to work or be terminated,” Trump said in remarks from the East Room before signing an immigration bill into law.
“We think a very substantial number of people will not show up to work, and therefore our government will get smaller and more efficient,” Trump added. “And that’s what we’ve been looking to do for many, many decades, frankly.”
Ultimately, how far will the federal workforce be slimmed down?
Will it be a 10 percent reduction?
Will it be a 20 percent reduction?
Could it be more?
I guess we will just have to wait and see.
In the entire history of the United States, we have never seen anything quite like this, and there is widespread panic among federal employees right now…
“The most common refrain I’m hearing from people who have left but are still talking to people on the inside is: ‘I knew it was going to be bad but I didn’t think it was going to be this bad,’” longtime Democratic lawyer Mark Bergman told the Guardian.
All the way back in 2017, I proposed cutting the size of the federal government in half.
After all these years, it is good to see someone finally taking some action.
But let there be no doubt about one thing.
This purge is going to be extremely disruptive to our society, and it is going to have very serious economic implications.
Since 2009, approximately 26 trillion dollars has been added to the national debt. By borrowing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars that we did not have, that allowed us to live a far higher standard of living than we actually deserved.
If we reduce government spending and dramatically slash the size of the federal government, there will be enormous consequences.
I hope that you are ready for that.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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