Trump firings of federal workers will 'absolutely' affect the economy: historian

25 February

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 11, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s mass layoffs in the federal government are going to have an impact on the economy, a historian said on CNN Tuesday.

Historian Leah Wright Rigueur, assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, noted that people often leave Washington, D.C. when administrations change, but “what I would be very careful about… is that there is a difference in how we are seeing the kind of explosion or transition, because it's not simply political appointees that we're seeing leave right now,” she said.

“We're seeing in mass these kind of much larger layoffs that affect career and civil employees who normally have not been part of these large mass layoffs that have happened so intimately and so fast that is absolutely going to have an effect on the economy, both the economy within Washington, DC, but larger economies that are dependent upon or have been integrated into the conversation around the federal government. The federal government plays an important role in the economy, and it's one that I think we've really overlooked in this larger conversation,” she added.

Earlier in the conversation, Kendra Barkoff, former press secretary to President Joe Biden, said that the layoffs were “causing chaos.”

“This is about power,” she said. “This is about control, and this is about causing mass chaos within a government who is supposed to be doing certain things… The Veterans Administration are supposed to be giving out what they deserve to get to their veterans. This is about causing chaos and the administration, and at the end of the day, who is responsible for this? You're already seeing some of the Cabinet Secretaries push back on this. There's just, there's a sense of just undue chaos, and this is all about the power.”

Rigueur also noted that President Bill Clinton had a program to cut the federal government, but he carried out the task much more carefully.

“Every administration has not only tried to cut costs, they've also tried to cut the federal bureaucracy,” she said, “and in fact, they've been pretty successful at doing it. Bill Clinton is a great example of this. Over the course of his two terms in office, he cut close to half a million people from the federal budget, and saved millions of dollars, and it was explicitly about efficiency and getting rid of waste and fraud.”

“However, he did it in a very specific manner,” she continued. “There was a task force that was led by Al Gore. It had 400 people on it, and so they would identify very carefully over the course of eight years: who are these people? What are they doing? And then we have very human conversations to limit the kind of harm that we are doing, because these are real people with real lives that also have details, very sensitive and important information.”

“The goal is not to cause chaos, which actually helps inefficiency. And so one of the things that we should be looking at in the way that we should be trying to understand DOGE, is that even as it is accounting for waste and bureaucracy and mismanagement and things like that, it is actually exacerbating those problems. So we should be evaluating that, and what are they doing? And how are they actually helping fraud or not helping fraud?” she asked.

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