Tens of thousands of federal government workers have been fired or have taken buyouts in recent weeks as the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, culls probationary employees in the name of saving taxpayer money. But former federal officials and those who study labor markets say the widespread firings are leading to a government brain drain that will harm the U.S.’s competitiveness globally, lower Americans’ quality of life for years to come, and even hinder some of the Trump administration’s stated objectives.
The problems stemming from the firings will compound in the years to come, says Misty Heggeness, a professor at the University of Kansas and former economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Census Bureau. She notes that a stable, well-run government requires maintaining a long-term career staff that passes their knowledge on to the next generation of career staff.
The Labor Department, for example, hires statisticians and economists who produce and report on the same economic data, going back decades. The private sector depends on this data to make all kinds of business decisions, but since creating it is labor intensive and not inherently profitable, they are unlikely to produce it themselves.
“There is a long tradition, since the Great Depression, of the federal government creating sound statistical measures in the same way, year after year, month after month,” says Heggeness. “To the extent that we go in and get rid of a bunch of statisticians who work in the federal government or economists who are generating these measures, there’s a break in our knowledge base that goes directly into influencing financial markets.”
Similar roles—important but unglamorous—exist all across the federal government: the researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) looking for the cure for a rare disease that won’t be pursued at a company that can’t make an immediate profit off of it; the securities fraud and civil rights litigator going after malfeasance in the finance sector; the national parks employee who is the only person who can unlock the park bathrooms.
In fact, “nearly 50% of federal employees have been in federal service for more than a decade, acquiring deep expertise and knowledge,” reports the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Heggeness warns that losing all of these medical professionals, public health officials, regulators, scientists, and so on could be a long-term threat to the U.S.’s global standing.
“The government is supposed to exist to invest in and do the things that businesses wouldn’t do by themselves, because it’s not profitable,” she says, citing investment in something as simple as sidewalks or as complex as the COVID-19 vaccine.
Another example: Firing workers with deep knowledge of federal rules and regulations means that Trump’s own economic agenda could be hobbled, says Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer focusing on climate change issues who worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the George W. Bush administration. Rolling back regulations, as Trump has said he wants to do, requires expertise. And only a small number of employees can actually oversee that process properly.
“You can’t do that if you don’t have people to actually go through the rule-making process, developing a rule under a federal statute,” says Holmstead. “It actually requires an enormous effort.”
Short- and long-term effects
It could also slow down other processes, Holmstead says. When companies, for example, want to build a new industrial facility, they are required to do air quality monitoring and acquire certain environmental permits and approvals. Fewer staffers means a longer backlog. And if companies want to avoid lengthy and potentially costly court battles related to those approvals and permits, they will need to wait for the agency to do it the right way.
Holmstead says he’s troubled by what he sees as indiscriminate firings of employees who are doing their best to serve the American public—and who the Trump administration will need to implement its agenda.
“This idea that everybody at regulatory agencies is trying to throw sand into gears and prevent Trump from doing deregulatory things, that’s just not been my experience,” he says. “Folks at the EPA, they understand that their job is to implement the decisions made by the political appointees.”
And it’s not just in the near-term that Americans will feel the effects, says Heggeness. Consequences of the mass purge of civil servants will reverberate for decades, whether it’s in a local community less well-prepared for a natural disaster or in a weakened scientific community that is no longer able to innovate.
Indeed, universities are pausing or cutting admissions to PhD programs that rely on government grants, and cancer research and clinical trials are being halted across the country, among other changes that could hurt the economy and American livelihoods long-term. It’s likely that doctors and other medical researchers, for example, could move abroad to countries that welcome their expertise.
And the effects wouldn’t just hurt the institutions that receive the funding directly. In a lawsuit filed by 22 attorneys general to stop the NIH cuts, for example, Michigan State University said a reduction in federal funding could “imperil thousands of Michigan jobs, not only in health science research, but also up to a thousand construction jobs, as MSU and Henry Ford Health are currently constructing a new research building in Detroit” that would be halted.
The Department of Government Inefficiency
Beyond the loss of knowledge and expertise, Heggeness notes that the way DOGE—under orders from billionaire Trump advisor Elon Musk—is approaching the firings, with the “move fast and break things” mentality of Silicon Valley, is wholly inefficient because there seems to be little to no thought or care being put into who is actually fired and what their jobs are.
A look at recent headlines shows how it’s going: Workers responsible for America’s nuclear weapons were laid off and then almost immediately rehired amid outcry, as were scientists fighting the current bird flu outbreak. “Indispensable” Food and Drug Administration employees in the medical devices division are being reinstated just days after being fired. The Department of Veterans Affairs fired 1,000 probationary employees and is now hiring back those who worked on the Veterans Crisis Line.
In the rush to lay off as many workers as possible, DOGE is creating the very inefficiencies it wants to eliminate, says Heggeness.
Last week, Musk said DOGE “will make mistakes, but we’ll also fix the mistakes very quickly.” But Heggeness says the mistakes are unnecessary and ultimately “devastating” and costly for the country.
“Short-term consequence is that somebody might die quicker. But years of research might be lost because they’d have to stop research temporarily,” she says. “It’s really a devastating way to manage a business, and it’s a devastating way to manage the government.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com