At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Elon Musk appeared on stage in oversized sunglasses, a black gothic MAGA hat, a thick gold chain around his neck—and wielding a chainsaw. Ha ha. Over at Politico’s Playbook, the new team may not have heard of the New Deal, but thank goodness they do have enough sense to know that the richest man in the world and the president he works for (or is it the other way around?) might—make that will—come to rue that cringey image.

The way Musk’s DOGE is going about these cuts is the equivalent, as I heard former Biden administration official Mitch Landrieu say on TV this week, of a man thinking he needs to lose 30 pounds and deciding to saw off his leg. That’s funny, and true. But this is even worse. A man sawing off his leg hurts only himself. What Musk is doing will hurt millions of people in ways that we’re only beginning to see.

Here’s one small example, which you likely haven’t read about but which I take a little personally. If you’re one of my regular readers, you know that I was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and went to my hometown university, West Virginia University, or WVU (not UWV, thank you). A week ago, West Virginia Watch, a small nonprofit news organization in the state, moved a story noting that the university expects to lose $12 million annually in funding that supports cancer and vascular research.

Under dynamic Dean Clay Marsh, a native of the state recruited back to West Virginia from Ohio State by WVU President E. Gordon Gee (and the son of hell-raising newspaper editor Don Marsh, who once upon a time made The Charleston Gazette one of the most aggressive regional newspapers in the country), the cancer institute has made tremendous strides. The cuts, a university spokesman told West Virginia Watch, could cost the school the faculty it has recruited to do the research and conduct the clinical trials that could lead to the breakthroughs that would save a lot of lives in the state with the third-highest cancer mortality rate in America.

And if it’s $12 million at the smallish West Virginia University Health Sciences Center, imagine what it is at New York University, or UCLA, or Johns Hopkins, or even much larger state research hospitals in Florida or Washington. And it’s happening to every state university medical system in the nation.

But the broad story here is far worse. The real-world impact of the cuts is bad enough. What’s even worse is the cynicism bred by the endless lies told by Musk, promoted by the right-wing media, and bought hook, line, and sinker by so many Americans. The lies promote the same old right-wing ignorance about how the world actually works.

The right-wing myth about how things work is that the federal government is full of waste and bloat and you could cut two-thirds of it and nobody would even notice. This view is based on utter cynicism and stupidity on the part of right-wing shock jocks and cable hosts and others who want to promote hatred and keep people in a state of outrage.

Here’s how things actually work. It’s a vital point, one that isn’t well enough understood, and that Democrats don’t make nearly enough.

Public sector workers, for the most part, are really different from private sector workers. Private sector workers, as a rule, produce tangible things. Factory workers make car bumpers and furniture and all kinds of things. Other kinds of workers innovate and give us new products. Bankers extend the credit that makes all this production and innovation possible. We all understand that this is how an economy works, because we learn it in school, and it’s completely intuitive (yes, far too many private sector workers in modern capitalism “produce” mostly for themselves, but that’s a separate problem).

What most public sector workers do is different. In fact, it’s completely the opposite. They prevent things from happening. They don’t produce goods, but they do make sure that the goods the private sector produces are safe and don’t injure people. They don’t innovate, but they ensure that innovations aren’t fraudulent. They don’t create workplaces, but they make sure that workplaces are safe.

This is a part of the economy, too—and it’s one that no one ever thinks about. No one takes a drink of water and thinks, “Hey, I didn’t get sick or die from that water, thank you, Environmental Protection Agency.” No one gets on a flight that lands safely and thanks the Federal Aviation Administration. No one buys a toy for their infant or toddler that does not contain any parts the child could accidentally choke on and thanks the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

No one does that, and on the one hand, no one should do that. These people signed up to do this work, and when drinking water and airplane flights and children’s toys are safe, they’re just doing their jobs.

On the other hand, maybe we should thank them once in a while. They do invaluable work. And the world only notices them—and this is another big reason that public sector workers are easy to pick on, and why they have bad reputations—when something screws up. Think about it. When have, say, the goings on at the Department of the Interior made The Washington Post? Answer: When something goes wrong. You’re not likely to see a headline like “Things Going Great Inside Interior,” because that isn’t the nature of the news business. It’s not news when bureaucrats are doing their jobs right.

To its great credit, the Post last year ran a series of articles positively profiling government workers. But generally, it’s only news when these folks get something wrong. These kinds of stories appear with some regularity in our lives. But in fact, when you consider the size of the federal bureaucracy and how many things it does, they are actually comparatively rare, which means that about 99 percent of the time, federal bureaucrats are doing their jobs well.

And yes, they, too, are an important part of the economy. Imagine what the U.S. economy would be like if even 0.5 percent of airplane flights ended in a crash (domestically, that would mean 275 crashes every day) or if 1 percent of America’s beef supply carried some disease. It’s the federal government, not “self-policing” industry, that makes sure these calamities aren’t happening. If they did, the economy would be a shipwreck.

Yet here comes the world’s richest man, in his unfathomable vanity and ignorance, tearing all this to pieces. And lies. Endless lies. The most conspicuous one is this nonsense about tens of millions of 150-year-old people getting Social Security checks. Of this alleged situation, Musk posted on X: “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”

It’s all a complete lie. There are only 108,000 centenarians in the United States. The lie started because the brilliant Musk and his brilliant interns misread the data from the Social Security Administration’s computer operating system, which is 65 years old. In other words, it’s a mistake that could be rectified easily if Congress appropriated a few million dollars for the SSA to modernize its computers. That, of course, will never happen in this Congress. It’s too busy getting ready to pass tax cuts for the 1 percent.

How much will Congress’s plan cut Musk’s taxes? I don’t own a calculator with that many zeroes. The man makes, it is estimated, at least around $55 million dollars a day. He reportedly makes around $8 million a day from the government alone, in the form of federal contracts with his businesses. Aside from the fact, dear Democrats, that every single person in America should know those figures, they also may help explain how he can see the U.S. Agency for International Development as a “criminal organization” and cancer researchers at WVU as pointless people doing the pointless work of saving pointless lives.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Pam Bondi was approved by the Senate to be attorney general on February 4. On February 5, she was sworn in. And on February 10, five days into her already ghastly tenure, she committed an act so electrically sleazy that in a normally ordered world, she’d be forced from office immediately.

Why Bondi? Why is my wrath not limited to Emil Bove, the acting assistant attorney general? After all, it was Bove (apparently rhymes with “no way”) who wrote the instantly infamous memo ordering Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to dismiss all charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams “as soon as is practicable.” (Sassoon quit instead.)

True enough, Bove’s Bond-villain name and his broodingly pharaonic countenance help finger him as an easy bad guy. But read the damn memo. Here’s how it starts: “You [Sassoon] are directed, as authorized by the Attorney General, to dismiss the pending charges in United States vs. Adams.”

As authorized by the attorney general. There it is. The top law enforcement officer of the United States, five days on the job, ordered that corruption charges, painstakingly assembled over a multiyear period by prosecutors in New York’s Southern District, be dismissed. Why? Well, your average fair-minded person, presented with the facts as I’ve laid them out so far, would assume that said attorney general and her people had discovered new information that exculpated the mayor. That’s how justice works in the movies, right?

But not here. In fact, Bove’s memo admits the opposite! It reads: “The Justice Department has reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” Couldn’t be clearer. Bondi’s decision—and please, please, call it that; Bondi’s decision, not Bove’s—had nothing to do with evidence. So what did it have to do with?

Two factors. The first is timing. The memo states: “It cannot be ignored that Mayor Adams criticized the prior Administration’s immigration policies before the charges were filed.” That’s a staggering sentence. It assumes an almost casual and universal corruption on the part of prosecutors in the Southern District generally, and the U.S. attorney in particular.

This is an outrageous charge: that prosecutors are working to exact political revenge for presidents. That is a morality that Fox News and others have gotten millions of American to cynically buy into. It is not the real-life morality of the Southern District, which for decades has rightfully enjoyed an apolitical reputation. Even when there have been politically ambitious U.S. attorneys in charge who were clearly bringing cases that might benefit them politically—most obviously, Rudy Giuliani prosecuting corrupt Democratic bosses in the 1980s—it had to be admitted that the prosecutions were legit. Giuliani won convictions in those cases, and the city was better off.

But this is an accusation—by the nation’s top law-enforcement officer—that the Southern District is, or was, a priori corrupt. It’s the kind of accusation, history instructs us, that is usually made by people who are guilty of exactly that which they allege.

And it is an accusation lodged specifically at former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. Yes, Williams was appointed by Biden. Yes, Williams is a Democrat. But what is his record of politically selective prosecutions?

Well, let’s see. He oversaw the indictment of former New York Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin—a Democrat and, for what it’s worth, like Williams, a Black man (I mention this only because the right-wing media would surely claim the fact as relevant were it expedient to do so). He oversaw the indictment of Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey. In 2018, as an assistant U.S. attorney in the same Southern District, he helped secure the indictment and conviction of Sheldon Silver, the powerful former speaker of the New York State Assembly—and, yes, another fellow Democrat.

And bear in mind, of course, that the investigation of Adams stretched back years. Read the indictment. It’s more than 50 pages, and it tracks events going back to 2016. You don’t assemble that in a week. Southern District investigators were obviously building an Adams case for years—probably before Williams was even named U.S. attorney, which happened in 2021, and long before Adams cozied up to Donald Trump.

On top of all that, suspicion of corruption has swirled around Adams’s head practically since he took office. The notion that the filing of the Adams indictment was somehow tied to his refusal to talk nice about Kamala Harris before the election is the kind of absurd conspiracy that used to be laughable in this country, consigned to the John Birch margins, before the right-wing media promoted this kind of thinking to the extent that it became imprintable on millions of fevered minds.

But remember—that’s only the first factor cited by Bove (and Bondi). The second, if you can believe it, is far more ridiculous. The indictment against Adams needs to be dropped posthaste, Bondi ordered, because it’s distracting him from doing his job! I’m not joking: “The pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration.”

This is, to put it politely, not how the law works in this country. Remember that the Supreme Court ruled—unanimously—that even a sitting president can’t be immune from civil litigation on the grounds that it will distract him from his duties. But that was about Bill Clinton, a scourge of the right. For a darling of the right, the rules appear to be different.

Except that the dismissal of these charges carries a big asterisk. They were dismissed “without prejudice,” meaning they can be refiled anytime Bondi—or Donald Trump—wants them to be. In other words, Mayor Adams is too busy fighting crime and immigration, but only for as long as Bondi and Trump think he’s fighting it their way. Once he’s not, cuff him.

So things go in a nation where it is openly declared that some people are above the law. That was not supposed to be the United States (although often it has been, in the case of rich people). It was supposed to be places like Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua. But now it is the United States. I didn’t declare it so. Trump did—more specifically, his White House counsel David Warrington did this week, in the form of a memo obtained by The Washington Post stating that it is now the official policy of the Trump administration that the president and vice president (What? Why?) and their top lawyers “can discuss ongoing criminal and civil cases with the attorney general and her deputies.” In other words, Trump—or Vance—can make one phone call and set any investigation they wish in motion, or get one quashed. In other words, they are the law.

But don’t forget the central role here of Bondi: “As authorized by the attorney general.” She has proven in a week that she will corrupt her office to any point and in any way that Trump desires. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Sassoon—a Republican and a Federalist Society member who, far from thinking Adams innocent, was about to file a superseding indictment charging him with even more corruption, including tampering with evidence. And take it from the five Justice Department prosecutors who followed Sassoon with their resignations.

This is a crisis. A legal and constitutional crisis of a sort seen only a few times in this country’s history. And yet the squashing of the Adams case will pass, as all these things pass, with nary a peep from elected Republicans because a serial liar with a mighty propaganda machine working overtime for him has convinced half the country that up is down, that honor is venality, and that integrity is just a ruse for suckers who believe all that garbage from our schoolbooks.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

When the initial shock began to wear........

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