29 January 2025 - 6:30pm
Late last week, Politico published an insidery DC horror story about the “dark mood” at federal agencies as government bureaucrats fretted about the ramifications of President Donald Trump returning to the White House. These government functionaries fear that Trump is “coming for their jobs” with new executive orders aimed at paring back the horribly overgrown federal bureaucracy. “I am terrified,” complained one staffer.
It’s a bit odd for a collection of employees just offered generous eight-month buyout plans by the President if they’d no longer like to continue in their jobs. Maybe if the threat of firing really is so “terrifying,” such an offer would be a lifeline. That the bitter rumblings have continued since says a lot about the actual interests of these employees.
And the coverage of them over the last few weeks says a great deal about the legacy media that so much reporting has been devoted to the plight of these poor bureaucrats. For example, the New York Times reported last weekend that “a Federal Trade Commission employee was so anxious that he told family members not to talk about politics on unencrypted lines.” Meanwhile, Reuters noted that federal and even public sector workers were “stunned” and afraid. Similar themes were also picked up in the Washington Post, CNN and Politico (again).
Lost in this narrative is why these positions have become expendable. Trump ran on a commitment to shrink the federal bureaucracy, which clearly chimed with the American public. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is premised on this very idea: the size of government has grown too large and unwieldy, and so must be reined in.
But because these workers hail from a similar social milieu as journalists, their job losses have received outsized attention. Other industries have not been so lucky. Take the example of coalminers and other workers tied to the extractive energy industry that has powered America for hundreds of years. Back in 2019, former president Joe Biden told them to “learn to code”. The media lapped it up, primarily because the miners were seen as enemies of the green agenda. Take this 2021 piece, from the New York Times, titled “The Achilles’ Heel of Biden’s Climate Plan? Coal Miners.” The sub-headline is even richer: “Unions representing other workers affected by climate legislation have struck deals, but opposition from coal miners has persisted, complicating the path to enactment.”
For simply fighting back against their jobs being eliminated, these coalminers weren’t real flesh-and-blood humans, but instead complications to a political agenda. This view was confirmed by a piece from CNN around the same time, which asserted that the end of the coal industry was the only way for “humanity […] to save itself”. And any complaining about this was simply, as a Politico piece claimed, a problem of “mindset”. If these miners can’t learn new skills and adapt, well, the future will simply leave them behind — they should’ve pursued more valuable skills, we’re told.
That even after the 2024 election, the corporate press still sees America as divided between the ennobled Left and the deplorable Right makes one other important point clear: it hasn’t learned anything since Trump’s first term. Journalists still see themselves as crusaders interested only in telling the stories of beleaguered liberals. It’s not journalism, rightly understood, just narrative-creation — and one prone to all of the mistakes made by the press last time around.
The media should simply apply the same cold logic it applied to coalminers to the bureaucrats. Political reality has passed them by. Industries evolve, jobs change. The federal bureaucracy is no exception to this. Maybe, then, they should learn to code.
