The Purge

The Trump administration has focused its latest attacks on federal workers and foreign aid. At the forefront of that battle is advisor Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. MSNBC’s Alex Wagner heads back to Washington D.C. amidst protests from federal workers and a looming deadline for workers to accept a government buyout. 

Listen as Alex speaks with Kristina Drye, a former USAID employee, as well as former Inspector General for the Department of the Interior, Mark Greenblatt.  

Catch new episodes of “Trumpland with Alex Wagner” every Thursday and follow the show. And subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts to listen without ads.

Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.

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Alex Wagner: After the 2024 election, many Americans just needed a break. People turned off their TVs and they closed their newspapers. An A.P. poll from last December found that around two thirds of American adults said they felt they needed to limit their consumption of news about the government and politics because they were so fatigued. And it looked at first like the resistance of Trump 1.0 had disappeared, had gone quiet. Now that may well still be true, but earlier this week, there was a glimmer of something.

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Alex Wagner: On Tuesday night, in front of the Treasury building in Washington, D.C., a large crowd gathered for a nobody-elected Elon rally.

Maxine Waters: We have got to tell Elon Musk, nobody elected your ass. Nobody told you could be in charge of the payments of this country.

Alex Wagner: It was a chilly, blustery evening that began with a couple hundred people carrying homemade signs gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Treasury building. But by the time a group of Democratic lawmakers began speaking, hundreds of protesters had spilled onto the street.

Crowd: This is what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.

Alex Wagner: Police eventually just cordoned off a whole block of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Crowd: This is what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.

Alex Wagner: If it wasn’t the resistance proper, it sure felt resistant. A moment of catharsis, an expression of anger at what has been happening to the federal government under President Trump and his advisor Elon Musk, who now heads the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE.

Maxine Waters: We want to make sure that all of our federal employees are protected.

Alex Wagner: If you are one of the over two million federal workers in this country, the last few weeks have been an onslaught.

Unidentified Male #1: President Trump is making more than two million federal workers an offer. Quit now and accept a severance package.

Unidentified Male #2: A government email titled Fork in the Road offers federal employees a choice, a severance package or return to the office.

Alex Wagner: The unions representing government employees have filed a lawsuit to block the plan. Calling the buyout offer arbitrary and capricious. Trump and Elon Musk, they’re really focusing their ire right now on USAID.

Unidentified Male #3: In just the last hours, Musk calling the agency criminal and saying, it’s time for it to die.

Unidentified Male #4: USAID, it’s uncertain fate. We’ve just confirmed an email went out early this morning to staff saying, do not come in. Headquarters will be closed this morning.

Unidentified Female #1: As federal workers are literally locked out of their offices while operatives working for a private citizen, essentially take over our government.

Unidentified Female #2: Today the president confirmed Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was granted access to Treasury payment systems which house the private information of millions of Americans. Thanks for joining.

Alex Wagner: Given all of that, it would make sense that this moment in front of the Treasury building would feel like both an inflection point, and a response.

Elizabeth Warren: Elon Musk wants everyone in America to be at the mercy of Elon Musk. We are here to fight back.

Alex Wagner: Senator Elizabeth Warren was there, as was Representative Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress.

Maxwell Frost: We might have a few less seats in Congress, but we’re not going to be the minority. We’re going to be the opposition.

Alex Wagner: At one point, Senator Richard Blumenthal surveyed the crowd.

Richard Blumenthal: If you’re a federal employee, raise your hand. Raise your hand if you were. We are proud of you.

Alex Wagner: But if you had been in the crowd at that moment, you could have counted the number of federal workers on two hands. Maybe they were scared to be captured by the TV cameras, given Trump’s scrutiny and focus on so-called loyalty. Or maybe the crowd was made up mostly of concerned citizens, people who had enough of the chaos and wanted to do something with their anger. After walking through the crowd, we did find a few federal workers.

Unidentified Male #5: I’ve been in government nearly 20 years. I would like it to be more efficient. But not like this.

Alex Wagner: Yes.

Unidentified Male #5: Not like just want them destruction.

Alex Wagner: We spoke with someone who told us he was a federal employee, but he was nervous to tell us exactly where he worked and put on a mask when our cameras started rolling.

Alex Wagner: What’s the mood among federal workers right now?

Unidentified Male #5: It’s really funny because I think last time it was, this is an aberration and we’re going to get through this, and things will return to normal. And now it’s more like, oh, no, this is, this like we’re in this for some kind of long haul, who knows? Like, it feels very disempowering.

Alex Wagner: You’re still working, right?

Unidentified Male #5: To the extent possible, we continue to do what we can.

Alex Wagner: Are people fearful right now?

Unidentified Male #5: Yes, I think everybody’s kind of aware of, like it’s not as bad for us as it is for a lot of people that have much worse. But, yes, the prospect of losing a job that you’ve worked at and you’re really passionate about, you’ve been doing for decades is really scary.

Alex Wagner: It feels like for a while there hasn’t been like an organized resistance with --

Unidentified Male #5: Yes.

Alex Wagner: -- sort of energy and focus.

Unidentified Male #5: Yes.

Alex Wagner: And I don’t know if I’m overstating the case here, but this feels like an inflection point for that.

Unidentified Male #5: This feels much more exciting than I think anything we’ve seen. Because I was thinking about this the other day, we feel like we have protests, and they have rallies. And this feels like a rally.

Alex Wagner: Yes. We found another federal employee who was willing to talk with us anonymously and not on camera. I asked her about this past week.

Unidentified Female #3: Yes, so I’m a federal employee. We’ve been getting a lot of emails from a new email address that’s essentially insulting the civil service and requesting that we resign. That’s what it feels like. There’s a lot of pressure to resign.

Alex Wagner: Yes.

Unidentified Female #3: But as far as I know, no one in our office is interested in taking that offer. There’s a lot of rumors flying around related to reductions in force. Nothing that has been confirmed.

Alex Wagner: Do you feel like there’s enough resourcing to stop the what could be an attempt at like a broad series of layoffs?

Unidentified Female #3: Civil servants care about the mission, about supporting the American citizenry, and they are going to fight to stay in their roles and defend democracy. That is an active conversation in the hallways.

Alex Wagner: How long have you been a federal worker?

Unidentified Female #3: I’m still in my probationary first year.

Alex Wagner: Wow.

Unidentified Female #3: So I feel very vulnerable. Yes.

Alex Wagner: What a first year.

Unidentified Female #3: Oh, my God. I came to the government for stability. That was a mistake.

Alex Wagner: Good luck there.

Unidentified Female #3: Yes, yes. It turns out that was a mistake. So.

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Alex Wagner: Now today, Thursday, February 6th, was supposed to be decision day, the deadline for the vast majority of federal workers to decide whether to accept or reject a buyout offer from President Trump and Elon Musk. But on Thursday afternoon, just hours before that midnight deadline, a federal judge in Boston temporarily blocked the administration from implementing these mass buyouts, at least until Monday.

So right now, it would seem federal workers have a few more days to decide. If workers do accept the buyout, they would trade in their resignation for the promise of eight months of pay and benefits. But the big problem with that promise is that Congress hasn’t actually approved those eight months of payment, and the federal government is only funded through March 14th.

So whether Trump and his administration can actually make good on this deal is an open question. There are over two million federal workers in the system, and the administration is hoping for 5 to 10 percent of them to take the offer. But as of Thursday afternoon, only 60,000 workers had reportedly taken the deal, roughly 3 percent. Still, who knows what happens next?

On this episode of Trumpland with Alex Wagner, we’re heading back to D.C. As the Trump administration attacks the federal workforce, we speak with some of the civil servants caught in the crossfire.

Unidentified Female #4: I signed a contract to serve the American people on my nine to five and this is my nine to five today and so I’ll be here as far as I need to be.

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Alex Wagner: It’s Tuesday in Washington, D.C., and Trump has been issuing a flurry of executive orders intended on dramatically slashing the size of the federal government, and he’s doing it with complete disregard to what is potentially lawful and what is potentially most orderly in terms of a transition.

We’ve been running around town for the last 48 hours trying to follow this story and understand how people are dealing with it. But every time, you know, you talk to one group of people, another agency comes under assault. It’s just like, it’s like federal agency whack-a-mole.

We’re on our way to USAID, which is the U.S. Agency for International Development. And that organization has been the focus of Trump’s federal purge. The agency itself has been shuttered. People’s emails have been turned off. It’s a huge question mark about what the international programs funded by USAID, what the future of those programs is. And we’re going to speak with one employee who is at the center of all of this and whose career, whose future, whose work remains deeply uncertain, which is maybe the point of all of this.

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Kristina Drye: Hi. How are you, Alex. How are you?

Alex Wagner: Thanks for doing this. We met Kristina Drye in front of the building earlier this week, which up until very recently was where she came to work every day. The USAID building is one of those huge D.C. buildings that essentially takes up a whole block, which maybe gives you a sense of what an institution it is. The kind of institution that helped rebuild Europe from the ashes of World War II and helped eradicate smallpox and has fought to secure food for millions in the world’s most vulnerable nations for over six decades.

More than 10,000 people work for USAID, about two thirds of them overseas. They provide critical life or death humanitarian aid to more than 100 countries, including areas decimated by war, like Gaza and Ukraine and South Sudan. They also promote democracy, transparency and human rights, with the idea that these American values spread around the world, help both the global community, and our own national security. That’s not to say that the work of USAID has been without criticism. For years, conservatives have raised questions about inefficient spending, while liberals have voiced concerns over the ethics of making vulnerable nations reliant on American aid. And this isn’t the first time the agency has been a high-profile political target.

In 1995, during the Clinton administration, Congress passed a bill abolishing USAID, but it was never signed into law. Whatever its flaws, no administration, Democratic or Republican, has been willing to strip USAID down to the studs. Until this one. So maybe just first start and tell me --

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: -- where you worked. Or work? I don’t even know what tense to use.

Kristina Drye: I also don’t know what tense to use. I worked, work at USAID, and I’m a speechwriter for the front office.

Alex Wagner: Do you think about past tense, present tense, future tense when you say that?

Kristina Drye: In my head, I think past tense. I feel like actively right now it’s probably present tense. But by the minute, I feel like it’s past tense.

Alex Wagner: And just walk me through the last week.

Kristina Drye: So, the last week has been just so crazy. I know that most people have heard about the emails people got from the government and the executive orders that first week of the new administration telling us, you know, we’re cutting all DIA. And so they were asking that we scrub our websites. They were making sure that people who had that in their job description were furloughed or administrative leave or whatever term they were using at the time.

And then it just really ramped up on Monday. I was sitting in my office and, you know, I heard sobbing, and I looked around. It was people who had just gotten an email. I mean civil servants who had worked for decades, you know, across administrations that had received an email saying that you’re on administrative leave effective immediately. We were finding out who it was based on hearsay from other colleagues that were also saying, oh, this person isn’t here today, but they were here yesterday.

So that was Monday, and then throughout the week, it just continued to feel really heavy. You know, they unplugged the televisions with the new stations from the kitchen galleys. They took off all the pictures of our work off the walls.

Alex Wagner: Why did they unplug the televisions?

Kristina Drye: I couldn’t tell you. I walked in one day to warm my lunch and the TVs were on and then I walked in the next day and they were off. You know, we heard rumors that DOGE was in the building and that they were assessing our work, and they were doing this review. And all throughout the week, again, as I’m sure you’ve heard, contractors were being furloughed right and left, and you didn’t know who and what and when until you saw them post on LinkedIn saying they were open for work.

And then on Saturday morning, all the websites went completely blank. I tried to log in Saturday, probably around 7 p.m., and my access was completely revoked. So I couldn’t retrieve any emails, I couldn’t retrieve any communication, I couldn’t retrieve any old speeches for writing samples. You lost complete access. And then we were told not to come to work on Monday through an email that I didn’t receive because I didn’t have access. So --

Alex Wagner: How did you find out about it?

Kristina Drye: I found out about it from colleagues who still had access, which there was no pattern to who did and did not. They texted and said, hey, they’re saying that the building is closed. And at that point I started feeling very past tense about this and I wanted my stuff, like the remaining stuff I had at my desk. And I came here, and they said, you know, did you get the email? And I said, I didn’t get the email because I didn’t have access. They gave me a printout of the email, and then they said, you know, it’s just closed today.

Alex Wagner: There’s the swiftness with which this all happened.

Kristina Drye: Yes. Yes.

Alex Wagner: But it also sounds so chaotic.

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: It sounds like people are, it’s word of mouth.

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: Like, your livelihood and the work of this massive agency, --

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: -- the agenda here is not developed.

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: And the execution is completely scattershot.

Kristina Drye: That’s the way it feels, and even as a contractor, most of USAID is contracted, my contractor had no idea.

Alex Wagner: So people are contractors. I mean, these people are all over the world.

Kristina Drye: Yes, I would say that I think the estimated loss in American jobs alone, from what I would consider bringing the development sector to its knees, is 52,000 jobs.

Alex Wagner: Wow.

Kristina Drye: More than that around the world, because we have implementing partners and these massive implementing partners, 5,000, 6,000, 10,000 employees that are doing amazing work around the world. Again, employing Americans and others, they’ve all been furloughed because they can’t, you know, they are not getting paid, they can’t pay their own bills. So in addition to the USAID folks that are losing their jobs without being able to plan, or even put in two weeks, everyone in the development sector that I know is just sitting here going, what do we do?

Alex Wagner: I mean, because USAID is a global agency in a sense, right? It’s obviously American, but the extent, the reach of it is global.

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: There’s the chaos that this visits upon American workers, you say, but it’s also America’s reputation abroad.

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: Can you talk about what the implications are for America’s reputation?

Kristina Drye: I think people forget that something like USAID is a critical tool in America’s national security toolbox. And when you’re looking at national security, you’re looking at keeping the American people safer, secure, and more prosperous, which is what the lines that are coming out of our current State Department. And USAID does that through things like soft power. And it’s almost like preventive care. You go to the doctor, you get preventive appointments, and then you get reactive appointments. And the more preventive appointments you get, the less reactive you have to be.

So, the more we invest in these things like development, the more we’re investing, not only in the health and security and human dignity of people around the world, but you’re also building currency with countries around the world, and you’re also protecting truly the safety of the American people. It’s devastating to see that this is not only being dismantled, but there might not be an alternative.

Alex Wagner: What’s the emotional tenor of the conversations you’ve been having with current, I don’t know, former USAID employees?

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: What’s that like?

Kristina Drye: I think that the emotional tenor is weight and shock and truly sadness. These people are public servants who never ask for recognition. They never ask for anything except that they do a good job for people around the world. And they see that every single day. We functionally see that every single day. And what hurts the most is when you think about those people in the field that are no longer getting this life-saving care, this life-saving food, this life-saving shelter, maybe the fear too that we’re abandoning them. And it’s not our choice to do that. And we, I think, hold honor and dignity and trust to a very, very high standard here at USAID. It’s part of the culture and the mission.

So to feel like that’s been broken without your input is something that is just so incredibly heavy. I think it’s a profound sadness that cuts deep and is compounded by the fact that most of these people are also looking for their own livelihood now. And there’s this sense of you cry in the elevator because if they see you crying out of it, they know where you stand. And that’s really heavy.

Alex Wagner: If you were launching a soft coup, you’d go in there, you’d storm the gates, you’d take over buildings that weren’t ones that you necessarily had access to before, you’d start firing people en masse, you would institute loyalty tests. You’d replace top leadership. All those things are happening.

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: And I wonder as someone who is of this place, who was a spokesperson for one of these agencies that’s directly under assault by this administration, --

Kristina Drye: Yes.

Alex Wagner: -- what it feels like to be here in this moment.

Kristina Drye: This place represents truly like the best of the American people. And it represents the empathy that I know we have. It represents the kindness and the gratitude and the respect for human dignity that we have. And I believe that we are all of this place. We are all of those values. We are all of that experiment on how to be kind to one another and run a country.

And, you know, we look at democracy as an experiment, and I think that it is heavy and momentous to be here in this time, but times of challenge are not unusual. They might feel momentous like this specifically or uniquely in the moment, and so I can only speak to this moment. But I do believe that we all have to engage with our democracy at every level so that you don’t watch something, you know, from the sidelines and then say, wow, you know, how could that happen?

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Alex Wagner: Hours after we talked with Drye, that answer came in the form of an email sent to USAID staff, informing all direct hires around the globe, with few exceptions, that they would be placed on leave. On Wednesday, the American Foreign Service Association, a union representing 1,800 foreign service officers working for USAID, called this a reckless decision by the Trump administration, and one that would impose an enormous financial and logistical burden costing American taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. The group also announced it would be seeking legal action, though it’s unclear what exactly that would entail.

Drye, who was contracted as a USAID speechwriter found out she too lost her job. She told our producer that she was sad and worried not just for her future, but for the future of all the people we, as in USAID, serve. We’ll be back after a short break.

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Alex Wagner: Right now, tens of thousands of federal workers are caught in limbo, unsure of whether they still have a job. Many have already been shown the door. Others are receiving intimidating emails urging them to resign. It’s all part of a purge launched by the Trump administration two weeks ago. A purge designed to upend the core of the American system of government. Activists are calling it a coup. History books may very well call it the Friday night massacre.

Unidentified Male #6: Mounting criticisms from both sides of the aisle after President Trump’s Friday night firings of 18 inspectors general. Removing the watchdogs from federal agencies tasked with monitoring for fraud, waste and abuse.

Alex Wagner: These weren’t political appointees refusing to follow a president’s controversial order. This was the president deciding to purge 18 independent watchdogs meant to keep the executive branch in check. The mass firing wasn’t just controversial, it may very well be illegal.

In 2022, Congress passed a law mandating that the president give lawmakers on Capitol Hill a 30-day notice if the president intends to remove any inspector general. The president is also required by law to provide a substantial rationale for firing an I.G. Trump did neither.

In order to fully grasp how unprecedented this all is, I sat down with one of the inspector generals who was fired, a man who was hired by Donald Trump himself.

Mark Greenblatt: So the Commerce Building is this red one right here.

Alex Wagner: That’s where you worked for how many years?

Mark Greenblatt: Five and a half years in that building. Up at the corner you see where that balustrade is going off the top, that one.

Alex Wagner: That’s where you were.

Mark Greenblatt: And then the Department of the Interior, which is I never actually looked at it from this angle. It’s one of those three.

Alex Wagner: Over there.

Mark Greenblatt: Yes.

Alex Wagner: So this is your hood.

Mark Greenblatt: This is it. I spent a lot of time on the ellipse.

Alex Wagner: This is Mark Greenblatt, the former Inspector General for the Department of the Interior. He and I spoke from a room that overlooked the National Mall, and, as it turns out, several places he had worked over the years. Trump nominated Greenblatt back in 2019 and spoke highly of his work at Interior, like the time in June of 2021 when Greenblatt’s department cleared Trump of wrongdoing after determining that the U.S. Park Police had not forcibly removed protesters from Lafayette Square near the White House to make way for Trump’s now infamous Bible photo op during the summer of racial justice protests in 2020. But Greenblatt’s career as an I.G. came to a screeching halt on that fateful Friday night.

Mark Greenblatt: So, on Friday night, this is a couple of weeks ago, I received an email around 7:30 at night, and it was entitled White House notification. And instantly my heart sank because I knew that was not good.

Alex Wagner: Were you on alert for that?

Mark Greenblatt: So certainly, over the course of the election period, and then once Trump won and during the transition period, there was open discussion about whether he would be firing any or all of the inspectors general. In fact, his former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, --

Alex Wagner: Yes.

Mark Greenblatt: -- wrote an op-ed in the New York Post expressly calling for him to fire inspectors general. So there was open discussion about this, both in the OIG community, in Congress, and out sort of in the world. So we were on notice that this could happen. But still, when you see it, it’s just so stark that even if you’re mentally prepared, it’s still, you don’t internalize it until you see it there in a two-sentence email saying that you’re terminated, effective immediately.

Alex Wagner: I mean, do you have the email still on your phone?

Mark Greenblatt: I do. I do.

Alex Wagner: Can I see it?

Mark Greenblatt: Yes.

Alex Wagner: Dear Mark, on behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I’m writing to inform you that due to changing priorities, your position as Inspector General of Department of Interior is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service. Wow. What was your first call? I mean, other than to your family, were you reaching out to fellow IGs?

Mark Greenblatt: Absolutely. So that was actually on my work phone. And on my personal phone, I had actually a text from another I.G. who was telling me that she had gotten removed as well.

Alex Wagner: Okay.

Mark Greenblatt: So this is when I said, okay, this is going to get real bad. So then I called the head of the council of inspectors general. And I said, Mike, I’ve just been fired.

Alex Wagner: Yes.

Mark Greenblatt: And he said, me too.

Alex Wagner: Wow.

Mark Greenblatt: And that’s when I knew this was going to be really, really bad. I knew this was going from an isolated one-off of me and maybe a couple of folks to a widespread massacre.

Alex Wagner: To a purge.

Mark Greenblatt: To a purge.

Alex Wagner: There seems to be like, there are two levels of it, it seems like there’s the thank you for your service question mark aspect, but then also what it represents in terms of oversight and what happens to the country next. What does this look like to you knowing the sort of dynamics of this office?

Mark Greenblatt: These positions were designed to be apolitical and not change with administrations. Our whole design, our whole construct is based on us being apolitical, nonpartisan. We don’t ride with the pendulum swinging back and forth, you know, with whichever way the wind is blowing.

Alex Wagner: Does he have to appoint new I.G.s?

Mark Greenblatt: No. I mean, we’ve had long-term vacancies in I.G. positions. For example, at the Department of the Interior before I got there, it was vacant for close to 11 years.

Alex Wagner: Wow. Well, so, I mean, workshop this with me because if I’m the layman that hears well, you know there have been departments agencies without I.G.s for extended periods of time. Nothing bad happened. Why does it matter if these positions sit empty after Trump’s purge?

Mark Greenblatt: So first, an acting I.G. like what’s happening now with the vacant spots, they are fully empowered to take actions. But when you have someone who’s been confirmed by the Senate, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, there is a bit of more stature that comes with that. And you also get the ability to make long-term changes. You can more robustly manage the office and lead the office. And there’s a marked difference between what an acting can do versus what a permanent I.G. can do.

And that’s the critical thing is, are they going to be in a weakened state as an acting I.G. throughout all the major departments in the federal government, all the cabinet-level departments in the federal government now have effectively all of them have acting I.G.s. Are they going to be necessarily more weak in what they’re doing? Are they going to be willing to speak truth to power as the job requires?

And if you have a weak I.G. or office of Inspector General, then they’re not doing what they need to do to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse. I mean, the key question is, are they going to be watchdogs? Are they going to be lap dogs?

Alex Wagner: We sit here in Washington, DC, where there are protests in front of the Office of Personnel Management. Elon Musk says, we’re shutting down USAID. There are protests over there. The Department of Treasury now has effectively given over a lot of important information and record keeping to members of DOGE, which is not actually a government agency, it’s sort of a group led by Elon Musk and a group of his acolytes.

It feels like, and I don’t mean to be heavy handed, it almost feels like a slow-motion coup, right? Am I overreacting when I think of this as something just extraordinarily dramatic that’s playing out within the federal government?

Mark Greenblatt: No, these are dramatic changes. There’s no question about it. And I think President Trump and his allies would argue that’s why he was elected. And, you know, we’ll have to see. We’ll have to see. Is this a week or two or three of robust activity in key principal ways, or is this going to be a sustained movement, if you will. But I think there’s no question these are enormous changes afoot, and they feel empowered and that they were voted in to affect these kind of broad muscle movements inside the federal government. There’s no question it’s going to look very, very different going forward.

Alex Wagner: But as someone who’s been in the federal government, are you alarmed by this?

Mark Greenblatt: Certainly, by the removal of the 18 I.G.s, yes, that’s alarming. And some of the other, you know, actions that we’ve seen are very aggressive. And this is going to be a total makeover of the federal government. This is going to change the way, you know, the federal government interacts with the American people and the world. And so I think we’ve got to brace ourselves for that. But yes, I mean, there’s no question, it’s alarming. I think they would even argue they would like that characterization in the sense that I think they’re trying to conduct a massive overhaul. And so I think they would appreciate, you know, that it would be alarming.

Alex Wagner: You say that government efficiency is, you know, that’s your bag. That’s what you’ve been dedicating your life to. And the fact is, Trump is rooting out the very people who focus on the thing that he says is, you know, job number one, two or three of his new administration, right? He and Elon Musk developed the Department of Government Efficiency, and yet the people who are in charge with sort of manifesting that, you know, where the rubber meets the road, the people who are in charge of efficiency and cutting out waste, fraud, and abuse are the ones purged within the first week of the administration.

Mark Greenblatt: Well, I think there are two interpretations of it. One is that he had, you know, a lack of confidence in us as individuals.

Alex Wagner: Yes.

Mark Greenblatt: Or he’s trying to remove the independent watchdogs and essentially emasculate the OIGs so that he can make over government without perceived roadblocks or speed bumps in the way. You know, in terms of the efficiency, I mentioned the Council of Inspectors General. The full name is the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. It is literally in our name. And so what I would argue is that we should be natural allies. There’s a synergy between what we do every day and what they are attempting to do.

And so I think the fact that the I.G. community and this effort, you know, to streamline and make government more efficient haven’t quite aligned. And to the contrary, as you’re saying, he fired 18 of us --

Alex Wagner: Yes.

Mark Greenblatt: -- is I think a missed opportunity to harness the power of the I.G. community to effect the very changes he’s hoping to effect.

Alex Wagner: Or maybe he’s not actually trying to affect the changes at all?

Mark Greenblatt: Well, you’ll have to ask him.

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Alex Wagner: Trump’s moves to slash the size of the federal government and to rid a massive bureaucracy of people perceived to be his enemies has all unfolded with alarming speed and complete disregard for the system itself. Nobody knows what waits on the other side of this purge, what it will mean for the millions of people employed by the government, or for those who depend on it for basic services, or for the millions more who simply expect it to function day after day, year after year, no matter who is in charge, because that’s how the federal system works.

It seems clear, this week especially, that President Trump is trying to break something fundamental to the American project. And if he ends up succeeding, well, what happens then?

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Alex Wagner: We’ll be back next Thursday with a new episode of Trumpland with Alex Wagner. To get this show and other MSNBC podcasts ad-free, be sure to subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. As a subscriber, you’ll also get exclusive bonus content.

Trumpland with Alex Wagner is produced by Max Jacobs, along with ulia D’Angelo and Kay Guerrero. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Our crew is Enrique Larreal on audio and Liam Lee and Katherine McNamara on camera. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory and Katie Lau. And Bryson Barnes is head of audio production. Matthew Alexander is the executive producer of Alex Wagner Tonight. And Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. And I’m your host, Alex Wagner. We’ll see you next week.

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