ANGELO LYNN

The slash-and-burn strategy of the Trump administration’s reduction-in-force actions, and its support by this lemming-like Republican Congress, is as wasteful and destructive as it is idiotic.

The destructive waste is demonstrated daily. Employees dealing with nuclear waste and arms are laid off one day by Elon Musk’s DOGE, then frantically tried to be rehired the next day only to find their emails and contact information already trashed and unworkable. Billions of dollars of renewable subsidies put in place these past three years (to lower the nation’s carbon emissions, which benefits the world and our local environment) are suddenly halted and replaced with policies that reverse that progress, plus allow foreign competitors to leapfrog ahead of us in industries that will determine the world’s future. Thousands of national park and national forest service employees are laid off, only to find that they laid off the one employee who has the keys to almost all of Yosemite’s facilities, while two-hour lines formed at the Grand Canyon entranceway the next day because four employees manning the entranceway were fired — and this in an system whose workforce is down 15% since 2010, while visitation has increased 16% to over 100 million annually. Making it worse, Trump’s team halted the hiring of thousands of part-time summer employees with the National Park Service right when those applications should be in process. (In short, the national parks will be a mess this summer and millions of dollars will be lost out of the $56.5 billion in revenue the parks generated last year).

But that’s just scaping the surface. Thousands of workers whose job it is to improve farm efficiencies, food and health safety were dismissed for no reason, as were employees at the Federal Aviation Administration after a raft of airline accidents caused in part by a shortage of staff. Research grants that make our lives healthier (developing the cure for cancers, and so forth,) and making our industries stronger were cut on a whim, while the decimation of agencies like FEMA won’t be missed until disasters are at our doorsteps — and overwhelmed states are left holding the bag. And on and on and on.

It is one giant obscenity after another.

And yet the MAGA crowd is cheering.

One wonders if they are deaf, dumb and blind — and I apologize for being so rude, but let’s be real. What Trump is doing is harming all Americans and many of our (former) friends around the world.

No one disputes there has been growth in the federal bureaucracy over the past several decades and it could be trimmed. But that’s done with a purposeful strategy, not by destroying agencies first and trying to rebuild them later. That’s idiotic.

And you don’t get rid of agencies like USAID without understanding the value of what they have provided — 60 years of “soft power” that has established democracy as something nations aspire to versus becoming authoritarian — and having an informed discussion with Congress about it. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the more democratic nations we have in the world who subscribe to the rule of law, the safer America and Americans are. On the contrary, to have Trump discard the importance of humanitarian aid, and embrace the lawlessness of dictatorships, destroys in a heartbeat more than 100 years of successful diplomacy and statecraft.

And trust, once lost, is not easily regained — particularly true when the world watched as the American public narrowly elected a known criminal, a tax cheat, a convicted felon and a president twice impeached, who was also charged with trying to overthrow an election. If this electorate can knowingly elect such a president, and the president turns out to be the demagogic dictator he said he’d be, why would they ever again trust America (at least when Republicans are in power) as a faithful ally?

Adding insult to the injury Trump has already caused, his blatant lie this Wednesday that Ukraine started the war with Russia as a reason he’s favoring Russia over Ukraine is catastrophic — for Ukraine, especially, but also for America’s standing in the world. Trump is now Putin’s lackey. Nor is it smart. You don’t spend $175 billion dollars (not $350 billion as Trump erroneously claimed) over the past three years in defense of a friendly country, and Europe, to then throw it away by selling out your ally on multiply counts before peace talks even begin! That’s the worst negotiating ever.

And just in case area readers haven’t heard what our European friends are saying, or watch too much Fox News, here’s a snippet:

“I’m afraid we’ve never been this close to Orwell’s ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength’ before,” said the Czech Republic’s Interior Minister Vit Rakusan.

Or this from Jean-Yves Le Drian, a former French foreign minister: “What’s happening is very bad. It’s a reversal of the state of the world since 1945. It’s our security he’s putting at risk,” he said, referring to Trump’s support of Putin. It is also, he said, an “inversion of the truth… The victim becomes the attacker. It’s the law of the strongest. Tomorrow, it could be Moldova and after tomorrow, it could be Estonia because Putin won’t stop.”

And, of course, it sets the stage for China to invade Taiwan with nary a concern that Trump would stop them.

If Trump’s legacy is to align America with dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and turn our backs on the democracies of Europe and the United Kingdom, it admittedly fits his character and with the spineless leadership of today’s Republican Party, but it betrays the trust of many Americans who voted for him.

Moreover, like so much else with Trump’s actions these first 30 days, what’s so damning is that it’s done without any understanding or recognition of the consequences. The problem for Americans, and for much of the world, is those consequences will likely have negative impacts on us all.

Angelo Lynn