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Tuesday night, President Donald Trump declared that “the American dream is surging bigger and better than ever before” and, with his typical modesty, anointed his 43-day-old presidency as “the most successful in the history of our nation.” He spoke of auto manufacturing plants “opening up all over the place” and how the tariffs currently crashing the stock market “will take in trillions and trillions of dollars that create jobs like we have never seen before.” The president noted that his buddy Elon Musk is cleaning up mythical fraud and waste as the head of DOGE. “He didn’t need this,” Trump said, as if Musk is a selfless aid worker rather than a mind-bogglingly wealthy and self-interested man systematically looting the Treasury to benefit himself and his friends.

It was a painful, offensive inversion of reality.

Because for the tens of millions of Americans whose jobs and livelihoods are threatened by Trump’s wrecking crew—from farmers getting stiffed by the lawless dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development to scientists whose research money has been vaporized because our addled president doesn’t know the difference between research about transgenic and transgender mice—this project isn’t about a “surge” in the American dream. It’s a demolition of it.

It’s not just that the president has empowered the world’s richest man—an unelected internet troll with a fetish for global reactionaries and autocrats—to illegally and indiscriminately torch the federal government with mass layoffs, unconstitutional funding freezes, and cruel psychological assaults. Or that the abusive effort is already causing markets to wobble, Trump’s approval numbers to list portside, and outraged citizens to swarm town halls with Republican members of Congress to protest what they rightly see as socially and economically destructive power grabs that were not remotely part of Trump’s razor-thin “mandate.”

It’s that the core of what he has accomplished takes aim at the most important domestic engine of prosperity we have: the federal system. There’s a term for the project Trump and his cronies are undertaking, coined by political scientists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum in 2024. It’s called ungoverning.

At least 30,000 federal workers have been fired, which the MAGA die-hards in unfettered command of the federal government view as a righteous assault on the “deep state.” It was these bureaucrats, they believe, who thwarted Trump in his first term and then persecuted him for four years afterward. Trump, Musk, and their supporters are presenting their project to the public as a long-overdue audit of the federal government’s resources, but in practical effects it is neither of those things. The Department of Government Efficiency is, first and foremost, an attack on the shared prosperity that federal investment generates. To name just one example, spending by the National Institutes of Health supported more than 412,000 jobs in 2023, according to United for Medical Research. A government investment of $47.68 billion created $92.89 billion in economic activity, to say nothing of the medical and scientific advances that are the direct result of this funding. It is also an assault on government support for nonprofit organizations that provide a dizzying array of vital services: disability support, legal aid, cancer research, veterans’ services, disease monitoring, and foreign aid, to name a handful of sectors that have come under the axe since Jan. 21. All these entities work indirectly to boost our economy too, by patching holes in America’s safety net or providing support for people and communities that the market cannot.

But the Trump cronies in charge aren’t fretting about the economy. Musk letting his algorithms loose on the Federal Aviation Administration, for example—only to find that it recommends canceling a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon and hiring his own Starlink instead—is about as clear-cut an example of broad-daylight corruption as you’ll ever find. Dismantling the work of the federal government has repercussions that go far beyond stuffing Musk’s pockets or putting tens of thousands of civil servants out of a job, though. The ripple effects are being felt in almost every sector and industry that relies, directly or indirectly, on federal money. And they are causing not just anxiety and gloom for workers and organizational leaders but real losses for everyone—including the very people that the MAGA movement pretends to care about.

A new presidential administration coming into office and deliberately precipitating a jump in unemployment and a massive drop in GDP growth is beyond surreal. But that’s what is happening. We don’t yet have a clear picture of the overall job loss situation, but according to one analysis February was the worst month for job losses since the height of the COVID pandemic in July 2020. The Trump administration has already caused a local spike in unemployment claims in the D.C. area with its mass layoffs of federal workers. The knock-on effects of this process, if replicated nationally, will be severe, given that people who are unemployed can no longer spend as much money on goods and services, placing downward pressure on businesses that rely on that spending. And job losses cause sustained economic and social damage for individuals and communities that will be difficult to repair. Earlier this week the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta updated its “GDPNow” model to predict a first-quarter GDP contraction of –2.8 percent, which would be the sharpest nonpandemic economic contraction since the first quarter of 2009, when the country was still reeling from the impact of the Great Recession. It would also be history’s first completely self-inflicted peacetime economic calamity. In Trump’s joint address to Congress, he acknowledged that there will be “a little disturbance” in the economy and that “we are OK with that.” Are we?

If you’re a conservative reading this, you may be thinking to yourself: Yes, great, this is exactly what I voted for. The federal government should no longer prop up hated liberal institutions like lefty nonprofits and universities that brainwash my kids with woke nonsense. The problem, though, is that the work that many of these organizations do fills massive gaps in the health care and social safety nets, addresses market failures like disease research, and powers local economies all over the country—for everyone, regardless of ideology. When they stop doing their work there will be no one to pick it up. Maybe you loathe universities, for example, but when the federal government messes with funding formulas from the National Institutes of Health, it doesn’t just put the squeeze on the gender studies professors and DEI programs that have become the targets du jour of the far right. Turning off the federal-money spigot also shuts down research into Alzheimer’s disease and cancers that are so rare that drug companies will never pour money into developing treatments for them. It halts the pipeline of graduate students training to become the next generation of scientists, biomedical researchers, and doctors.

These public-private partnerships are one of the unheralded engines of American prosperity and scientific advancement, and without their sources of funding, they will run cold. The same goes for rural health clinics connected to both public and private universities, which are often by far the largest employer of and a services lifeline for communities that would not otherwise have access to them. The loss of these institutions will harm everyone who lives in these areas, many of which could not really exist and prosper without generous federal subsidies. Not content to merely destroy one pillar of rural economies, Republicans seem determined to also make massive cuts to Medicaid, which will further thin out the ranks of rural health care providers. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Medicaid cuts will “put rural hospitals at serious risk of closure.”

Many Republicans and Trump supporters are already suffering from the cuts, and are not happy about it. Republican senators like Alabama’s Katie Britt and West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito are begging Trump for mercy from the DOGE buzz saw. Deep-red-district congresspeople have constituents berating them at town halls about the slashing. GOP voters are telling pollsters that this is not good—they voted to inflict pain, but not on people like themselves. And anecdotes about Trump voters immiserated by the cuts who feel “buyer’s remorse” are beginning to multiply.

The sheer scale of the lunacy unfolding in Washington is hard to understand in the normal terms that have defined most American adults’ political lives. What kind of government comes into office determined to take actions that will spike unemployment, drive up inflation, dismantle the guardrails that prevent corporate actors from exploiting Americans, make flying and even eating food less safe, and destroy lifesaving research and medical innovations? Are they not afraid of repudiation in the midterms?

This is where a short 2024 book by Muirhead and Rosenblum comes in. The professors write: “The idea that those entrusted with responsibility for governing would intentionally make the state less capable—degrading its ability to collect taxes, to deliver mail, to conduct diplomacy, to prosecute violations of civil rights—is almost unthinkable.”

But the goal is “not reform but incapacitation”—of the state and its ability to implement policy.

In MAGAworld, dismantling the civil service will make it possible to eliminate obstacles to a right-wing reactionary vision of public policymaking, including removing all impediments to discriminating against the movement’s ideological and cultural enemies. Institutions that can’t be warped to serve the MAGA agenda, like the Department of Justice, will simply be destroyed, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or USAID.

Instead, what dismantling the civil service does is remove obstacles to corruption, abuse, and fraud in the private sector and enable them in the public sector. As Muirhead and Rosenblum write, “The animating purpose, again, is to free the president from the constraints of procedure and from dependence on public servants with experience designing and managing complex, public programs.” Fire the IRS agents, and there is no one to catch you and your friends engaging in tax evasion. Kneecap the Department of Education, and the president will be free to turn federal funding off and on to punish enemies and reward supplicants. Destroy the agencies responsible for collecting health data, and no one will see the impact of your policies. The state becomes the vehicle for personalized rule and systemic graft, just like it is in countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia that Trump yearns to emulate.

In many ways, the Trump administration’s attacks have been more sudden, indiscriminate, and heartless than even a literal reading of Project 2025 would have anticipated. At least those hatchet wielders imagined themselves to be unleashing innovation and economic growth by eliminating red tape and needless regulations. What is particularly unnerving about the Trump administration’s ungoverning is that it is indisputably causing economic mayhem for everyone—ideological opponents, the movement’s own core supporters, and millions of people who aren’t invested in America’s crucible of polarization one way or the other.

The project, then, is indisputably not about tearing down the “deep state” as it exists across the buildings of D.C.’s federal agencies. What Trump and Musk are doing is cutting America’s economy and society off at the knees and telling its inhabitants that the procedure is necessary to make all of us run faster.

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