Yves here. It is striking how gleeful Trump officials are about turning well-functioning bureaucracies like the Social Security Administration or the Park Service into burn pits, or setting out to ruin rather than shore up merely adequate performer. And then they try to frame degradation of services in class warfare terms, as if deliberate crapification is a benefit. But this is just another instance of using a Big Lie to cover for grifting or mere sadism.
By Stephen Praeger, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser boasted on Fox Business Thursday that the government had slashedmore than 300,000 “high-paying” jobs from the federal payroll during the president’s first year back in office.
Asked by anchor Maria Bartiromo about the administration’s efforts to cut government spending, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said it had made “a huge amount of progress.”
“I think the biggest thing that we can point to is that we’ve cut government employment by 300,000 workers,” he said. “Those are jobs that are very high-paying that are gone forever.”
He claimed the cuts reduced government spending by “an unthinkable amount of money,” perhaps $1 trillion over the next ten years.
He also said that the administration “reduced the deficit last year by $600 billion” through a combination of higher-than-expected economic growth, tariff revenues, and “supply side effects” of Trump’s massive tax cut, which mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans while gutting the social safety net.
Dean Baker, a longtime collaborator of Hassett’s despite their opposing political beliefs, wrote on social media that Trump’s economic adviser was dramatically exaggerating the deficit reduction that occurred during the administration’s first year.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the deficit was about $1.8 trillion for fiscal year 2025, just $41 billion less than the previous year and $56 billion lower than the $1.9 trillion deficit CBO projected in its most recent baseline.
“In the real world, the deficit fell… less than one-tenth of what Kevin claims,” Baker said.
In the real world, the deficit fell by $56 billion last year, less than one-tenth of what Kevin claims, but he did get the direction right this time, unlike his claims about inflation falling https://t.co/v6gzEX2d5o
— Dean Baker (@DeanBaker13) April 9, 2026
Trump has touted the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of government employees from their “boring federal jobs” as one of his crowning achievements.
Among the agencies hit by mass layoffs were the Department of Veterans Affairs, where more than 12,700 employees got the axe; the Department of Health and Human Services, which lost more than 14,400 workers; the Social Security Administration, whose staff shrank by more than 6,600; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which lost more than 4,000 employees.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest labor union representing federal workers, told Common Dreams that even if slashing jobs did reduce the deficit as Hassett claimed, the harm far outweighs any such benefit—not only for the fired employees, but for the millions of Americans who depend on services they provide.
“When you say 300,000 jobs, it is a nice round number, and you link it to deficit reduction, which he was lying about,” Simon said. “The fact of the matter is, the disappearance of those 300,000 jobs means degraded healthcare for our veterans; slower or nonexistent service at the Social Security Administration for the elderly and disabled who rely on Social Security for their income; and the elimination of huge swaths of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that help ensure we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink.”
“You have federal prisons absolutely overwhelmed by too many inmates and too few corrections officers, endangering public safety,” she continued. “Consumer product safety has been eviscerated. There are also serious public healthconcerns involving substance abuse, childhood nutrition, and vaccinations.”
She decried Hassett’s comments as “ignorant” in light of his false claims about deficit reduction, but also “just demonstrably pretty cruel and disdainful” given the impact these job losses have on individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole.
“It’s cruel,” Simon said, “not only on the people who held those jobs—about a 100,000 of whom are military veterans—but the impact of the disappearance of those jobs also falls on children, the elderly, anybody who consumes agricultural products, breathes air, or relies on clean water.”
“Everybody is hurt by what he’s celebrating,” she added. “I guess it’s just par for the course from this administration, but it’s still a disgusting thing to hear.”
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The “Hassett Curve” will become as famous as the “Laffer Curve”. All we need is a napkin and a high ranking Republican or Trumpian ie. a Cheney or Rumsfeld. A “Stockman” could or might help.
How much does Kevin Hassett make? Seems likely he makes quite a bit more than the highest paid civil servant.
If any administration were at all serious about getting rid of over-paid, under-performing income earners, they would go after CEOs of hospitals, “non-profits”, board members, university presidents, all the people who award.themselves high dollar incomes because otherwise you “can’t get the best people”.
Minor quibble — “make money” should not be predicated of individuals or corporations. They are paid by others for what they do (money is “made” only by monetary sovereigns).
A better framing would be “what does Hassett do and is it worth what he is paid?”
Don’t you see it? They steal, disenfranchise, divide and deceive.
This is somebody who does that and seems to be human – I mean, without the human part.
By the way, there is nothing less patriotic acting like that.
And no, it’s not cool or aspirational these days to become richer and richer by doing one or all of the above.
Why, this is beyond me, are we still looking at these morons as achievers and deserving rich people?
They literally cut all the wrong departments and boosted spending in all the wrong departments. They never laid a glove on the pentagon, quite the opposite, in fact.
This. It’s the principle of kakistocracy applied to budgeting, ensuring that domestic life gets progressively worse for citizens.
When T said he was going to destroy a civilization he meant it.
I know a few of the “cut” jobs – they were very skilled persons who were close to retirement and decided enough of this Sh-t (from DOGE). Literally, people at one lab were afraid to go to the bathroom if there was no one to keep an eye on their desk, because DOGE kids would come by and see it empty and start procedures to eliminate a position.
The damage is long-term and will not be undone by the next administration – assuming it has any interest (and team D does not have a decent track record of reversing Team R neocon policies). As Galloway says the two teams are the left and right cheeks of the same butt.
So the goal is to debt finance or monopolise entire surplus
Hello, first time poster here and I apologize if I’m slightly off topic. But articles like this always make me think about the larger economic picture.
Back in 2017, Anis Shivani had an essay published in the Baffler titled “Oculus Grift: Capital as the Cutting Edge AI App,” in which he argued that capital has assimilated it’s human overseers into its own seamless functioning, thereby passing the weak AI criteria and, arguably, the strong AI form as well.
An especially foreboding line near the end of the essay read “capital as artificial intelligence cannot be contested by any known form of resistance.”
I’m no real expert on anything, so I’m not quite sure. But something I think about: what would the effects be, if masses of people worked as few hours as possible, i.e., as close to the standard deduction as possible? Is it possible to deprive the parasites of most of the tax dollars they rely on in order to carry on with their debauchery? Perhaps some people would categorize it as a gift economy or as Peter Maurin said at one point, “do not sell your labor.”
I’m just curious what other readers think: is there an opening here? To some form of collective action or resistance? I still stand by getting out and marching in the street but I don’t think that bothers or scares the ruling class as much as it used to be in the day…
Our Billionaire Overlords simply wish to re-create a plantation economy. They want to replace “high-paying” jobs with AI and leave only menial labor (and sex work) for the teeming masses who they haven’t policed, bombed, or starved to death.
The cruelty is the point. Hassett is part of a competition to show the greatest pitilessness toward all but the billionaire caste.
“I think the biggest thing that we can point to is that we’ve cut government employment by 300,000 workers,” he said. “Those are jobs that are very high-paying that are gone forever.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
An awful lot of NPS jobs have gone away, and if being compensated in sunrises, sunsets and assorted glorious views is considered a high paying job, we’ve got problems.
The only war is class war.
Another choke point
https://time.com/article/2026/04/08/bab-el-mandeb-strait-iran-houthis-threat-trade-hormuz-war-ceasefire/