There really isn’t any need for bloodshed, you just do it with a little more finesse
By 
Elon Musk is ending lives and ruining careers, essentially at random, for no material benefit to anyone, and once again Trump’s supporters are getting it as good and hard as anyone:
If you’ve been following the news, you may know that I’m referring to the NIOSH building—the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which for 55 years employed dedicated researchers in Morgantown studying the effects of black lung on coal miners. Black lung, or pneumoconiosis, occurs when coal dust is inhaled and has killed many men before their time; it killed one of my grandfathers in his fifties. Pap, whom I never knew, died way before the federal government managed to overcome the coal operators’ fierce resistance to even acknowledging that coal mining could expose one to harm and established NIOSH through an act of Congress. But once that happened, laboratories were established in Morgantown and six other cities to research occupational safety, in the mines and other dangerous workplaces. Some 200 people worked at the lab in my hometown and from the mobile van they used to travel across coal country to perform checks on miners, sometimes literally right outside the mine gate.
Until Elon Musk.
Those 200 people were fired in early April by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Controversy ensued, and many of them have been temporarily rehired, but they’re slated to be fired again in June. Labs in Pittsburgh and in Spokane, Washington, were also eliminated.
As Musk steps back from DOGE, we’re getting a number of assessments of his “accomplishments.” They’re generally harsh. He vowed to slash $2 trillion in “wasteful” federal spending (the federal government spends just under $7 trillion a year). He recently acknowledged it’ll be more like $150 billion. However, his “cuts” will also cost American taxpayers $135 billion, according to one estimate, because it turns out that some of these bloodsucking deep staters save taxpayers money. But even $150 billion is a grotesque lie. Jessica Reidl of the Manhattan Institute—yes, the staunchly conservative and generally pro-Trump think tank—recently told The New York Times’ David French: “So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust.”
That’s harsh, all right. But it’s not only or even mainly on fiscal grounds that he deserves our contempt. The cuts are leaving thousands of good people unemployed. And they will literally kill people. Coal miners will die prematurely. Children all over the world will die from malaria and other diseases because of the demise of USAID, which Musk called a “criminal organization.” In fact, this is already happening: Children with AIDS in Africa have died because of the elimination of a President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, outreach program. That’s just the beginning of the enormous pain these cuts will inflict across the world. And the richest man on the planet, who grew up amid vast wealth from his father’s emerald-mining operations and has never known hardship or had to rely on a government service in his life (unless you count $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits for his companies), is responsible for every drop of it.
Thursday night, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and Jacob Soboroff hosted a fantastic special from Washington, in which they gathered some 50 federal workers from around the country to talk about what they did, why they loved their jobs, and how this will hurt people. One person, Scott Laney, was a Morgantown-based epidemiologist who spoke eloquently about the dedication of the people he worked with. Keri Murphy of the Commerce Department was working to implement the CHIPS and Science Act—that is, bringing jobs back to America in just the way Donald Trump says he wants. “That’s why I thought I was safe,” Murphy told Soboroff. Tamara Maze of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said: “All federal workers I’ve ever known are in it because we want to serve the country.”
“That’s why I thought I was safe” is going to describe a lot of reaction to the Elon Chainsaw Massacres. I wish I thought it would cause more people to reconsider what they think about the Republican Party.