Waning days of a dying empire
Is this what collapse looks like from the inside?
Hi everyone. I took inspiration from a post Matt made yesterday on X for today’s discussion thread, in which I review some recent firings by the Trump administration.
Here are some of the officials ousted over the last week:
The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was fired by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Friday.
Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who Trump said on Monday he was firing, sued him today.
On Tuesday, Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers who sent a letter criticizing the Trump administration for its emergency management approach were put on leave.
At least four top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted their resignations on Wednesday, just hours after news broke that the agency’s director, Susan Monarez, had been ousted. Monarez is pushing back on her dismissal today, and accused the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of weaponizing public health and putting lives in danger.
Read three of the letters of resignation.
A member of the Surface Transportation Board, the regulating body weighing a merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern railroad companies, was fired by the White House today.
This apparent personnel purge marks a turbulent week for federal leadership. But is it the end? The beginning? Maybe we are too caught up in the middle to see light in either direction.
I think there will be a longish period after all this where the country’s wealth and institutional slack will mask the loss of expertise and erosion of law but at some point it will become obvious that everyone is much worse off. It’s been weird to see long term institutional actors (universities, businesses, health care industry) bend the knee hoping to ride it out rather than taking seriously the harm to their longterm interests. I get that doing so is expedient because Trump is vindictive and maybe things will go back to normal post 2028. But bending the knee also makes it much less likely things will go back to normal.
I think there will be a future that's between the two extremes people like to rave about: we'll still be a strong and dominant country, but we'll be worse off in several ways 3.5 years from now that we wouldn't have been otherwise.