This account of DOGE’s gutting of federal agencies is clear about the damage it did, but what we need is more on what was done, and can be done, to fight back, argues John Clarke

With this book, Sasha Abramsky sets out to show how, through the vigourous efforts of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an all-out attack was launched, in 2025, on ‘the federal government’s social contract with its workers to provide good, stable conditions of employment, and with the population to provide core social services …’ (p.xii).

Abramsky brings a particular perspective to this undertaking that shapes how he presents and explains the DOGE assault and the result is a textbook case of liberal outrage. As such, the work offers a compelling account of an enormously destructive episode, while leaving unanswered a series of important questions.

The author extensively examines the impact of Musk’s efforts on the lives of eleven federal workers. This certainly provides him with a powerful means of demonstrating the brutal human impacts that were involved in the process. Yet, I was left with a sense of frustration at the lack of a deeper analysis and of any substantive account of how the attack was resisted or how it might have been opposed more effectively. Without trivialising the harsh experiences that emerge throughout the pages, I had a nagging sense that something very much more than a tale of woe seemed to be called for, if meaningful lessons were to be drawn from this extraordinarily sharp austerity assault.

‘Utterly sideswiped’

When it comes to the federal workers whose situations are set out in the chapters, their sense of shock and disbelief is an ongoing theme. Taly Lind, a worker with USAID, who had weathered the storm throughout the first Trump administration, displays this sense, as she and her co-workers face the rapid-fire DOGE attack, when she observes that: ‘We were utterly sideswiped’ (p.4). The book leaves no doubt that the tactics employed by those wielding the austerity axe were based on a ‘shock and awe’ approach that was clearly intended to overwhelm and incapacitate those who were being targeted.

Despite the intense focus on individuals, it is possible to discern something of the scale of the attack and the methods that were employed in executing it. Near the conclusion of the work, we are told that ‘… the federal government’s payroll had shrunk by 22,000 in just the month of May alone. And by July, [it was estimated that] 148,000 federal workers had either resigned, been laid off, or been fired during the first six months of Trump’s second administration’ (p.165). Moreover, ‘… the Administration intended to reduce the size of the federal workforce by another 150,000 people over the months to come’ (p.165).

It is also clear that this assault on federal workers was a deliberate strategy that was intended to set the stamp on the administration’s general regressive approach by going after a supposedly bloated and pampered workforce that had been created by the very state structure that was now in Trump’s hands. ‘The federal government had decided that its workers were the enemy within. Indeed, Russel Vought, architect of Project 2025 and Trump’s choice to head the Office of Management and Budget, was on record as saying he wanted federal employees to be “traumatically affected”’ (p.xv).

So it was that, with Elon Musk elevated to a leading position in the operation, the carnage got underway. ‘Within days of DOGE’s engineers, many of them barely out of their teens and with little to no knowledge of how complex government bureaucracies operated, having been set loose on the American government, a cascade of cuts flowed through Washington D.C. and onto points beyond … In this frenetic assault on government function, tens of thousands of ordinary workers became collateral damage’ (p.xiii).

The ordeal faced by Taly Lind, the USAID worker I mentioned previously, is rather typical of the experiences of many of those affected by the DOGE assault. She had worked for the federal agency since 2009 and had fully expected a relatively secure retirement. Suddenly, ‘because of Elon Musk’s determination to feed her job and her agency into the woodchipper, she was eligible for only a $23,000 a year pension and wouldn’t even get that for another nine years’ (p.6).

Abramsky’s treatment of the assault on USAID in particular is both revealing and problematic. He points out that it was targeted so aggressively by Trump and Musk because the ‘agency was the most visible manifestation of American soft power around the globe’ (p.7). As such, it undeniably provided levels of healthcare and met severe nutritional needs in some of the poorest countries on earth.

Abramsky, however, lets the cat out of the bag when he presents USAID ‘as a relatively cheap way to project American power and win friends in countries around the world’ (p.8). He correctly points out that the Trumpian right has no patience for such displays of ‘soft power’ and wants to obliterate them entirely. Yet, without disputing the viciousness of the removal of programmes on which deeply impoverished populations depend, the glaring reality is that such initiatives have been crafted by US political leaders and state officials as part of an effort to preserve stability and US legitimacy in countries that are being exploited by US imperialism and where repressive client-state regimes are being propped up. Contrary to Abramsky’s views of the matter, USAID and the Marines are the good and bad cops of US imperialism.

This sanitisation of USAID is in line with Abramsky’s general approach in which a demonised Trump is counterpoised to a mythically kind and benevolent US state that supposedly existed before he took over the White House. This sentiment is captured very clearly in a later chapter, where the author enthusiastically endorses the observation of a federal worker that: ‘We have a system set up in America for a reason … And when you start breaking down the system, you’re breaking down America’ (p.38). A less forgiving view of the functions of US state power is entirely possible and may even be found among those who have no choice but to rely on USAID in order to survive.

Through the experiences of Kelsey Hendrix, a worker with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which was another very obvious prime target for Musk and his associates, we see the reckless haste with which DOGE carried out its grisly work. ‘Around the huge federal bureaucracy, as the cuts kicked in similar stories could be heard; in their rush to slash the government pay-roll, DOGE and their department level enforcers were working so fast that they weren’t sending the most basic severance paperwork, leaving the fired employees stranded, with no access to healthcare and … no ability to receive unemployment insurance’ (pp.24-5).

Very predictably, the thoroughly racist ideology driving Trump and Musk meant that the assault on public services would be very significantly focused on a drive to attack measures that offered some protection against forms of oppression and disadvantage that impacted federal workers and the broader society.

The DOGE attack on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) emerges very sharply in the pages of the book. In fact, it became an obsessive element of the process. In detailing the situation of Carmen Frier, a worker engaged in the US Geological Survey, the book shows how staff at her workplace ‘got an email explaining to them that all DEI programs and employees related to those programs were being rooted out – and, perhaps even more concerning, that employees were being ordered to report colleagues who might surreptitiously be continuing on with DEI related projects’ (p.48).

Resistance disregarded

So doggedly does Abramsky continue, as the narrative proceeds, to keep his gaze firmly locked in the disrupted lives of his eleven living examples, that I feel compelled to stress the degree to which it obscures other vital considerations. As someone with a long background as an anti-poverty organiser, who has been involved in challenging a great deal of injustice and human misery, I found this aspect of the book to be very frustrating. The emotional pain, the family crises and the efforts at self-medication that are depicted are by no means flippant matters but I kept wanting to read less about individual suffering and considerably more about forms of organisation and examples of defiance and resistance.

We do see at various points legal initiatives that led to a mainly temporary reinstatement of displaced workers and we discover, almost in passing, that forms of organised resistance and protest were underway. However, no clear picture of how the DOGE attack was challenged and no critical appraisal of the resistance that was taken up is provided.

In the case of Hannah Echt, a worker with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), this reaches the point of absurdity. In her case, we are given another detailed depiction of how cruel the cuts were and the misery that came in their wake. Yet, there is only a bare acknowledgment that ‘she agreed to speak to me in her capacity as an AFGE union member and steward’ (p.62). We are told that ‘her life plans had been shredded’ (p.62) and this is certainly true but the fight back in which she must have played a significant role and the lessons that we might draw are barely mentioned. Protests and other forms of resistance are referred to as minor details but no clear picture ever emerges of how they played out or what strategies underlay them.

The book continues to chart a long and highly confused process, in which some workers were able to cling to jobs while legal appeals played out, but they did so in work settings that had been undermined and rendered almost dysfunctional. We see a spiteful and very deliberate effort to make working conditions as unpleasant and insecure as possible, so as to convince workers to take whatever settlements were available and move on.

Then, in the summer of 2025, ‘the US Supreme Court cleared the way for the mass firings and RIFs [Reductions in Force] to be implemented; and, a few weeks later, a panel of Ninth Circuit appeals court judges upheld the Trump administration’s efforts to end collective bargaining rights for over a million workers … In quick order, entire branches of government were, in practice, eliminated’ (p.167).

As Abramsky brings his work to a conclusion, in keeping with his view that the undeniably brutal and destructive Trump assault on public services was waged against a largely admirable system of state power, he singles out the observation of one of the displaced federal workers that ‘America can’t be GREAT, if we’re not GOOD!’ Though it may not have been the author’s intention, that seems an appropriate way to set a concluding stamp on the essential limitations of the book and the perspective it advances.

American Carnage certainly presents a very clear sense of the great injustice and enormous hardship that the Trump administration and its billionaire enforcer Elon Musk imposed on hundreds of thousands of federal workers, as they were displaced and discarded. The impacts of the decimation of some very important systems of social provision are set out lividly. The reckless and chaotic brutality that marked the process is also captured very effectively.

Contrary to Abramsky’s view of the matter, however, Trump and his austerity axe didn’t come from nowhere. The process of gutting the relatively meagre US social infrastructure reaches back over the neoliberal decades and it has been overseen by Democratic as well as Republican administrations. No serious reckoning with Trump and his assault on public services is possible as long as his political agenda is presented as utterly unique and inexplicable.

Most importantly, I must again stress that, without seeking to dismiss or disregard the hardship and pain that federal workers experienced and that are dealt with so extensively in this book, many readers will find the fleeting references to the resistance that was taken up against the austerity measures wholly inadequate. They will wonder what lessons can be drawn, not only from the suffering the process unleashed, but the various attempts that were made to challenge it.

American Carnage unleashes an intense bombardment of moral outrage that, in the process, exposes a major injustice, carried out by a brutal political administration, that harmed workers and communities very seriously. Those who want to understand the factors that drove the DOGE assault and who seek to build the movements and struggles needed to defeat such measures in the future, however, will have to look elsewhere for the knowledge and analysis they will need.

Sasha Abramsky, American Carnage is available from O/R Books.