Elon Musk listens to U.S. President Donald Trump speak in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The campaign by President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk to radically cut back the U.S. bureaucracy spread on Friday (February 14, 2025), firing more than 9,500 workers who handled everything from managing federal lands to caring for military veterans.

Workers at the departments of Interior, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture and Health and Human Services had their employment terminated in a drive that so far has largely — but not exclusively — targeted probationary employees in their first year on the job who have fewer employment protections.

The firings, reported by Reuters and other major U.S. media outlets, are in addition to the roughly 75,000 workers who have taken a buyout that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have offered to get them to leave voluntarily, according to the White House. That equals about 3% of the 2.3 million person civilian workforce.

Mr. Trump says the federal government is too bloated and too much money is lost to waste and fraud. The government has some $36 trillion in debt and ran a $1.8 trillion deficit last year, and there is bipartisan agreement on the need for reform.

But congressional Democrats say Mr. Trump is encroaching on the legislature’s constitutional authority over federal spending, even as his fellow Republicans who control majorities in both chambers of Congress have largely supported the moves.

The speed and breadth of Mr. Musk’s effort has produced growing frustration among some of Mr. Trump’s aides over a lack of coordination, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, sources told Reuters.

In addition to the job reductions, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have tried to gut civil-service protections for career employees, frozen most U.S. foreign aid and attempted to shutter some government agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFPB almost entirely.

Almost half of the probationary workers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others at the National Institutes of Health are being forced out, sources familiar with the job cuts told Reuters.

The U.S. Forest Service is firing around 3,400 recent hires, while the National Park Service is terminating about 1,000, people familiar with the plans said on Friday.

The tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service is preparing to fire thousands of workers next week, two people familiar with the matter said, a move that could squeeze resources ahead of Americans’ April 15 deadline to file income taxes.

Other spending cuts have raised concerns that vital services were in danger. A month after wildfires devastated Los Angeles, federal programs have stopped hiring seasonal firefighters and halted removal of fire hazards such as dead wood from forests, according to organizations impacted by the reductions.

Critics have questioned the blunt force approach of Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person, who has amassed extraordinary influence in Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday shrugged off those concerns, comparing Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to a financial audit.

“These are serious people, and they’re going from agency to agency, doing an audit, looking for best practices,” he told Fox Business Network.

Mr. Musk is relying on a coterie of young engineers with little government experience to manage his DOGE campaign, and their early cuts appear to be driven more by ideology than driving down costs, budget experts say.

FILE PHOTO: Donald Trump has appointed former PayPal Chief Operating Officer David Sacks as his “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.”
| Photo Credit: Reuters

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday said he was appointing former PayPal Chief Operating Officer David Sacks as his “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar,” another step towards overhauling U.S. policy.

“He will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the U.S.,” Trump said in a post on his social-media site Truth Social, without saying whether “czar” was an official title.

The crypto czar and other officials in Trump’s incoming administration such as the chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are expected to reshape U.S. policy on digital currency along with a newly created crypto advisory council.

Trump’s tech backers generally want to see minimal regulation around artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, saying Washington would throttle growing innovative sectors with excessive rules.

Trump announced on Wednesday that he was nominating prominent Washington lawyer and crypto advocate Paul Atkins to lead the SEC, in a move celebrated by the industry.

Trump – who once labeled crypto a scam – embraced digital assets during his campaign, promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet” and to accumulate a national stockpile of bitcoin.

Bitcoin broke $100,000 for the first time on Wednesday night, a milestone hailed even by skeptics as a coming-of-age for digital assets as investors bet on a friendly U.S. administration to cement the place of cryptocurrencies in financial markets.

Matthew Dibb, chief investment officer at cryptocurrency asset manager Astronaut Capital, described the news as extremely bullish. “David has had somewhat of a hands-on approach to crypto over the years, at times holding coins such as solana. He appears to be a lot more technically and commercially competent regarding crypto than most would think,” Dibb said.

Born in South Africa, Sacks, 52, is a co-founder of venture capital firm Craft Ventures and an early leader of PayPal, a payment processing firm that was acquired by eBay in 2002.

Sacks is considered a member of the “PayPal Mafia” of former workers and executives at the digital finance firm that includes prominent Trump supporters Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

Musk, the Tesla CEO who leads artificial intelligence startup xAI, is a crypto fan and was appointed by Trump as co-lead of the new Department of Government Efficiency. The advisory board to streamline government is nicknamed DOGE, the name of a cryptocurrency.

Sacks is also a former chief executive of software company Zenefits and founded Yammer, a social network for enterprise users.

He was an early evangelist of cryptocurrencies, telling CNBC in a 2017 interview that he believed the rise of bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, was revolutionizing the internet.

“It feels like we are witnessing the birth of a new kind of web. Some people have called it the decentralized web or the internet of money,” he said.

Trump said Sacks will also lead a White House advisory council on science and technology.