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One benefit of getting older and having a family and a house to take care of is that you learn a little bit about How Things Work. Usually this is because a basic Thing you had taken for granted stops working, like the washing machine spin cycle, or the boiler that heats the house during the winter, or the combination of shingles and wood that is supposed to prevent rain from traveling directly from the sky to the ceiling of your daughters’ bedroom and creating multiple enormous patches of discoloration that look like something from the poster for The Ring. In the panic that results, you are forced to learn basic facts about plumbing, electricity, or home construction in order to guide the process of getting your life out of the 19th century.
Apparently, this is what the United States has voted to do for the next four years, but at the level of society as a whole. It’s been 11 days since Donald Trump was sworn into office, and the list of usually taken-for-granted things that have been broken, or are in the process of being broken, is already long—as is the resulting file of “Huh, didn’t know that’s how they did that.”
Medicaid “portals” briefly went down because of a seemingly illegal Office of Management and Budget directive to freeze spending. Because of this, I learned how Medicaid gets paid out: The program operates via an entity called Payment Management Services, which distributes federal “grants” to individual states, which then distribute payments to health care providers or managed-care administrators.
Leaders of Meals on Wheels, which delivers food to seniors, warned that the spending freeze had the potential to interrupt its operations. Because of this, I learned that Meals on Wheels and other nonprofits essentially provide quasi-official governmental services: They are funded in part by federal money that is granted to states and, in turn, distributed through state agencies.
A helicopter crashed into a plane attempting to land at DCA Airport in Washington, after which I learned that air traffic control stations typically assign one operator to monitor helicopters and another to monitor landing and departing airplanes. A single operator was reportedly handling both jobs at the time of the crash Wednesday. (It’s not fully clear why the D.C. tower was understaffed, but this all takes place amid the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate as many federal employees as possible through a dubiously legal “buyout” offer, its forcing out of the Federal Aviation Administration’s “administrator,” and its shutting down of an aviation safety committee.)
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that the highest-ranking civil servant in the Treasury Department is resigning. The resignation reportedly has something to do with Elon Musk’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency and its attempts to “access” the treasury’s disbursement systems. Because of this, I learned that Social Security checks, tax refunds, and many other government payments are issued by an entity within the treasury called the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. It also sells the bonds!
Other potentially imminent disruptions—and educational opportunities!—concern federal deposit insurance, the official issuance of citizenship rights, herd immunity, the funding of science and math research, and the flow of electricity from Canada to the Northeastern U.S. Musk’s buyout and “DEI hire” initiatives are premised on assumptions about the federal workforce that he has arrived at by reading random stuff on social media, which seems likely to create additional problems. There may well be inefficiency in the government, but there is nothing about the process Musk is stewarding that suggests that this crew is going to find it.
Nor does it seem probable they will be infusing public service with the “merit” and competence that, Musk and Trump claim, should be the only grounds for holding a job. The new secretary of transportation, for instance, is a former MTV personality who has a degree in marketing.
The irony is, after the first Trump administration, some voters turned to Joe Biden so they didn’t have to think about the president every day. But having returned an emboldened Trump to office, they have set themselves up to hear more about the executive branch than they ever thought possible. On Thursday I spent about an hour reading about how airplane wings create lift because I wondered if the secretary of transportation knew. One way or the other, lessons will be learned.
