Flooding the Zone Again

Why it's so difficult to keep up with news about the gutting of government

Flooding the zone

I don’t know about you, but I’m having a hard time keeping up with the news these days. For someone who has followed the news closely for my whole adult life, this is a surreal feeling. But there’s been such a deluge of actions and information (or misinformation) pouring out of the Trump administration for nearly three months now that I’m struggling not just to keep up with it but also to try untangling what’s important from what isn’t.

I’m attempting, as always, to focus on bigger picture politics and on historical parallels to the current moment, but not a lot makes sense in those contexts right now. So, admittedly, there are times when it sounds awfully appealing to just throw up my hands and give up trying.

Which, of course, is the point of it all.

Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece on the Trump team’s strategy of flooding the zone during a campaign. I described it this way:

[Flooding the zone] describes a way of overwhelming the media-political environment … not as a way to drive a narrative, but rather as a means of disorienting the system.

It was based on some quotes from interviews with Trump advisor Steve Bannon. This Bannon statement pretty much sums up the strategy:

“The media … can only focus on one thing at a time … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things … These guys will never — will never be able to recover.”

So if the media can’t keep up — and if the opposition party is having difficulty figuring out what to focus on — well, what chance does the average voter have?

So yes, the goal is to disorient everyone. The media, the opposition, the voters. When there are things to be outraged about almost daily, eventually nothing is an outrage anymore … not because people aren’t bothered, but because they don’t have the energy or bandwidth to keep up with everything. So eventually we give up and stop paying attention.

And that’s when democracy begins slipping away. Without informed and engaged voters there is no democracy.

The Trump-DOGE attack on government

This strategy dovetails nicely with the Trump-DOGE attack on government. Most people know some of what’s happening, but there is such a flood of information inundating the news that (just as Bannon predicted) it’s actually difficult to grasp the full scope of what’s been going on.

So I decided to round up a collection of news items about some of what DOGE and the Trump administration have been up to. It took a while to collect but this is still only a partial list, there is no way I could find or publish everything. And it’s focused on cuts to government agencies or services. Tariffs and democracy and other things in the news aren’t included because they’re beyond the scope of this post.

Nevertheless, the list below is an example in black and white of what it means to flood the zone.

One last point before I get to that: I know an argument making the rounds is that these cuts may be painful but they’re necessary if the government is going to get its budget deficit under control.

I’m actually sympathetic to the argument that the deficit is too high. However, I would point out that Elon Musk recently suggested the cumulative savings from all that DOGE is doing will be about $150 billion this year (which would amount to $1.5 trillion over a decade). Meanwhile, the tax cuts that President Trump and Republicans are hoping to pass soon are expected to reduce revenue by $5 to $11 trillion during that same period.

So if you believe we’re making painful cuts because they’re necessary for fiscal sanity, please realize that we’re eviscerating much of the good that government does while still increasing the budget deficit. No one in a leadership position in the Republican Party at the moment is even remotely trying to balance the budget.

I feel it’s important to point that out, and perhaps it deserves a longer discussion. But right now it’s a sidebar to the primary reason for this post, which is to show that so many actions are coming at us so fast that most of us can’t grasp the scale of it all.

The list

Here is a partial list of the departments and/or services the Trump administration has been eliminating (listed alphabetically).

Aviation safety

The administration fired hundreds of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration. While air traffic controllers were retained, the employees who lost jobs work in radar, landing, and navigational maintenance. Which still seems somewhat important, doesn’t it, for an agency dedicated to keeping airplanes and airline travelers safe?

Books and libraries

Millions of dollars in Congressionally appropriated funding to state and local libraries and museums has been eliminated.

The Pentagon is also in the process of removing allegedly objectionable books from schools for children of military personnel. Among the titles removed is a children’s book about the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and any books that mention slavery or the civil rights movement.

The book purge also extends to college students at military academies. The Naval Academy, for instance, just announced the removal of 381 books from its shelves, including Maya Angelou's autobiography, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," and books on the history of the Holocaust, civil rights, and feminism.

Ah, but do you know which books have NOT been removed from the shelves? “Mein Kampf,” by Adolf Hitler, which details the Nazi leader’s political beliefs, and “The Camp of the Saints” a 1973 novel that’s popular among white supremacists.

Child care

The massive layoffs at Health and Human Services are not only affecting public health (see below), but they’ve also decimated the staff and offices that manage Head Start and other child development programs, which provide vital support for poorer families who need help with child care so that parents can work.

Climate

On climate issues, the administration has not only withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate agreement, but has also weakened regulations on pollution from vehicle emissions, suspended support for building electrical vehicle charging stations, blocked approvals for wind farms, and frozen funds for clean energy projects, among other actions.

Consumer protection

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been dismantled. The agency was created after the 2007-08 financial crisis to protect consumers from such issues as errors in medical debt reporting or from payday loan lenders that charge exorbitant interest rates. The Trump administration has since dropped nine lawsuits against banks and mortgage firms the CFPB had filed, including one that charged Capital One with failing to pay more than $2 billion in interest to account holders.

Control of information

It’s not just government agencies that are being eliminated. There are also thousands of pages of government websites that have been taken down, including information about Black History and Women’s History Month, STD prevention, vaccines, hate crimes, Head Start, mental health, climate change, HIV, bullying of transgender individuals, foreign aid, and much, much more. Outside groups have raced to archive and preserve as much information as possible before it disappears.

Control has also been exerted over what public health information the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is allowed to publish, even in scientific journals or about the bird flu outbreak.

Corruption in government

Remember how Trump wanted to drain the swamp? Well, now he apparently wants to fill it. The administration has removed inspectors general, whose job it is to look for corruption in government; fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, who ensures that ethics laws are followed; and decimated supposedly independent agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and Securities and Exchange Commission that regulate businesses.

Election and infrastructure security

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security each had task forces dedicated to stopping foreign interference in U.S. elections. No more. And the government’s early-warning system for cyberattacks, which protects the power grid and other vital infrastructure, was also dramatically reduced. So does this mean we’re OK now with foreign interference in our elections? And our infrastructure?

Food programs

Programs that paid American farmers to provide food to school districts and food banks was eliminated. So not only is the food aid gone, but farmers lost a source of income.

A similar situation is playing out internationally. The U.S. in recent years has spent nearly $2 billion annually on food aid. This food was bought from farmers in the U.S. and distributed to starving children and families abroad. So the end result of this aid cutoff is that American farmers are losing money so that more children can die of starvation.

IRS

We know Republicans hate the IRS. But in cutting 20,000 employees, the administration has shuttered 110 offices that provide assistance to taxpayers, and nearly eliminated the agency’s ability to get wealthy tax dodgers and corporations to abide by tax rules. Because of these steps, the IRS projects it will take in 10% less in tax revenue this year. Which, in turn, will drive the deficit up further.

National Archives

The head of the National Archive was fired. This may not sound all that important, but the National Archives actually has a few crucial roles in government:

• It administers the Electoral College count after a presidential election.

• Provides information to journalists and citizens through the Freedom of Information Act.

• And oversees the protection of all the government’s classified documents (yes, it was the National Archives that first alerted the FBI about Trump’s refusal to return boxes of classified papers after leaving office.)

Hmm, easy to see how having a loyalist installed in this position could be problematic, right?

National Parks

One thousand employees of the National Park Service were eliminated, a loss that is expected to impact services at national parks during the upcoming tourist season (the parks receive more than 300 million visitors each year).

National Weather Service

The National Weather Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also lost hundreds of employees. This is not only going to impact weather forecasts and climate research, but these organizations provide warnings of severe weather events such as hurricanes and tornados, track flood risks, and provide vital information to farmers, fishermen, and the Coast Guard.

Nuclear weapons

Concerned about the safety of the country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons? The Trump administration doesn’t seem to be. They fired hundreds of nuclear scientists and staff, seemingly without realizing that they actually had pretty important jobs in assembling and protecting nuclear weapons. After realizing its mistake the government then tried to rehire them … but had trouble locating many people because in the process of termination the employees had lost access to their government email accounts.

Public Health

The government also had difficulty in rehiring public health employees who were mistakenly fired from an office that is tracking the spread of bird flu. Of course, it’s not stopping the administration from thinking about pulling funding for research into a vaccine for bird flu.

Speaking of public health, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy is in the process of terminating 20,000 employees, many of them at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These are individuals who ensure the safety of food that you buy at the grocery store, track infectious diseases, and work on a host of other issues ranging from substance abuse to rural health care. In fact, the entire staff of the Office of Infectious Disease was laid off, as were top vaccine officials.

In addition, $12 billion in grants to state public health departments were also eliminated. These cuts led to the closing of more than 50 vaccination clinics in Texas alone, right as the state is dealing with a measles outbreak that is still spreading and which so far has killed two schoolchildren and resulted in more than 50 hospitalizations out of 500 or so cases.

They even fired the CDC’s cruise ship inspectors — bizarrely, because the officials are funded with fees paid by cruise ship companies — which has crippled the government’s ability to track and manage infectious diseases that spread on these ships (there have been a dozen norovirus outbreaks just this year).

Public health and foreign aid

Foreign aid isn’t popular, I get it. But the organizations that receive this funding work on such issues as promoting democracy and elections, fighting human trafficking, and managing camps for war refugees. And even if you leave all of that aside, it’s worth considering just the impact on global health from this aid:

• Since the freezing of U.S. foreign aid in January, there have been 11,000 more tuberculosis deaths because of the cutoff of drugs from America.

• It’s estimated there will be about a 30% increase in tuberculosis worldwide, along with 12 million more cases of malaria, 200,000 more cases of paralytic polio, and 28,000 more cases of Ebola and related diseases. And remember, the more cases worldwide, the greater the chance of these diseases spreading to America.

• The U.S. also ended the PEPFAR program to eliminate HIV/AIDS as a global health threat. In the two decades since it was created by George W. Bush with bipartisan support, it has saved 25 million lives.

Scientific research

There have also been considerable cuts to scientific research funds at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and at universities across the country. This is going to impact research into cancer treatments, vaccines, infectious diseases, gene therapy, and more. Grant awards and research jobs will dry up. Ironically, estimations are that every dollar invested in research and development produces an economic return of at least $5.

Moreover, other countries have now started recruiting American scientists. One recent poll showed that three-quarters of scientists are considering leaving the U.S. for better research situations abroad. If this continues, it means that many future research breakthroughs and medical advances will happen in other countries, which led one researcher to call this moment “the apocalypse of American science.”

Social Security

The loss of thousands of jobs at the Social Security Administration have led to disruptions to customer service and, according to workers there, has “caused complete, utter chaos” and is “threatening to send the agency into a death spiral.” Which would obviously not be an ideal result for an arm of the government that provides some level of income to 69 million Americans monthly.

Special education services

By shuttering the Education Department and laying off thousands of employees, it has put into question the future of federal support for special education, which guarantees educational rights for students with autism and other disabilities. The attack on DEI also threatens employment and college-related programs for neurodiverse individuals.

Wildfires and natural disasters

Most of us have heard President Trump complain that many wildfires could be prevented if only, say, California would clear its lands of combustible undergrowth. It’s an interesting complaint because his administration is cutting off funds (from Joe Biden’s infrastructure legislation) that were dedicated to doing exactly that — helping to clear forests of fuel for wildfires.

Was “flooding the zone” worth it for America?

Donald Trump has been in office for 12 weeks as I write this. One week short of three months. He has obviously succeeded in flooding the zone — disabling the mainstream media and the Democratic opposition, overwhelming the attention span of many voters, and even rendering most Congressional Republicans mute.

His administration can gloat about all of this, but I have to ask: Was it really the best way to go about governing? After all, what is now being destroyed was built over many decades of painstaking work. It will take years or decades to rebuild — if it’s even possible to do so at all.

And despite all this, the deficit is still going to increase. This is not a movement for fiscal sanity or government efficiency, it’s an ideological agenda to destroy government. Yet I don’t remember anyone campaigning on this issue. Did Americans know they were voting to have the government disabled without even a debate?

Maybe “flooding the zone” was a good strategy for the administration, but was it a good strategy for America?

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