A compassionate portrait of some of the many who suffered when Musk’s foot soldiers targeted dedicated professionals.
What DOGE destroyed.
Demonstrating the kitchen-table impact of the Trump administration’s attack on civil servants, Abramsky, an academic and journalist, fashions perceptive profiles of people fired by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. A reported 148,000 federal employees were idled in the first six months of Trump redux. Those featured here worked in consumer protection, public health, climate science, foreign aid, workplace safety, and tax collection, among others. Dismissed without valid cause and, in some cases, denied severance pay and pensions, Abramsky’s subjects—a racially diverse group of men, women, and nonbinary Americans—struggle to pay bills, obtain prescriptions, and get jobs in a market “saturated” with ex-colleagues axed by DOGE. In enraging detail, Abramsky describes Musk’s lackeys’ “cruelty” and carelessness. DOGE fires employees via wildly unprofessional emails and orders others to stop working entirely while still getting full pay. Angry and anxious, the former employees volunteer in their fields, pray, binge read historical fiction, meet up for “trauma-bonding,” and apply for jobs; one sends out nearly 200 applications. It’s touching that, through it all, the workers remain devoted to their agencies’ missions. An ex-USAID staffer weeps when discussing the agency’s canceled food programs, cuts that almost certainly resulted in preventable deaths abroad. Any organization employing hundreds of thousands is likely to have some waste, a reality Abramsky largely avoids. But his up-close attention to his subjects’ distinct post-government trajectories presents a poignant tableau “of a country in a profound moment of crisis and dislocation.” An erstwhile IRS staffer says that when DOGE came for his agency, he had to leave the building almost immediately. This made government work forever unappealing. Which, Abramsky’s conscientious reporting suggests, is just what DOGE hoped to accomplish.
A compassionate portrait of some of the many who suffered when Musk’s foot soldiers targeted dedicated professionals.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781682196762
Page Count: 150
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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