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When President Donald J. Trump took office for the second time lat year, he enlisted tech giant Elon Musk to help find and cut “waste” in the federal government. Over the first few months of his second-term, Trump, Musk and the Administration cut federal funding to international aid programs, food programs and safety net programs even within the U.S. They took on science and medical research, too, slashing funding to universities and even government research institutions.

By May, Musk announced he was leaving the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE. Though technically DOGE disbanded before the end of 2025, it left the federal government forever changed.

Journalist , a senior continuing lecturer at the , has been covering politics for three decades, writing for publications such as , ,  ,  and .

While the cuts were happening, Abramsky was at work, interviewing distraught workers, following their lives and writing their stories. In his new book,  (OR Books, 2026), Abramsky chronicles the real costs of DOGE cuts just within the first year of the second Trump presidency.

Abramsky officially launched American Carnage in Washington D.C. on Jan. 20, exactly one year after Trump’s inauguration for a second term.

“I want the stories of federal workers to go viral,” Abramsky told a crowd at Avid Reader in Sacramento on Jan. 11, .

He said when The Nation asked him to tell the stories of federal employees affected by DOGE cuts, Abramsky knew he would need more than 4,000 words to really get to the heart of their experiences and bring in the context of the U.S.’s — and the world’s — political history.

“It's heartbreaking to me that you could have people with power using that power to just gut the idea of decency and the idea of empathy,” Abramsky said. “And I think all of that’s epitomized in the DOGE cuts — the way DOGE went in, the way it took people earning $40, $50, $60,000 a year and it gave them two hours to clear their desks. They cut their emails off, got rid of their healthcare the next day and eviscerated their pensions. These are hard working men and women trying to make a buck doing decent public service for the United States and that’s how they were treated.”

In American Carnage, over the course of 170 pages, Abramsky tells the stories of 11 federal workers laid off during the first months of DOGE cuts, including employees from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of the Interior, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the U.S. Forest Service.

“This is a real story with real pain involved,” Abramsky said. The DOGE cuts, he said, were a project in ruthlessness, not efficiency.

Their stories are America’s stories. What happened to them — the bullying, the intimidation, the denigration of character, and the deliberate removal of financial stability — also happened to hundreds of thousands of other employees."

— American Carnage, Sasha Abramsky

“They were described as these sort of faceless, lazy, bureaucrats but, actually, they’re really hard working, they don’t get paid very much, they do jobs that are oftentimes vital for public wellbeing,” Abramsky said. “They do all of that work and then they get demonized in really crude, crass ways.”

Adding up the dollars and cents

In addition to highlighting the experiences of these discarded federal workers, Abramsky selects key moments from 2025 that, by now, readers may have forgotten amongst a deluge of information and misinformation. Two striking “back of the envelope” calculations Abramsky included in the book focus on Musk specifically and the contrast between his wealth and the way he characterized federal spending.

“Musk was saying  — they’re useless, we got to fire them,” Abramsky said. “It turned out that Musk was so wealthy by the middle of 2025 that he could have taken on the entire payload of the entire federal government of over two million people, paid all of their income for a year, paid all of their health benefits and all of their retirement benefits, and Musk would still have had 100 billion leftover at the end.”

In spring of 2025, Musk said that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” During that same time, the U.S., via DOGE, cut funding to USAID. One of the program’s projects was distributing an anti-starvation intervention to children in other countries. The intervention featured a dense, high-calorie, high-protein food called .

“It was proven to bring very, very malnourished children back from the brink of death if they were about to die of starvation and it’s incredibly affordable — it’s literally 25 or 30 cents per little package — and you need to have the kid on it for six to eight weeks,” Abramsky said. “I did a back of the envelope calculation and, it turns out, that you could actually give enough �ʱ��ܳ����’N�ܳ� to 12 million children to keep them alive just if Elon Musk was willing to forfeit one day of his income in early 2025.” 

Empathy, free speech

Facing backlash and criticism isn’t new to journalists and writers, especially those writing on such potentially contentious as politics. Abramsky has not only received hate mail but was, earlier in his career, even denigrated by prominent conservative personality Rush Limbaugh.

“He thought I was a woman,” Abramsky said, remembering the sexist comments.

“There's nothing unique to me about this. Every journalist I know who’s writing on politics gets hate mail at some point,” Abramsky said.

That hate mail comes from both “the left” and “the right,” he added.

“This is par for the course for journalism in the 21^st century and it’s a really destructive development because any democracy relies on the free exchange of information,” Abramsky said. “You can agree with me, you can disagree with me — that’s what I tell my students, I would never try and impose my views on my students.”

Abramsky is open to having political discussions and debates. And, when it comes to students, he expects that, whichever conclusion they come to, they will make their arguments intelligently and respectfully.

“Where I get angry is when people can’t be bothered with political debate and they reach for violence and they reach for violent rhetoric,” he said. “And I get angry whether that violent rhetoric comes from the left or whether it comes from the right. It doesn’t have a place in a functioning democratic system.”

He doesn’t like cancel culture either.

"I don't think anyone has a right to say, "You think outside the box and therefore I'm going to banish you," he said. 

Both violent rhetoric and cancel culture, he said, reflect a breakdown in discourse and debate in politics.

“It is just fundamentally un-American to craft public policy that is so afraid of free speech that it puts the might of the government against individuals for things they have thought or things they’ve expressed,” Abramsky continued. “It’s as un-American an ideology as you can get.”

Abramsky typically teaches non-fiction writing, social justice writing and journalism courses. He also writes a weekly column in The Nation called “Authoritarian Watch.”