Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a plan for federal workers: hard labor.
Photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been a very busy man the past week. By all accounts, he played a huge role in convincing at least some people on Wall Street (and in Congress) that Donald Trump doesn’t really mean what he’s been saying about tariffs and trade deficits for decades now and is in fact just using the tariff “stick” to get concessions from other countries on a broad range of policy concerns. Just as crucially, he personally lobbied the president himself to tone down his rhetoric in order to calm the markets, as Politico reported:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flew to Florida Sunday to encourage President Donald Trump to focus his message on negotiating favorable trade deals — or risk the stock market cratering further, according to two people familiar with the conversations, granted anonymity to share details of them.
Bessent, who landed with the president at the White House on Marine One Sunday night, told Trump that markets would remain in peril unless he started putting more emphasis on talking about his endgame with tariffs — winning deals with other countries.
Bessent’s takeover of tariff messaging from such trade-war enthusiasts as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did indeed reassure movers and shakers enough to quell (at least temporarily) a market meltdown, and probably (again, at least temporarily) head off a civil war in Trump’s inner circle between those who share the president’s love of tariffs and those who like quiet profiteering instead.
But much as investors owe Bessent trillions of dollars that might have been lost in a total market collapse, he also found time to offer reassurance to an unlikely audience through a very unlikely intermediary. Appearing in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the Treasury secretary had some cheerful news for the federal workers the administration is working so hard to lay off:
“On one side, the president is reordering trade,” Bessent said. “On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings.”
“That will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing,” Bessent continued, arguing artificial intelligence and automation would limit how many workers needed to fill new jobs.
While this sort of breezy faith in the infinite fungibility of labor is possible from 40,000 feet, how well will it work in practice? Let’s say you are a 55-year-old auditor at the IRS (very definitely a disfavored position under this administration). What sort of factory job will you be qualified to perform? Even if you find one, is it likely you’ll be able to support your family with the (preferably, from the GOP point of view) nonunionized wages you earn? Since we are living in an era when remote work is becoming illegal, how far must you move to find a smoke-belching factory that’s hiring, and what do you do about the many years that could elapse between federal worker layoffs in 2025 and this magical post-trade-war economy when U.S. manufacturing comes back? And to cite one more troubling problem: Is there a good chance that you, the redundant employee, could get ground up between the AI Elon Musk wants to use to perform your federal-sector job and the AI Scott Bessent suggests will minimize the need for manufacturing labor?
If there are good answers to these questions, we’d all like to hear them from the ever-reassuring Bessent. But it’s worth noting that his entire rap may represent quite the dog whistle to some dark corners of Trump’s MAGA base, where the idea of forcing pointy-headed pencil pushers to do some real work is very popular, as Rotimi Adeoye explained in a fascinating Washington Post column about the online reaction to “Liberation Day”:
Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: “Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a ‘product manager’???” It’s a joke, but it’s also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn’t just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution.
What we’re seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”
This back-to-the-future approach inverts the old neoliberal myth that training for higher-skill jobs will absorb obsolete forms of work, notes Adeoye:
Populists used to share memes about miners who were condescendingly told to “learn to code” while their towns struggled. The coders, in this updated version, need to be thrown back in the mines.
There’s also an intensely reactionary gender politics at work in some of this MAGA joy over white-collar jobs vanishing, as David Atkins observes in a particularly vivid depiction of where Trump is leading the country:
[T]he project is about deskilling America: reducing white-collar work through AI and remote job cuts, destroying universities, starving higher education, using tariffs to wall off the country as a manufacturing-and-extraction island, gutting the cities, and pushing men into manual labor while nudging women into domestic roles.
Now we don’t know that Scott Bessent shares this atavistic vision of burly proles assembling iPhones and mining lithium to power them as their women stay home to breed the next generation of workers and war fighters. But there is something to the idea that everyone in Trump’s orbit is enjoying the agony of DOGE’s victims as though they deserve punishment and a bleaker future.
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