By JOE MURCHISON
Last month, The Laurel Independent ran a story about the reaction of a federal worker to the efforts of President Donald Trump and his advisor, billionaire Elon Musk, to slash the federal workforce. Another federal employee called in response to that story to give his own reaction, which is presented here.
Douglas Dribben has worked for the federal government for 46 years, most of that time as a military and civilian lawyer. An Odenton resident who works at Fort Meade and is a member of a Laurel fraternal order, he has taken the buyout offered by the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the unbudgeted agency that Trump created under the leadership of Musk.
“It’s a great program for the American public because it’s cutting the fat,” Dribben said of the buyout offer and other administration cost-cutting measures. “We have too many people doing too little, and so the government is simply saying, ‘We want to get rid of some.’ … There’s a lot of bloated bureaucracy, there’s a lot of duplication.”
The buyout offer, presented by Musk (under the auspices of DOGE) to most federal employees in a January email titled “Fork in the Road,” allows workers to be placed on administrative leave after they are approved. They have been told they will receive full pay through Sept. 30 or, if they are putting in for retirement, through as late as Dec. 31. Dribben is among some 75,000 employees who have taken the buyout. He said he has been informed that his administrative leave should start sometime in March.
Dribben approves of Trump’s and Musk’s desire to trim the federal workforce by 10%. “Ten percent is probably a manageable number, if not more,” he said. He also said Trump and DOGE should easily be able to cut $1 trillion from government expenditures during the four-year term. “I’m amazed, and I think the vast majority of Americans are amazed, at what we have been spending money on and to whom we have been giving that money,” he said. “We’ve been feeding Afghan Taliban people, for example. It’s all out there. There are websites that list all that.”
While he thought Musk and DOGE could have been more, in his words, “respectful” in some of their communications with federal workers, Dribben said criticism aimed at them was often overwrought. Musk, he said, “is the richest man in the world. He’s doing this for free, and he has no authority. He can’t fire a single person; he cannot make a single decision. To act, it goes to President Trump. Now, President Trump has delegated him a lot of authority to figure out how to find this stuff [fraud, waste and abuse], but he’s just passing on this info to the president.
“All those people who think this unelected richest man in the world is the acting president and has the power and want to steal their Social Security number for some reason, it’s ludicrous,” he added.
Dribben said the administration’s attempts to fire most probationary employees, who have been at their jobs for less than two years, makes sense, because these workers haven’t gained enough expertise and institutional knowledge to be key employees. “I’ve had several of these people at my command who have left, and we didn’t notice. … We can replace them fairly easily.”
Staffing adjustments probably will need to be made at the end of the layoffs, he suggested. “I think there’s going to be a bigger cut, perhaps, than most people thought necessary or wanted, and then we’re going to come back from that cut a year from now and rehire selectively.”
Longer-term federal workers who have shown their value shouldn’t be intimidated by the firings and layoffs, Dribben said. “If you’re an employee who is afraid of this, you probably have a good reason to be. … If you’re competent and you’re confident in your competence, the government’s not going to fire you.”
As enthusiastic as Dribben is about cost-cutting, he said he wasn’t entirely satisfied with DOGE’s approach. “If I were running DOGE, I would have targeted [firing] … those people who, after a quick analysis, had jobs that could be streamlined, automated or who had a history of not performing well, based on reviews by your supervisors. I would not have offered [the buyout] to people like me … who have performed well.”
Dribben added that what he called DOGE’s “chainsaw approach rather than scalpel approach” had negative effects on his own office, where 10 employees have worked at the headquarters of the Army Claims Service at Fort Meade. These employees have a huge workload adjudicating claims against the U.S. military around the world, often filed by people employed by or associated with the military.
Three of the 10 took the buyout, Dribben said, adding, “I’m 100% certain we’re going to hire new attorneys next year.”
