(Zero Hedge)—The first month of Donald Trump’s second term has been a hurricane of activity, with Elon Musk’s DOGE pursuing a scorched earth policy on government waste. Despite continuing disruptions by Democrats and activist judges the audits of federal government agencies continue. Trump’s executive orders are likely designed to catch the bureaucracy off guard so they don’t have time to hide their mismanagement. However, in all that beautiful mayhem many in the public are confused as to what cuts have actually been made.
Establishment economists are predicting a recession for the Washington DC area due to the mass layoffs (which is not necessarily a bad thing). The concern over recession within the financial media helps to illustrate how real the cuts are and how worried the progressives have become. Some argue that conservative employees will be caught up in the cleansing along with their leftist counterparts, however, looking at the voting record of the population of DC it’s not much of a threat.
Over 92% of the district voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Only one Republican candidate has ever won more than 20% of the DC vote (Richard Nixon in 1972). The town is crawling with leftists, many of them working within the bowels of the government. No tears should be shed over rising unemployment in Washington.
The federal government employs 3 million civilian workers today – A massive number. The last time the government had this many employees was in 1994. The foundation for ever growing government was established in 1933 under Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal”; social programs and debt spending became the norm. The national debt grew by 50% in only three years after the New Deal was passed and, contrary to the propaganda, it accomplished little in the way of solving the problems at the root of the Great Depression.
Trump’s federal cuts, if he follows through as he has promised, could mean the smallest federal government apparatus in almost a century. Here is a list of agencies that have received pink slips so far…
USAID
Trump now has the legal go-ahead to gut USAID. The organization has at least 10,000 employees and most of them will be fired in the coming weeks. So far 2000 are being put on leave while others are being reviewed to determine if they are essential. It is expected that Trump will ultimately keep less than 300.
Deferred Resignations
The White House offered a “deferred resignation” proposal in exchange for financial incentives to almost all federal employees who opted to leave their jobs by February 6th. But a federal judge blocked Trump’s plan, wanting to hear arguments from the administration and the labor unions. According to the Office of Personnel Management, about 75,000 federal employees had accepted the offer.
Probationary Employee Layoffs
Federal workers with less than one year on the job are subject to immediate layoffs. All agencies have been ordered to fire such employees, meaning up to 220,000 are let go. Many of these probationary workers are included in the general cuts for institutions like the Department of Defense.
IRS
Trump is moving ahead with layoffs within the IRS. The agency employs at least 100,000 people and Trump’s cuts only affect 6000 of them. However, questions are swirling over Trump’s intentions to eliminate the IRS entirely, a move which most Americans would welcome.
Department of Homeland Security and TSA
The DHS has executed only 400 layoffs so far, all of them considered “non-mission critical” personnel.
FAA
The FAA has fired 400 staff according to the union representing the employees. DOGE has also been ordered to further investigate and streamline the efficiency of the agency.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
100 workers have been fired from the CFPB.
Department of Education
The battle over the Dept. of Education is ongoing. No measurable layoffs have been executed yet, but Trump says he intends on removing the agency entirely, which would mean 4400 worker layoffs.
Department of Energy
The department famous under the Biden Administration for hiring a trans activist official that liked to steal women’s luggage from airports. Approximately 2000 personnel have been fired so far.
Department of Health and Human Services
Thousands of probationary employees were cut from the HHS and NIH along with 700 employees fired from the CDC.
Department of Land Management
At least 2300 employees have been let go including 800 from BLM and 1000 from the National Park Service.
EPA
Around 500 staff have been terminated from the EPA after an efficiency review, including the entire staff of the EPA’s Diversity and Inclusion office.
Small Business Administration
720 SBA employees were fired, including hundreds of probationary workers.
US Forest Service
Around 3400 employees have been terminated from the Forest Service, at least 10% of the total staff. Much griping has been made in the media about these job losses, though many of them involved positions in “climate change education” and DEI initiatives. The layoffs do not include firefighters, law enforcement officers, bridge inspectors or meteorologists.
Inspectors General
Each of the federal government’s largest agencies has its own independent inspector general who is supposed to conduct objective audits, prevent fraud and promote efficiency. Trump has fired at least 17 of them and it’s understandable why. With the amount of fraud and waste DOGE has found so far, it’s difficult to justify their continued employment. What a surprise, the bureaucrats policing the bureaucrats doesn’t work.
Department of Justice
Trump is firing all Biden era attorneys from the DOJ, including those that hounded him over the last four years. The Justice Department said last month that it had fired more than a dozen employees who worked on criminal prosecutions of Trump by special counsel Jack Smith’s team.
State Department
A large number of senior career diplomats who served in politically appointed leadership positions, as well as in lower-level posts at the State Department, left their jobs at the demand of the new administration. It was not immediately clear how many nonpolitical appointees were being asked to leave.
DOGE’s Window Of Opportunity
Given that Trump has faced ongoing legal challenges on his crusade to reduce the size of government, the level of cuts is still extensive. DOGE is a limited program that ends in 18 months, just in time for Mid-Term elections where Trump will need to solidify the conservative control of the Congress and Senate while also booting out those pesky deep state Neo-Cons still haunting the the halls. Whatever layoffs they plan to enforce will all be done in the next year.
This means the whirlwind will continue. Legal opposition will likely wane as it becomes clear to Democrats that there’s nothing they can do to stop the policies that the American people voted for. It will be interesting to see what the federal government looks like in 2026.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
