(Daily Signal)—Fear is a strong motivator—especially when it’s given a political megaphone. And Democrat officials, public employee unions, and their minions in the media have no qualms about trying to terrify the public with ridiculous claims in an attempt to counter President Donald Trump’s swamp-cleansing initiatives through the work of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Just look at the recent hysteria from Capitol Hill. Last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., likened the dismissal of federal employees to “a bank robber trying to fire the cops and turn off the alarm just before he strolls into the lobby.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, pontificated that “firing this many critical employees at once could make it impossible for our government to provide BASIC services.”
But the nuttiest scream of all came from yet another congresswoman, Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., who urged supporters of dismissed U.S. Agency for International Development workers to “Shut down the city! We are at war!”
She didn’t want to talk about the bizarre, absurd misuses to which those USAID workers had put the hard-earned dollars of American taxpayers, like funding a “transgender comic book” in Peru. That is certainly something worth “going to war” about. Not!
As usual, mainstream media outlets are seeking to amplify the political Left’s hysteria. But a realistic look at the reduction in federal bureaucracy relative to the bloated size of the federal government shows just how ridiculous these claims are. They are engaging in the worst type of fearmongering hyperbole.
The numbers can’t be exaggerated.
The current proposals for reduction in federal agency personnel add up to just over 238,000 employees. But that number represents less than 8% of the more than 3 million current federal employees, according to the Pew Research Center. That 3 million figure, however, does not include the roughly 1.3 million active-duty military personnel. Pop that number in and out of the total of 4.3 million individuals receiving paychecks from the federal government—paid for by U.S. taxpayers—the Trump administration wants to reduce the size of the executive branch by only 5.5%.
That 4.3 million number of total employees makes the U.S. government the largest single employer in the entire country, larger than private companies like Walmart or Amazon. Moreover, that number is so large that it means the federal government bureaucracy is larger than the total population of half of the states, including places like Utah, Kansas, and Wyoming.
Add in the conglomerate of 109,000 government contractors, according to a 2024 study by the Government Accounting Office, and the dismissal percentage plummets even more. The estimates of the number of individuals employed by those contractors range from almost 4 million to over 5 million. Including those federal contractors drops the percentage of taxpayer-paid staff being laid off even more drastically.
If less than 8% of the civilian workforce has been shaved off, without taking into account contractors, that means over 92% of federal bureaucrats are still staffing the multitude of federal agencies. That’s 2.8 million federal workers still taking care of the business of the federal government. If the critics are correct that this minuscule reduction will cripple America, that says a lot about the inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and incompetence of vast swaths of the government.
Only by ignoring these statistics can critics continue to proclaim that the reductions in force proposed by the Trump administration will lead to a disaster. In fact, fewer government workers means fewer federal bureaucrats trying to overregulate, overtax, and overburden Americans in their personal lives, their businesses, and their professions.
Nor is this the end of the road for laid-off federal employees. Apparently, the critics believe that having to join the rest of us in finding a job in the private sector is a terrible infliction of harm.
Yet over 30% of the federal workforce holds a bachelor’s degree, and over two-thirds of the now-former staff of USAID possess postgraduate degrees. These folks will be just fine in the private sector, although they might have to actually show up at their workplaces to work (horrors—what an inconvenience!).
It’s time for everyone to take a deep breath. And it is time for the American taxpayer to stop being burdened with paying the salaries of federal employees who are so numerous that they dwarf the populations of so many states.
While the pace at which Trump has implemented his plans may be surprising, that is only because Washington usually moves at a glacial pace, when it moves at all. But his actions to constrain and streamline the federal government have been needed for a long time—with no one until now willing to do anything to try to trim the bloated monstrosity that the federal government has become. Most importantly, his moves are improving—not wounding—the government.
Those listening to the shrill cries of the critics should step back and take in the full picture—a picture that shows that trying to get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse that infests the nation’s capital will benefit the American people and the republic.
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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.
