LETTER: Trump’s reductions in the federal workforce are destructive

Your Dec. 26 editorial on President Donald Trump’s reduction of government employees was wrong on several counts. Cutting employees does not reduce bureaucracy, it reduces efficiency. We saw this when Mr. Trump was forced to rehire thousands of workers he had fired because essential services began to fail.

When workforce reductions are truly needed they should be handled through attrition, not by abruptly and illegally firing thousands of employees. Mr. Trump’s approach disrupted the lives of thousands of dedicated public servants and their families.

In my case, my position required up to 10 years of training. Because of hiring freezes and such, I was forced to work thousands of hours of overtime simply to keep essential functions operating. For years, I earned more than the president of the United States. That is not savings. It is waste created by political grandstanding.

Our government was not “unwieldy, inefficient and unaccountable.” It delivered the strongest economy this country had seen in a decade — arguably the best in the world. The damage we are seeing now is the result of Mr. Trump’s reckless and uninformed actions.