“On the Holmes Front” with Frank Holmes
Less than three months into his second term, President Donald Trump is about to accomplish a major milestone—the kind other presidents before him tried, and failed, to achieve.
To make matters worse, this family has a long-running vendetta against President Trump…and unlike most Democrats, their hatred isn’t just professional or personal: It’s both.
Thanks to the hard work of Tesla founder Elon Musk and his tean of young whiz kids at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Donald Trump is about to cut more government jobs than any president in modern history, maybe ever.
That record used to belong to President Bill Clinton. During his eight years, he fired somewhere between 400,000 and 426,200 jobs from the federal payroll, depending on whose estimates you trust. More impressively, that excludes anyone the Clinton administration axed from the U.S. military—which Clinton gutted after the end of the Cold War—or now-former employees of the United States Postal Service (USPS).
Clinton’s move reduced the total number of bureaucrats from 2.2 million bureaucrats in the whole D.C. executive branch, civilian workforce down to about 1.8 million, according to figures supplied by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
That’s still the size of a huge city or a small state…but it was considered a revolutionary step in the right direction at the time. It earned the big-spending liberal Democrat Bill Clinton political capital as a “centrist” willing to “cross the aisle” to get things done.
And no one liked the idea of holding federal records more than Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president to serve two full terms in office since Franklin Delano Roosevelt more than five decades earlier.
But soon—very soon—all that is going to be gone.
In the intervening years, the federal workforce ballooned to 2.3 million employees, especially with President Joe Biden doling out above-market raises and cost-of-living adjustments to federal bureaucrats.
Federal workers are among the most heavily unionized of all U.S. workers and vote for, and donate to, reliably Democrats in election after election.
President Trump learned the lay of the land in his first term, when he learned too late that the Democratic Party had embedded left-wing moles and saboteurs deep inside the the Deep State.
Trump immediately cleaned house. He had OPM offer generous buyouts to federal workers across the government.
All told, 75,000 people accepted his offer to bow out now instead of hearing Trump say, “You’re fired!” later.
As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth explained, he and other Cabinet officials aimed to “maximize participation so that we can minimize the number of involuntary actions” they take later…and it worked.
But that was the first round: Get ready for round two.
Bureaucrats get the exact same deal: They can quit, and the Trump administration will make sure they keep getting paid through September 30…or take their chances.
One difference is that the buyout offers no longer come from OPM: They come from each, individual department…making them harder to predict, interrupt, or curtail.
So far, the government agencies trimming the HR department’s fat include the Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Energy, Housing and Urban Development (HUD, and Transportation. The Small Business Administration and the General Services Administration are right in line, too, according to Politico.
That has Bill Clinton spitting mad.
First, President Trump broke off their friendship—after the Clintons invited the billionaire mogul to daughter Chelsea’s wedding—and thought about running for president.
He even thought about running in 2012, when he would have faced off against Barack Obama and a team led by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Instead, Trump ran in 2016 and stole Hillary’s ability to claim the title of America’s first female president.
When he promised to put her in jail, he got the whole country to chant, “Lock her up!”
Now, Trump is infringing on Clinton’s place in history.
Trump only needs to cut another 200,000 employees over the next four years…and he’s already gearing up to abolish the entire Department of Education.
Clinton, who has reportedly been depressed since Hillary lost the 2016 election and decided to spend more time at home, can’t feel good about that—and he’s not alone.
As The Horn reported to you earlier this year, Barack Obama’s former staffers have let it be known the first black president is secretly green with envy over The Orange Man’s amazing record, especially when it comes to DOGE personnel cuts.
President Trump, they admitted, got things done Obama could only dream of.
“Honestly, some of this is pretty annoying because it’s some of the stuff we should’ve done,” said former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett on the Pod Save America podcast.
Another Obama speechwriter, Jon Favreau, agreed with Lovett on the podcast, confessing: “We tried to reorganize the government. We tried to find efficiency. It’s hard to do!”
But as President Trump proves, accomplishing great things for the American people isn’t that hard: It turns out, all we needed was a new president.