Chaos
Allison Silberberg's Plain Talk
Chaos
By Allison Silberberg
October 9, 2025
Chaos. That is the word that comes to mind when I think of the state of our country. And I sense that things will get far worse.
President Trump is literally creating a war zone in major cities by sending the National Guard to cities like Chicago and Portland. There is no need for him to do that. More people will speak out and walk their streets in peaceful protest as one Presbyterian minister did a couple of days ago in Chicago, but ICE agents shot that priest in the head with a pepper bullet. The minister was injured even though he did nothing but stand on a street and use his right to speak. It’s called freedom of speech.
To say this is an unprecedented time in our country is a huge understatement. This is authoritarianism. It is a scary time if a priest cannot speak his mind.
Trump recently said to an assembled auditorium of 800 of our top generals and military brass that he wants our military to root out the “enemy within” our own country. He is going to war against Americans.
Lately, Trump and his top aides keep mentioning the Insurrection Act. Chaos will ensue even more. And the one thing that families, communities, Wall Street, and Main Street all crave is stability and calm and predictability. This is not what we have under Trump.
To recap, in the beginning, Trump said that we as a nation are at war with immigrants even if some are legal. He was hellbent on deporting thousands a day and still is.
He has taken on the media, threatening them and suing them. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are on the chopping block each and every day.
And let’s not forget his threats against universities across our country, including slashing important research funding.
His threats against the judiciary are equally destabilizing, as Trump continues to cast aspersions against judges with whom he disagrees. This threatens our separation of powers and three equal branches of government, thereby undermining our Constitution.
I cannot even think of all the institutions that are under attack. Every day is a new Trump threat against an entity. It’s chaos in America.
Our federal workforce is under constant assault from Trump. During the current government shutdown, all furloughed federal employees are supposed to get their back pay after the shutdown. But now, Trump is saying he doesn’t want to pay them. Tell that to all those who are still working but without a paycheck, or all those who are waiting to get back to their offices. All of this is not right.
In fact, it is against the law. In 2019, Congress passed a law that stipulated that furloughed federal employees must get their back pay after a government shutdown is resolved. Trump even signed the legislation. But now, he is saying that federal employees shouldn’t get paid. Talk about chaos for hundreds of thousands of American families.
In the meantime, so many government services have been chopped up, everything from USAID and the State Department to the Departments of Justice, Education, Internal Revenue Service, and Interior, the Social Security Administration, and Voice of America, to name a few. Tens of thousands of federal employees have already been fired. Those who are left are doing multiple jobs, trying to keep up. Many of them may or may not have the institutional knowledge to handle things though.
Let’s say you don’t care about any of those things, that you believe that they don’t affect you. But it will affect your community, your neighbors, and perhaps your family – the fabric of our society.
Rather than look at ways to make the government work more efficiently, the Trump administration has a point man, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, who wants to get rid of our government.
Trump, Vought, and Elon Musk may wish to ignore the facts about the federal workforce, but the statistics speak volumes.
The federal workforce as a percentage of the total American population has shrunk, according to the Partnership for Public Service. Here are a few facts about our nation’s federal workforce.
First, the population of our country has increased by nearly two-thirds since 1960. In 1960, our population was 180 million. By 1970, our population grew to 203 million. In 2024, it was 340 million. At the same time, if you look at our nation’s employment stats, the federal workforce went from 4.47% in 1960 to 1.89% in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The federal workforce is less than 2% of all those employed in the country.
The overarching point is that the federal workforce was amazingly lean in 2025 when Musk showed up with his infamous chainsaw. It’s foolish and frankly a lie to say otherwise. Some DOGE employees even admitted this.
Further, 85% of the federal workforce works outside of the Washington, DC, area. Think about the economic impact of such government cuts on cities such as Kansas City, which had about 30,000 federal employees. Texas has over 102,000 federal employees. These cuts affect each state and most importantly, affect how services are delivered.
For those who hate the government, think about the food that needs inspecting, the viruses that need to be tracked, the bridges that need to be inspected, the flooding that needs to be addressed, the airplanes that need to fly safely. The list is long. That is a tiny sampling.
Apparently, Vought hates government spending no matter what. The vision and the mission that he and Trump have is to dismantle the government. That in a nutshell is Project 2025, of which Vought was a major architect. As far as Project 2025, the proponents must be thrilled because things are going according to their ruthless plan. Here is the bottom line: People will suffer, and some will die as a result.
Health care is the main point of contention that has caused this government shutdown. In short, the Republicans are dismantling our health care system while Democrats are trying to save it.
The chaos is about to hit in a massive way unless the Dems stop the madness. With his Republican “Big, Beautiful Bill” (BBB), Trump will harm everyone’s health care. And once you lose your health, you have lost everything. No one gets away from the need to receive health care. No one! Health is the great equalizer in life. (I warned about the BBB’s threat to our health care in my first Substack column. I will delve more into that topic in my next column.)
Trump is also threatening Social Security payments to the disabled under the age of 60. That is only the start.
Trump has already chopped SNAP (food stamp benefits) as well as CHIP money, which is health care for low-income children. This is unbelievably unconscionable. Many or most of these programs had bipartisan support previously. Is there no end to Trump’s slash-and-burn approach?
How ironic that we as a nation are in the midst of celebrating the 250th year of our nation’s birth! And yet, our nation is crumbling from within under Trump’s leadership, or lack thereof.
The people of our country are mad and they are about to become far angrier. The anger is palpable. Will Trump even care? And here’s the question that we should all be asking: What happened to him in his life that he should be so rapacious?
The country can and must do better. The essence of our country is at risk. Is this what Bob Dole, Howard Baker, and Al Simpson and other notable Republicans would have wanted? I don’t think so. The Republican Party has been hijacked.
Whatever happens in terms of human suffering and the growth of unmet social needs in our land because of Trump’s destruction of these time-honored programs will be blamed squarely on the Republicans.
And what was it all for? A few tax cuts for billionaires? I don’t get it.
It is tragic. It is chaos. We must all continue to speak out. The next “No Kings Day” will be Saturday, October 18, in communities all over our country. I’ll be there at the one in my community.
Allison Silberberg is a writer and public affairs/public policy consultant. She served as mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, 2016-2019. Her work includes working on staff on Capitol Hill for Senator Lloyd M. Bentsen (D-TX). She is the author of “Visionaries In Our Midst: Ordinary People who are Changing our World,” which hit #1 on Amazon’s List for Philanthropy & Charity. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, on PBS.org. To learn more, please visit: www.allisonsilberberg.com
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