By Andy Brockman
Morgan Kinney is best known to the archaeological social media as @Archaeowolf, telling stories about adventures in archaeology and exposing the grift of pseudoarchaeologists and its cheerleaders like Graham Hancock. However, alongside his role as a populariser and communicator, Mr Kinney had a day job overseeing the archaeology on fourteen million acres of federal land in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest. as an employee of the Forest Service of the US Department of Agriculture [USDA]. Then in November 2224 came the election of President Donald Trump and with that ,on the back of a quarter of a billion dollar donation to the Trump campaign, along came Elon Musk.
With the US political system still grappling with what Elon Musk’s, self styled, Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] actually is? What, if any, are the extent of its legal powers? And precisely what is the official status of the South African born business man and, of and on, richest man in the world, Musk spread teams of young computer engineers with no background in operating, let alone understanding, Government mechanisms, virally through the systems of the US Federal Civil Service.
According to Musk their objective was to uncover waste and fraud in the State and slash trillions from the US budget. Others saw Musk’s efforts as a repeat of what he had done to Social Media platform Twitter when he took it over. That is sack most of the staff, including those engaged in safety critical functions, and move so fast that the operation remained several steps ahead of any legal action to restrain the project.
Certainly the effects across Washington and the federal administration were immediate and shocking. Whole agencies were decimated, and in the case of USAID, all but deleted and it was not a case of a single stroke. The impact of DOGE and Trump’s executive orders, rippled outwards from Washington to the furthest corners of the country, including to the historic, landlocked and sparsely populated, State of Montana.
Amid the carnage Morgan Kinney took to his regular platform of TikTok to offer an instant and understandably angry, commentary on what had happened to himself and his colleagues in Montana on 14 February.
Above the hashtags #WrongfulTermination and #StValentinesDayMassacre Kinney posted to his three hundred and eighty four thousand followers,
“If there was doubt on Friday it’s sure sh*t now.” .
He then described the bureaucratic finality of the brutally sudden terminations which were decimating his employer, the US Forest Service,
“I just dropped off my computer and ID card and access keys and now we’ll figure out a time when I can get my personal effects out of my office,” he said, reflecting,
“This region lost eleven, archaeologists. Eleven heritage staff. I was in charge of fourteen million acres, just me. Imagine how many eleven people covered. F*ck…?”
Following his post on TikTok the Marc Barkman-Astles approached Mr Kinney on behalf of the #WatchingBrief podcast for an extended interview because we thought it was important to get some insight into what was actually happening to archaeologists in the United States and and in particular, what it was like to be on the receiving end of Elon Musk’s controversial DOGE campaign to radically downsize the US Government.
“Everyone could see that there was going to be some upheaval” Morgan Kinney told us “I mean you know Trump is if anything he’s not you know subtle yeah he’s not he’s he’s not sneaky. He’s a bragger he’s a narcissist you know he’s throwing it out there. All this stuff he’s going to do and I think a lot of people were like oh well he’s just going to be big and loud and I imagine that if Elon Musk wasn’t involved it would be another four years like the first term of him being big and loud and squealing like a pig stuck in the dirt but not a lot happening.”
But for Kinney the difference between that first term as POTUS and Trump 2.0 is Elon Musk.
“With Elon Musk pushing buttons like he is it’s it’s become this entirely new machine that is kind of shockin.” Kinney said.
Kinney described how he and his colleagues had received the now infamous “Fork in the Road” email from DOGE.
“That said if you want to resign here’s what we can give you and that was the if you resign just type “resign” and reply in the reply bar and that was it and I’m like that can’t be a legal binding thing I’m sorry um yeah you’re supposed to get paid till September full Benefits full full salary but not actually have to come to work yeah.”
Others involved were also questioning the legality of what DOGE seemed to be doing. Especially as the emails seemed to have originated in batches and via templates which bore no sign of having been properly thought through and drafted in accordance with any recognised practice in human resources management.
“The moment we got that email within I think four hours we got an email from the union regardless if you were a union pay Union due paying member or not .” Kinney remembered.
The Union advised that the only part in the communication which had legal teeth was if a recipient had indeed replied “Resign”.
The Union also advised that DOGE did not have the authority to promise the pay or benefits on offer because such a movement of money would have to go through Congress as an Appropriations Bill and there was no sign of that happening, particularly when the Senate, with its very narrow Republican majority, was already engaged in a fierce row over the new administration’s budget, amid predictions that opposition from Democrats and splits on the Republican side, means the legislature could reach an impasse by mid March, shutting down the Government.
“I hope that’s when the Democrats stick it to him.” Kinney said.
Having offered the carrot of resign and be paid until September, by mid February the round of firings began and after initially thinking he had dodged the DOGE bullet, on February 14, St Valentines Day, Morgan Kinney was told by his team leader that his post had been terminated.
The reason given was “Poor Performance”.
This crude catch all it turned out to be the standard reason being given for the abrupt terminations across federal agencies. It also happens to be just about the only reason a federal agency can use to summarily fire an employee.
In fact Morgan Kinney was just fifty two days short of being confirmed in his post and his most recent appraisal had described him as a “fully successful mission critical employee.”
We put it to Mr Kinney that such a misrepresentation was almost certainly legally actionable.
“Yeah oh 100% it is 100% actionable,” Kenney said, adding that there are already cases being filed with suggestions the Administration was already reeling back its ambitions because. as Kinney put it, “they they’ve touched the stove.”
Kenny recalled, “I sat on a teams call with a lawyer who works for a a law firm that deals specifically with federal employees and there were there were about 1100 people in that call yeah just getting like the taking information and learning what we can and cannot do.”
Nonetheless, the immediate future remains uncertain.
The possibility of legal action remains, but the time scale for that is uncertain, and Kinney is realistic that even a win in the courts might not mean reinstatement for the victims of DOGE.
Kinney echoes the concern that one aim in DOGE moving so fast is that Musk’s operation wants to reach the point where it is fiscally impossible to undo the damage.
It is equally possible that the Federal Government will face enough push back that staff who have been fired may be quietly rehired. After all, as well as the public services which are being impacted, including areas as crucial to the lives of individual Americans as welfare and Medicaid, America’s voters are now finding that those corrupt and grifting Federal employees they have been told about from White House podiums by Elon Musk and President Trump are their relatives, friends, and as Kinney points out, the people who spend money in local shops, bars and all the other businesses which feed the economies of the nation’s communities.
Meanwhile, the risk is the ongoing education and dialogue archaeologists hold with the communities they work in will no longer happen, at least to the extent they have hitherto and archaeological sites, including the most sensitive cultural sites belonging to native peoples, could be damaged or lost without being recorded, or at worst will be looted for private collections and profit.
For Morgan Kenny himself he says that he is going to either have to get a job not in his career field and waste the investment in his career to become something else, or he is going to have to leave his home.
“I don’t have as much power in my household as I’d like to think I do,” he says wryly ” I’m just Dad. I can’t pack up seven horses and four dogs and a you know a dozen and a half chickens and sell this property and move somewhere for a guaranteed project job you know I mean it’s it is a loss loss loss here because even if I just pack up my truck and travel and go work and be an archaeologist I’m gonna be gone. I’m going to be living out of my truck living in hotel rooms project to project to project and I will not see my daughter. I will not see my wife. I will not see my dogs. I will not see, you know, I will not be in this place to care for.”
Amid all this turmoil I asked Morgan Kinney why break cover like this and go public.
“I want to make sure that this gets out there is because social media is such a wonderful thing it connects everybody.” he said.
He explained, “I have talked to people from the forest service from like the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] which takes care of food um the CDC [Centre for Disease Control] the VA [Veterans Affairs] um the NCS which is Natural Resources Consulting the FAA [Federal Aviation Authority] and the Park Service and all of these agencies that have lost anywhere from, I mean the Forest Service lost 3400 people in the stroke of a pen.
That is 3400 people with families, friends, social networks and that is the hidden, all too human, cost of the Musk/DOGE attempt to the deconstruct the US Federal Government by acting like a Silicon Valley start up, moving fast and breaking things.
And the possibility remains it may be that, thanks to its own carelessness and incompetence in legal compliance, and the hubris of its leader of dubious legal status Elon Musk, that it will be DOGE itself which is broken in the end by the enormity of what is being attempted.
As Morgan Kinney said in that first TikTok post, in the cold anger at what was happening to himself and his colleagues,
“I hope everyone that voted for him [President Trump] is happy at how he is raping the country because it is your f*cking tax dollars which are going to be spent on fighting every single one of the cases that’s coming his way.”
**STOP PRESS**
Just as this article was being completed news emerged that a federal judge in California had found that the Trump Administration’s Office of Personnel Management [OPM] had exceeded its authority in carrying out the mass firings in federal agencies.
Clinton appointed District Judge William Alsup said that he did not believe the OPM’s claim that each agency had made its own decisions over who to fire.
“Plaintiffs…have mustered a mountain of evidence that points in the other direction from a broad range of federal agencies.” the judge wrote
.
The lawsuit brought on behalf of thousands of federal workers by trade unions and civic bodies, claimed that far from being an attempt to eliminate waste and fraud,
“[The Trump administration] in one fell swoop has perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not.”
Judge Alsup responded writing,
“It is unlikely, if not impossible, that the agencies themselves had the time to conduct actual performance reviews of the thousands terminated in such a short space of time…it is even less plausible that the OPM alone managed to do so.”
It is too early to say what, if any, the effect of Judge Alsup’s determination will have on the cases of the federal workers like Morgan Kinney, who have already lost their jobs.
Andy Brockman is the editor of thePipeLine and co-presenter of the #WatchingBrief podcast.
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Featured Image: Morgan Kinney, Courtesy of Archaeosoup Productions.
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