The legacy media have chosen perhaps the most outrageous attack on President Donald Trump’s efforts to pare back the federal bureaucracy and gain control of well-insulated Deep State: DOGE efforts are harmful, because they make it harder for federal bureaucrats to get divorced.

The liberal website Axios warned Monday that federal employees who describe themselves as “wannabe-divorcés are delaying the process because they want more security about their employment status before they put themselves on the hook” for a costly divorce, including obtaining a new singles pad in America’s 11th most expensive rental market. 

“When the income takes a dip, how do you calculate alimony? How do you calculate child support? How long is the decrease in income going to last?” asked a lawyer who oversees divorces for those in the federal workforce. “When the economy is not doing well, you have less options on how to problem-solve untangling two people’s financial lives.”

Another lawyer, Cheryl New, said the Trump/DOGE efforts, which amount to a mere 6% of Washington’s sprawling bureaucracy, also complicated divorce for “Washington power-player” clients. They ask her, “Am I going to be able to afford the four homes that I bought and the three kids in the private school?”

Stories like these are valuable for two reasons. First, they demonstrate the alternate universe Beltway journalists inhabit. Rather than publish a story on how budget cuts make it harder for married couples to stay together, a liberal website thought Americans would rise up in indignation because Trump’s popular cost-saving measures complicated fired DEI officials’ plans to break their marriage vows and still keep the summer home.

Perhaps realizing the futility, the legacy media settled on another line of attack: DOGE cuts are killing people. The Washington Post late last month ran a story directly tying Trump layoffs of federal bureaucrats to their attempted suicides. One bureaucrat told the Post working under the Trump administration, “The depression now is worse than during my divorce, worse than when my mom died of cancer.”

According to Jeff Bezos’s newspaper, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are virtually pushing federal bureaucrats out of windows. Both the WaPo story and CNN’s Dana Bash “cherry-picked” a quotation made by Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought in 2023 saying — as the president cuts fraud, increases efficiency, and fires intransigent bureaucratic holdouts who refuse to carry out his orders — “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”

The Post likened DOGE to a French employer who wanted to induce workers’ resignations, so “employees were demoted, reassigned to ill-suited jobs” — much like Marlean Ames, an Ohio government employee who was denied a promotion, demoted from her current post, and saw her salary cut nearly in half as her boss hired two, less qualified people who identified as LGBT. 

The Washington Post, Axios, and the legacy media cover stories from the standpoint of the Deep State and power-players (and, until recently, USAID) for the same reason The Wall Street Journal features stories about stockbrokers: That’s their constituency. Where was their sympathy over the last four years, when at least 11 million illegal immigrants entered the United States? They rushed to claim Haitian illegals were not literally eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.

Where was their sympathy for East Palestine, Ohio, when the noxious chemicals officials burned off — unnecessarily, as it turned out — settled into drinking water and the Biden administration (especially Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg) abandoned them? In recent weeks, the Government Accountability Project has obtained documents that FEMA warned of the outbreak of “cancer clusters” in the area but covered it up. Axios and The Washington Post had nothing to say about it. (WaPo implied J.D. Vance used the tragedy as a “showcase” for his populism.)

Second, the story’s more important aspect comes as it reveals the moral compass guiding those who write and implement the federal regulations that bind the rest of the country. Experts say “irregularities” in the census data make it hard to gauge divorce rates in the nation’s capital, but no one doubts Washington leads the board in a closely related metric: adultery. Forbes dubbed the District the “Capital of Marriage Infidelity” in 2015. “DC Is for Cheaters” proclaimed a 2012 headline from the local NBC News affiliate, noting the District of Columbia had ranked #1 for infidelity every year since 2009. AshleyMadison.com, which facilitated affairs, named D.C. its most adulterous city three years running. The top neighborhoods for adulterers were Dupont Circle (the location of Embassy Row, which also hosts D.C.’s annual Pride March), Georgetown, and Arlington; Capitol Hill ranked sixth. In 2022, the website MyDatingAdviser.com’s “Infidelity Index” ranked D.C. 10th out of 200 major U.S. cities.

Washington, D.C., also has the nation’s highest percentage of people who identify as LGBTQ+. In 2016, the number of LGBT-identifying residents was 461% higher than the nation’s average and three-and-a-half times higher than the highest-ranking state, Hawaii, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBT advocacy group posing as a think tank. More recently, sociologists at Bowling Green State University analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, which asked respondents about their sexual preference, and found 16.27% of D.C. residents described themselves as LGBTQIA+ in 2022, down from 19.5% in 2020-2021.

This is the moral framework guiding the unelected bureaucrats who write the nation’s regulations. We hope the DOGE cuts will inspire these troubled families to consider another alternative: staying together and being happy. Multiple studies show married couples are happier, healthier, and better off financially. God’s word brings blessings. If Washington’s federal workforce embrace God’s commandments in their personal lives, perhaps they could allow it to inform America’s regulations, as well. In the meantime, if President Trump’s DOGE efforts helped a single couple reconsider breaking up their family, we should say, “Axios!”