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The corridors of power are empty. Many Americans who commute to work every day would be surprised to learn that occupancy of federal buildings [ [link removed] ] in Washington, D.C., is just 12% according to a recent report to Congress. The workers are home, working remotely. Or they are just home. Either way, they are not coming into work in their mostly empty federal buildings. Buildings we are paying for.
The empty halls evoke the notion of Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” his 1842 novel ostensibly about important people who buy and sell dead names still listed on census rolls for financial gain. A friend and former federal employee made this observation to me in the context that, in his experience, federal workers are accumulated and elevated and assigned without necessarily too much thought given to value, like dead souls wandering empty halls.
Because I am not a student of Russian literature, I thought instead of “Ghostbusters [ [link removed] ].”
They Expect Results
If there are empty halls emptying money from tax coffers, taxpayers should be aware of that. The congestion pricing controversy [ [link removed] ] in New York City demonstrates that COVID-19 is over and you have to come into work.
One of the closet capitalist messages in Ivan Reitman’s inspired 1984 movie is that in the for-profit private sector they expect results [ [link removed] ]. Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and colleague Dr. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) have this conversation over a pint of cheap whiskey after getting punted out of their soft gig in academia. They decide to use their credentials and limited means and credit to go into business as paranormal exterminators.
Venkman is portrayed as a shallow carnival barker with no real scholarly credentials to merit his pretense to be an Ivy League academic. He is essentially Donald Trump deciding to go into politics. But in Stantz, Venkman has a partner who proves to be the heart of and true believer in the endeavor. Trump has incorporated both of these impulses.
The first Trump administration can be thought of as Venkman and Stantz going into business for themselves without any help. In 2017, Trump didn’t know what he was getting into, with the predictable result that he struggled to enact his agenda. What he was missing during that first term was an Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), who in “Ghostbusters” provides Venkman and Stantz with the technology they need to turn their wacky concept into something real. In the second Trump administration, Spengler has arrived in the form of Elon Musk, providing the necessary steely-eyed missile man guidance.
Equipped with Spengler’s proton packs and various containment units and sensor devices, Venkman’s team went to work on ghosts. Sure, they shot up a few hallways and a ballroom and made innocents dive for cover. But they caught ghosts. The ghosts were real. And they got better at it.
The American people expect results from the man they elected as their president and the team he has put into place. This team is going directly for secret burial grounds of spectral programs funded from unaccountable sources such as USAID. These programs, on-purpose, cross-purpose and secret purpose alike, are being dragged into direct sunlight. Trump’s proton packs are employee buyouts and Musk’s AI-wielding data miners. He’s giving the ghosts of the federal bureaucracy a chance to get out under their own power. Voters are delighted at and supportive of these efforts even if deep state necromancers and their amen corner in the media howl with rage.
It’s easy to take an analogy too far. But Democrats find themselves in the role of the federal inspector Walter Peck (a game William Atherton in the movie) who wants nothing more than to reverse the Ghostbusters’ gains and go back to the status quo. In the film, this turns out to have disastrous consequences and sets up the showdown with the powers of evil.
It is mostly because Venkman has questionable credentials that the audience identifies with him as he fights Peck and the bureaucracy, even though the bureaucrats supposedly know better. He flummoxes them with one-liners and outrageous insults. Sound familiar? Ultimately, this puts his enemies off their game and makes them look even more ridiculous.
It’s because he gets results busting ghosts that the people in the movie get behind him and his team. They save New York City.
Alas, movies are not reality. The capture of an actual ghost would upend all assumptions of the material universe. This is why you can’t take comparisons too far. Yet here is Trump as Venkman using his outrageous personality and iconoclasm and inspired staffing and decision-making to skewer the sacred cows of the establishment, which responds with sputtering and indignation as it struggles to defend the indefensible.
The Pecks of the Democratic Party are trying to get the people out into the streets to stop the Ghostbusters. But they are finding that Trump’s program is more popular than they realized. We are less than a month into Trump’s second term, but so far the people seem to be behind him. Calls for war in the streets and impeachment are falling flat.
The American people seem interested in what the second Trump term, newly equipped and staffed with unusual personages, can accomplish. Doubters are not wrong to question Gaza and other outlandish proposals. Still, many people seem to want to give the Ghostbusters in the White House a chance.
Ghosts in the Halls
If you can get a ghost to talk to you, of course they are going to say they are important. Everybody is important. Particularly if you work for government. The difference between government employees and those in the private sector is that the former think they have a right to employment. Even lifetime employment with pensions that should be passed onto spouses.
This is not what most working people expect. If they get fired they have to look for another job. Try it sometime. I know. It’s hard.
This is why government workers are like Gogol’s apparatchiks. They believe they are more special and necessary than the people they supposedly serve, even if they don’t have to come into work and don’t really have anything to do.
Just like ghosts exist in the world of “Ghostbusters,” there is unaccountable spending in the U.S. government. If ghosts work against life as we know it, the forensic accountants of Musk’s maligned “little boys” [ [link removed] ] are uncovering money channels that work beneath public knowledge and against the national interests most people think they are voting for.
The government workforce centered on D.C. is now facing the sort of downsizing that is routinely applied to other sectors of the U.S. economy, from energy, to manufacturing, to finance to media. (Musk himself cut nearly 80% of Twitter’s workforce [ [link removed] ] when he bought the company in 2022.) For those of us caught in this buzzsaw, it can be very hard. But as other people in those industries have had to discover, eternal employment is a phantasm.
Unlike Venkman and his Ghostbusters, Trump and his unorthodox team don’t seem to need the money and appear to be motivated by a genuine desire for efficiency and transparency. While the president’s opponents have tried to cast him as a reckless, egotistical charlatan (at best), the American people thus far seem primed for him to bust on.

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