As metaphors go, "low-hanging fruit" is a pretty easy one to understand. You walk through an orchard while picking fruit that is easy to reach and offers no obstacles to harvest. You just reach up, pluck some low-hanging fruit, and you effortlessly have some apples or oranges in your hands to enjoy. The problem (that the metaphor subtly points out) is what happens after all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Then you've got to expend a lot more effort to get the rest of it -- with ladders that have to be climbed and whatnot.

The Trump administration is now in the process of picking all the low-hanging ideological fruit they can. There are silly examples (such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico on a whim), but there are also much bigger and more serious ones, such as President Elon Musk eviscerating federal departments he has taken a dislike to, and the increased focus on deporting immigrants. So far, both of these efforts are walking through their respective orchards and grabbing the easiest fruit to harvest (metaphorically speaking, of course). But what happens when all the easy pickings are gone? That's what I've been wondering, so when I came across the subject (and the metaphor) in a Politico article today, I took note:

The early targets of billionaire Elon Musk and conservative technocrat Russ Vought -- including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- were chosen because they carry little political risk, especially among conservatives, according to three people close to the Trump administration, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the strategy.

The agencies are little-known and opaque to most Americans. Trump and his allies, meanwhile, have sold them to their base as examples of an unchecked bureaucracy that is aiding other countries, creating more red tape, researching climate change or promoting policies out of step with their agenda.

"You gotta light things on fire that burn the brightest and have the most distinctive smell of waste, fraud and abuse," said one White House ally, granted anonymity to share insights on the cuts.

A White House official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the work, described the early moves at the agencies as "low-hanging fruit."

The article follows this up with a warning:

The next phase of the dismantling -- which is likely to include the Department of Education, the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services, according to some of the people close to the administration and the president himself -- could be more challenging, as it takes aim at programs that are better-known, more popular and have much more support on Capitol Hill.

The overreach is already becoming a little painful, even to red-state Republicans, as the "waste, fraud, and abuse" meat axe has begun slashing things like medical research grants. Many of those grants go to universities -- in both blue stands and red. Eliminating this funding stream is going to hit hard not just in Democratic-run states, to put this another way. And some Republicans are already pushing back on the idea: "Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) has voiced concern on behalf of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, which was among the top 30 recipients of NIH funding in 2024, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) called the cuts 'arbitrary.'"

What's going to happen when Musk gets around to eliminating FEMA and "auditing" the Social Security Administration? Some on the right love to hate FEMA, but what happens when it's not around as a useful whipping boy any more? What will happen when the inevitable hurricanes hit red states in the South? Who will the voters blame when disaster relief fails to show up (or is ineffective)? And people call Social Security "the third rail of politics" for a good reason -- namely: "you touch it and you die."

I've already predicted that Musk is going to run into a buzzsaw of pushback when he takes on Pentagon spending, because it seems completely predictable to me. But military funding isn't the only thing lots of Republican politicians actually care about -- to say nothing of their actual constituents. Again, plenty of rightwing politicians love to demonize the federal Department of Education, but gutting it or eliminating it is going to bring a lot of anxiety to parents everywhere about their children's schools getting the funding they need to operate.

This isn't the only way team Trump is going to run out of easily-pickable fruit. Trump ran for office promising to deport millions and millions of immigrants, and he began this effort with a public relations effort intended to highlight "criminals" and "gang members" that were shown being led away in handcuffs. But even these early efforts have swept up a large percentage of non-criminals and non-gang-members. What is going to happen when they run out of dangerous people they've already identified for deportation (previous to Trump even entering office)?

The immigration enforcers have reportedly been given quotas -- hard numbers that they must deport on a daily basis. How are they going to meet these numbers when all the easily-deportable criminals are gone? They'll instead go after the easiest way to round up large numbers of immigrants, which is to launch workplace raids.

This is going to be problematic for them for a number of reasons. The first is that it threatens big Republican donors -- the people who profit from hiring undocumented workers (and exploiting them for low wages). Farmers, meat processors, and construction firms will all feel the pinch. And, assumably, they'll all complain to the Republicans who represent them (and who they've donated lots of campaign cash towards).

The second reason this is going to cause blowback is the law of supply and demand. Some of the farmers and meatpackers and construction firms may be able to replace their lost workforce with American workers. However, this is going to cost them more money. And when their costs go up, the prices they charge will go up as well.

This is assuming that they will even be able to replace such workers. The jobs many immigrants perform are physically demanding and not fun to do, for the most part. Some of these jobs are so tough that American workers will not do them -- for any price. Think of workers in the fields, doing what is called "stoop labor" (since it all involves bending over all day long). What price would you have to pay a young American worker to do such labor? Whatever you think the answer is to that question, at the very least it equals "many times more than what is paid to immigrants." How many American high school graduates apply for jobs in meatpacking facilities? That's another way to look at it.

What this can lead to is having good food rotting in the fields because there is no one left to harvest it. Even if somehow this massive waste can be somewhat averted by employing legal workers, the price of that food is going to wind up being a lot higher (because of the increased labor costs to harvest it, or because of reduced supply because much of the crop rotted in the fields).

There is no computerized A.I. or robotic answer to this, it bears mentioning. These are jobs that cannot be easily automated (if they could have been, they would have been by now). You can harvest corn and wheat with giant machines, but not so much tomatoes and (to return to our metaphor) most fruit.

But with the set quotas for rounding people up, eventually workplace raids on farms and meatpacking plants seem pretty inevitable (historically this has been true, at any rate). There will just be no other way to reach the assigned quotas without doing so -- because (once again), arresting more criminals and gang members (once the ones who have already been identified have been successfully targeted) is a lot harder than ICE rolling up on a field full of ripe celery or bell peppers and just grabbing everyone there harvesting the crops. The farmworkers ironically will become the default "low-hanging fruit" themselves -- and the temptation to target them will be irresistible to those ICE officers looking to meet their quotas.

Depending on how widespread this becomes, it could very easily have an inflationary effect in the place most average Americans are already worried about -- the prices in their grocery stores.

So far, the average voter hasn't reacted all that negatively to much that Trump and Musk have been doing. Few of them are personally impacted if U.S.A.I.D. disappears, to put it another way. But Elon Musk "auditing" Social Security or the Pentagon is going to be a different story. And sticker shock in the produce and meat department in the grocery store is also not going to endear the public towards the effects of Trump's promised roundup of millions of immigrants.

Sooner or later, you wind up picking all of the low-hanging fruit -- and then you're going to have a much harder time with the rest of it. I have no idea when we'll reach that point, but barring team Trump just declaring victory and ending their efforts, they're going to reach that point sooner or later. They're going to start slashing government programs that people deeply care about, and they're going to start impacting the price of food and housing in a big way. Trump could make Elon a scapegoat and get rid of him (if one of his budget-slashing efforts blows up in his face), but he's going to have a tougher time backing down on his plans for mass deportation in the face of consumer outrage in the produce and meat departments.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant