65 ms·

Pretty terrible to be fired like that with no severance. I think that's unconscionable. It looks like they targeted mostly probationary employees, which doesn't

Pretty terrible to be fired like that with no severance. I think that's unconscionable. It looks like they targeted mostly probationary employees, which doesn't make it better. However, is it right to be hiring so many new people when we are $36T in debt, with the debt growing $1T every 100 days. It seems like this was going to happen at some time and the original sin was to expand headcount when debt is already this high.

cyberge99 2y ago
The debt to GDP ratio is the important number.
aaronbrethorst 2y ago
Donald Trump in a hot dog costume: we’re all looking for the guy who did this! https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna191665 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna191665
akmarinov 2y ago
Debt isn’t always bad. If you take on a trillion in debt but invest it in science and get cold fusion, you’d be endless trillions ahead
- cogman10 2y ago
  Debt is actually what cements the dollar as the world currency. It's not only not bad, it's a huge positive driver of the US economy. T-Bills are a bedrock of most portfolios. Eliminating them over some bad analogies to household budgets is just misunderstanding what debt actually means for a country/government. Heck, even inflation isn't bad. You need a little bit of it to keep companies and individuals from simply hording assets.
- blindriver 2y ago
  Debt isn't always bad. But our current debt load is bad and will never be paid off. 50% of our tax revenues are going to be used to pay interest from our debt. That is a huge curtailing of spending because of this unsustainable debt.
- kjksf 2y ago
  In abstract, arguments always sound great. As far as I know majority of research on fusion / future of nuclear is financed by NOT government. Spending $50 million on housing immigrants or $2 million on DEI programs that result in wasting employees times with "training" about white privilege will not create fusion. If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed. Not to mention that universities are grifting on science grants and using half the money for "overhead", not for actual research. It's also an open secret that grants don't necessarily go to the best scientists but to best grant proposal writers and those are not the same people.
  - rsfern 2y ago
    > If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed. This is the reason that NSF exists - many exciting and potentially promising future technologies are not commercially viable. We invest in NSF to fund the foundational research to get to a place where ideas are commercially viable enough for industry to fully develop and implement them. Also, there is also (internal) overhead in industrial research organizations, and there are similar problems of optimal resource allocation in any organization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to do better, but I think it’s selective logic to apply these critiques only to the public sector.
bongodongobob 2y ago
If the US's budget were like a household budget, these firings would be like easing your toothpick budget to save money. It's completely asinine. This is about controlling narratives and consolidating power, nothing else.
- blindriver 2y ago
  Anyone who says saving billions isn't worthwhile isn't serious about saving money. Rebuilding all of Maui's destroyed housing would cost $5 billion, but the people have been completely ignored by the government and private equity funds are coming in and buying the land from long time residents because they are desperate. You have to start somewhere and they're starting with the low hanging fruit. They've already gotten permission to go though the defense budget as well.
matwood 2y ago
Wait, you think this about addressing the debt/deficit? Why are ~$4.5T of tax cuts still on the table? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-calls-adding-trillions-dollars-us-debt-rcna191665 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-cal...
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  The tax cuts are the only agenda they are really interested in.
- blindriver 2y ago
  Whataboutism isn't a valid defense against my original point, which was why are we hiring people when we are so deeply in debt. For the record, I personally am completely against the tax cuts.
  - theGnuMe 2y ago
    Because the debt is a red herring.
    - blindriver 2y ago
      This sounds like a conspiracy theory. I thought that was relegated to MAGA but I guess both sides are just as vulnerable to it.
      - theGnuMe 2y ago
        You can continue to pontificate the blind but that is a failure to see reality as it is.
        blindriver 2y ago
        This is exactly what MAGA says too.
  - matwood 2y ago
hiddencost 2y ago
Federal government employees like this are a trivial fraction of this. Most of the spend is medicare, medicaid, social security, and the military. The NSF generates much more value than it costs.
whatever1 2y ago
The contracts with space x seem to be intact. Also new contracts for military cyber trucks were signed just last week. So no they don’t care about costs. Its about sucking all the government money for themselves :)
- pookha 2y ago
  Biden signed the deal with the cyber trucks. https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-is-the-state-department-about-to-pay-tesla-400-million-for-cybertrucks/21860274/ https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-is-the-state-departmen... And the NSF headquarters is a complete joke...I use to do tempo runs down Eisenhower Ave when it was all brutalist government buildings and condo's. They ripped down the brutualist buildings and rebuilt them into commercial office space which has sat vacant for years. But then in comes the NSF and they constructed this abomination of a building that has rooftop gardens and dominates the skyline. Massive sky scrapper...And they did this when a significant portion of their employee's worked from home (I know one). Sorry if I'm not crying about layoffs with the NSF, especially after years of tech layoffs due to Section 174 (approved of by some of these same progressive NSF government employees).
  - whatever1 2y ago
    I said intact. Aka not cut. Also Space X was contracted to “fix” FAA that is on the chopping block. So you will be paying Musks folks.
    - kjksf 2y ago
      You said: > new contracts for military cyber trucks were signed just last week. To repeat: Biden admin signed those contracts and they were last updated in December. So not new, not last week, not a deal with Trump admin. > Space X was contracted to “fix” FAA No. DOGE, which is a government department of ~100 people, will work to fix FAA, not SpaceX. And you don't have to use scary quotes: by their own admission traffic control system is tech from 70. Finally, why don't you tell us which SpaceX government contract should be given to another company and how much more will that other company charge (assuming they are even capable of executing the task).
simonw 2y ago
Probationary doesn't mean "new", it means "new to their role within the past 12 months, including if they are existing employees who were promoted". Mass firing your best workers is not a great way to build a more efficient government.
- blindriver 2y ago
  For the vast majority of people, it means "new". There's no evidence that these probationary workers are the "best workers". I think they should get severance but they don't deserve job protections when they are filling in new positions that should have been closed instead.
  - simonw 2y ago
    Have you seen credible numbers on what portion of the "probationary" workers that have been laid off were new as opposed to existing government workers who had been promoted in the past 12 months?
    - blindriver 2y ago
      Have you seen numbers that back up your unsourced assertions? I have sources for mine.
      - simonw 2y ago
        The fact that you said "I have sources" and didn't share them makes me doubt that you are here to argue in good faith.
        blindriver 2y ago
        So you don’t have sources.
JohnTHaller 2y ago
The cruelty is the point. It's spelled out specifically in Project 2025.
jghn 2y ago
Why are they proposing to raise the debt ceiling if the debt is the real issue? It's almost as if it's just a boogeyman they trot out when they're the opposition party, and not the thing they're actually concerned about.
- theGnuMe 2y ago
  It is exactly that! It is the boogeyman they trot out. You should also read up on the Two Santas strategy.
abeppu 2y ago
Actual leading drivers of federal spending: - Social Security: 21% - Medicare: 15% - Defense: 14% - Interest: 13% The administration has at points said social security and medicare won't be touched, no one's been talking seriously about defense spending cuts, and we understand there to be giant risks with screwing around with paying interest. So almost 2/3 of our 6.8T budget is off limits. The 10B for the whole NSF is like < 0.15%. I'd love us to have a serious conversation about addressing the debt, but that can't start with asking for tax cuts and protecting existing entitlement benefits under their exact current terms. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/#spending-categories https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
- jghn 2y ago
  Further: My understanding has always been that "defense" is quite a bit larger than reported as there are a lot of things that are really in the name of "defense" that aren't categorized that way in the budget.
- throw0101c 2y ago
  > […] and we understand there to be giant risks with screwing around with paying interest. Yeah… maybe: > "We're even looking at Treasuries," Trump said. "There could be a problem - you've been reading about that, with Treasuries and that could be an interesting problem." > He added: "It could be that a lot of those things don't count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought." > It was not clear whether Trump was referring to debt service or other government payments made by the Treasury Department. * https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trump-says-us-might-have-less-debt-than-thought-2025-02-09/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trump-says-us-might-have-...
- tzs 2y ago
  > The administration has at points said social security and medicare won't be touched That's also in the 2024 Republican party platform: "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE". (Shouting copied from the source). There are however a couple reasons to doubt the sincerity of that. First the Republican Study Committee, which around 80% of House Republicans belong to, keeps proposing that the retirement age be raised. Second, if nothing is done to either cut benefits or raise revenue or both the Social Security trust fund runs out of money around 2035. Around 20% of benefits are paid out of the trust fund. If that is allowed to happen then the only way to not cut benefits would be for Congress and the President to make that up out of the general budget. The only thing Republicans have said along the lines of increasing SS revenue is that their policies will lead to so much economic growth that tax revenue, including the payroll taxes for SS, will go way up and that will be enough to avert the trust fund's insolvency. Meanwhile, many of their proposed tax cuts will shorten the time to insolvency. The proposal to eliminate taxes on tips and to eliminate taxes on SS for retirees with high non-SS income will move the insolvency up by up to a couple years or so. Anyway, I'm sure that if the trust fund is allowed to become insolvent those who let that happen will say that since they did not actively cut benefits they did not violate the party platform. The Democrats also have repeatedly introduced bills to address the trust fund, which concentrate on raising its revenue. The main method in these bills is to raise the cap on income subject to the payroll tax. Right now you pay 6.2% on the first $176100 (in 2025) of your pay. The Democrat proposals are to include some income above that cap in payroll tax. I believe there have been proposals to get rid of that cap, to raise the cap, or to put a cap on that cap (e.g., payroll tax on first $176100, then no payroll tax from there to $400k, then payroll tax again on income above $400k). A poll of a proposal that would do the cap on the cap thing (with the numbers given above), gradually raise the payroll tax from 6.2% to 7.2%, make the annual COL adjustment more accurately reflect inflation, and a few other things which would result in there being a small surplus got overwhelming support from voters [1] (here's the PDF with the detailed results) [2]. Overall support is 82%. This doesn't vary much by education level or income level or age. By party affiliation support is 88% for Democrats, 82% for independents, and 74% for Republicans. Note: the above results are for a proposed package that includes several things. The poll also looked at the individual things in isolation and at variants of them. [1] https://www.aarp.org/social-security/survey-raising-taxes/ https://www.aarp.org/social-security/survey-raising-taxes/ [2] https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NASI_SocialSecurityat90.pdf https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NASI_SocialS...
greggyb 2y ago
Hiring so many new people is a false assumption. US Federal employment numbers have grown at incredibly low rates relative to US economic growth or federal spending. ~1% federal workforce growth since 2000: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-... Federal employment numbers since 1940: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-federal-government/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f... (peaks are temporary census hires) spending over time as a % of GDP: https://www.cato.org/blog/century-federal-spending-1925-2025 https://www.cato.org/blog/century-federal-spending-1925-2025 Inflation adjusted federal spending (~4% growth): https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-the-federal-budget-changed/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-the-federal-budget-cha... US real GDP over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/
- blindriver 2y ago
  This is completely incorrect. The attrition rate of the federal government is 6-7% per year. This is about 150,000 new hires a year if you maintain the same size government. You can even see it from the DOGE website showing hundreds of thousands So yes, the vast majority are new employees. The idea that the government hasn't grown doesn't mean that new employees haven't been hire. I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically. It doesn't have to be demeaning the way it's currently being done, but the 8 month offer was pretty generous in my opinion.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    >I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically. Or maybe you are wildly off base about how many humans it takes to corral the federal government of the US? Maybe you are more filled with propaganda of government jobs? Maybe the people like you making government jobs the butt of jokes have been part of the problem? Maybe we should respect civil service and have high expectations of it but also understand how important it is. Being mildly in debt is no reason or excuse to destroy democracy.

cyberge99 2y ago

The debt to GDP ratio is the important number.

aaronbrethorst 2y ago

Donald Trump in a hot dog costume: we’re all looking for the guy who did this! https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna191665 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna191665

akmarinov 2y ago

Debt isn’t always bad. If you take on a trillion in debt but invest it in science and get cold fusion, you’d be endless trillions ahead

cogman10 2y ago
Debt is actually what cements the dollar as the world currency. It's not only not bad, it's a huge positive driver of the US economy. T-Bills are a bedrock of most portfolios. Eliminating them over some bad analogies to household budgets is just misunderstanding what debt actually means for a country/government. Heck, even inflation isn't bad. You need a little bit of it to keep companies and individuals from simply hording assets.
blindriver 2y ago
Debt isn't always bad. But our current debt load is bad and will never be paid off. 50% of our tax revenues are going to be used to pay interest from our debt. That is a huge curtailing of spending because of this unsustainable debt.
kjksf 2y ago
In abstract, arguments always sound great. As far as I know majority of research on fusion / future of nuclear is financed by NOT government. Spending $50 million on housing immigrants or $2 million on DEI programs that result in wasting employees times with "training" about white privilege will not create fusion. If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed. Not to mention that universities are grifting on science grants and using half the money for "overhead", not for actual research. It's also an open secret that grants don't necessarily go to the best scientists but to best grant proposal writers and those are not the same people.
- rsfern 2y ago
  > If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed. This is the reason that NSF exists - many exciting and potentially promising future technologies are not commercially viable. We invest in NSF to fund the foundational research to get to a place where ideas are commercially viable enough for industry to fully develop and implement them. Also, there is also (internal) overhead in industrial research organizations, and there are similar problems of optimal resource allocation in any organization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to do better, but I think it’s selective logic to apply these critiques only to the public sector.

bongodongobob 2y ago

If the US's budget were like a household budget, these firings would be like easing your toothpick budget to save money. It's completely asinine. This is about controlling narratives and consolidating power, nothing else.

blindriver 2y ago
Anyone who says saving billions isn't worthwhile isn't serious about saving money. Rebuilding all of Maui's destroyed housing would cost $5 billion, but the people have been completely ignored by the government and private equity funds are coming in and buying the land from long time residents because they are desperate. You have to start somewhere and they're starting with the low hanging fruit. They've already gotten permission to go though the defense budget as well.

matwood 2y ago

Wait, you think this about addressing the debt/deficit? Why are ~$4.5T of tax cuts still on the table? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-calls-adding-trillions-dollars-us-debt-rcna191665 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-cal...

rqtwteye 2y ago
The tax cuts are the only agenda they are really interested in.
blindriver 2y ago
Whataboutism isn't a valid defense against my original point, which was why are we hiring people when we are so deeply in debt. For the record, I personally am completely against the tax cuts.
- theGnuMe 2y ago
  Because the debt is a red herring.
  - blindriver 2y ago
    This sounds like a conspiracy theory. I thought that was relegated to MAGA but I guess both sides are just as vulnerable to it.
    - theGnuMe 2y ago
      You can continue to pontificate the blind but that is a failure to see reality as it is.
      - blindriver 2y ago
        This is exactly what MAGA says too.
- matwood 2y ago

hiddencost 2y ago

Federal government employees like this are a trivial fraction of this. Most of the spend is medicare, medicaid, social security, and the military. The NSF generates much more value than it costs.

whatever1 2y ago

The contracts with space x seem to be intact. Also new contracts for military cyber trucks were signed just last week. So no they don’t care about costs. Its about sucking all the government money for themselves :)

pookha 2y ago
Biden signed the deal with the cyber trucks. https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-is-the-state-department-about-to-pay-tesla-400-million-for-cybertrucks/21860274/ https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-is-the-state-departmen... And the NSF headquarters is a complete joke...I use to do tempo runs down Eisenhower Ave when it was all brutalist government buildings and condo's. They ripped down the brutualist buildings and rebuilt them into commercial office space which has sat vacant for years. But then in comes the NSF and they constructed this abomination of a building that has rooftop gardens and dominates the skyline. Massive sky scrapper...And they did this when a significant portion of their employee's worked from home (I know one). Sorry if I'm not crying about layoffs with the NSF, especially after years of tech layoffs due to Section 174 (approved of by some of these same progressive NSF government employees).
- whatever1 2y ago
  I said intact. Aka not cut. Also Space X was contracted to “fix” FAA that is on the chopping block. So you will be paying Musks folks.
  - kjksf 2y ago
    You said: > new contracts for military cyber trucks were signed just last week. To repeat: Biden admin signed those contracts and they were last updated in December. So not new, not last week, not a deal with Trump admin. > Space X was contracted to “fix” FAA No. DOGE, which is a government department of ~100 people, will work to fix FAA, not SpaceX. And you don't have to use scary quotes: by their own admission traffic control system is tech from 70. Finally, why don't you tell us which SpaceX government contract should be given to another company and how much more will that other company charge (assuming they are even capable of executing the task).

simonw 2y ago

Probationary doesn't mean "new", it means "new to their role within the past 12 months, including if they are existing employees who were promoted". Mass firing your best workers is not a great way to build a more efficient government.

blindriver 2y ago
For the vast majority of people, it means "new". There's no evidence that these probationary workers are the "best workers". I think they should get severance but they don't deserve job protections when they are filling in new positions that should have been closed instead.
- simonw 2y ago
  Have you seen credible numbers on what portion of the "probationary" workers that have been laid off were new as opposed to existing government workers who had been promoted in the past 12 months?
  - blindriver 2y ago
    Have you seen numbers that back up your unsourced assertions? I have sources for mine.
    - simonw 2y ago
      The fact that you said "I have sources" and didn't share them makes me doubt that you are here to argue in good faith.
      - blindriver 2y ago
        So you don’t have sources.

JohnTHaller 2y ago

The cruelty is the point. It's spelled out specifically in Project 2025.

jghn 2y ago

Why are they proposing to raise the debt ceiling if the debt is the real issue? It's almost as if it's just a boogeyman they trot out when they're the opposition party, and not the thing they're actually concerned about.

theGnuMe 2y ago
It is exactly that! It is the boogeyman they trot out. You should also read up on the Two Santas strategy.

abeppu 2y ago

Actual leading drivers of federal spending: - Social Security: 21% - Medicare: 15% - Defense: 14% - Interest: 13% The administration has at points said social security and medicare won't be touched, no one's been talking seriously about defense spending cuts, and we understand there to be giant risks with screwing around with paying interest. So almost 2/3 of our 6.8T budget is off limits. The 10B for the whole NSF is like < 0.15%. I'd love us to have a serious conversation about addressing the debt, but that can't start with asking for tax cuts and protecting existing entitlement benefits under their exact current terms. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/#spending-categories https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

jghn 2y ago
Further: My understanding has always been that "defense" is quite a bit larger than reported as there are a lot of things that are really in the name of "defense" that aren't categorized that way in the budget.
throw0101c 2y ago
> […] and we understand there to be giant risks with screwing around with paying interest. Yeah… maybe: > "We're even looking at Treasuries," Trump said. "There could be a problem - you've been reading about that, with Treasuries and that could be an interesting problem." > He added: "It could be that a lot of those things don't count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought." > It was not clear whether Trump was referring to debt service or other government payments made by the Treasury Department. * https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trump-says-us-might-have-less-debt-than-thought-2025-02-09/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trump-says-us-might-have-...
tzs 2y ago
> The administration has at points said social security and medicare won't be touched That's also in the 2024 Republican party platform: "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE". (Shouting copied from the source). There are however a couple reasons to doubt the sincerity of that. First the Republican Study Committee, which around 80% of House Republicans belong to, keeps proposing that the retirement age be raised. Second, if nothing is done to either cut benefits or raise revenue or both the Social Security trust fund runs out of money around 2035. Around 20% of benefits are paid out of the trust fund. If that is allowed to happen then the only way to not cut benefits would be for Congress and the President to make that up out of the general budget. The only thing Republicans have said along the lines of increasing SS revenue is that their policies will lead to so much economic growth that tax revenue, including the payroll taxes for SS, will go way up and that will be enough to avert the trust fund's insolvency. Meanwhile, many of their proposed tax cuts will shorten the time to insolvency. The proposal to eliminate taxes on tips and to eliminate taxes on SS for retirees with high non-SS income will move the insolvency up by up to a couple years or so. Anyway, I'm sure that if the trust fund is allowed to become insolvent those who let that happen will say that since they did not actively cut benefits they did not violate the party platform. The Democrats also have repeatedly introduced bills to address the trust fund, which concentrate on raising its revenue. The main method in these bills is to raise the cap on income subject to the payroll tax. Right now you pay 6.2% on the first $176100 (in 2025) of your pay. The Democrat proposals are to include some income above that cap in payroll tax. I believe there have been proposals to get rid of that cap, to raise the cap, or to put a cap on that cap (e.g., payroll tax on first $176100, then no payroll tax from there to $400k, then payroll tax again on income above $400k). A poll of a proposal that would do the cap on the cap thing (with the numbers given above), gradually raise the payroll tax from 6.2% to 7.2%, make the annual COL adjustment more accurately reflect inflation, and a few other things which would result in there being a small surplus got overwhelming support from voters [1] (here's the PDF with the detailed results) [2]. Overall support is 82%. This doesn't vary much by education level or income level or age. By party affiliation support is 88% for Democrats, 82% for independents, and 74% for Republicans. Note: the above results are for a proposed package that includes several things. The poll also looked at the individual things in isolation and at variants of them. [1] https://www.aarp.org/social-security/survey-raising-taxes/ https://www.aarp.org/social-security/survey-raising-taxes/ [2] https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NASI_SocialSecurityat90.pdf https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NASI_SocialS...

greggyb 2y ago

Hiring so many new people is a false assumption. US Federal employment numbers have grown at incredibly low rates relative to US economic growth or federal spending. ~1% federal workforce growth since 2000: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-... Federal employment numbers since 1940: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-federal-government/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f... (peaks are temporary census hires) spending over time as a % of GDP: https://www.cato.org/blog/century-federal-spending-1925-2025 https://www.cato.org/blog/century-federal-spending-1925-2025 Inflation adjusted federal spending (~4% growth): https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-the-federal-budget-changed/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-the-federal-budget-cha... US real GDP over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/

blindriver 2y ago
This is completely incorrect. The attrition rate of the federal government is 6-7% per year. This is about 150,000 new hires a year if you maintain the same size government. You can even see it from the DOGE website showing hundreds of thousands So yes, the vast majority are new employees. The idea that the government hasn't grown doesn't mean that new employees haven't been hire. I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically. It doesn't have to be demeaning the way it's currently being done, but the 8 month offer was pretty generous in my opinion.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  >I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically. Or maybe you are wildly off base about how many humans it takes to corral the federal government of the US? Maybe you are more filled with propaganda of government jobs? Maybe the people like you making government jobs the butt of jokes have been part of the problem? Maybe we should respect civil service and have high expectations of it but also understand how important it is. Being mildly in debt is no reason or excuse to destroy democracy.