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Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatic
by hayst4ck 2y ago
Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M
18F are the bureaucrats they want to traumatize.
- Modified3019 2y ago“The cruelty is the point”
- khazhoux 2y agoIncorrect. Their goal is to dissolve these agencies, to reduce regulation that burden certain industries.
- genter 2y agoHow is that incorrect? They're deliberately being cruel to government employees so they quit and the agencies are de facto dissolved.
- khazhoux 2y ago[flagged]
- fragmede 2y agoWhy would you assume either? Do you have access to brain scanning technology that would let you know what goes on in the minds of these men? If they think that the federal government is all waste, why wouldn't being cruel to them be more important than this idea about efficiency that idiots are absolutely eating up.
- beej71 2y agoBut 18f? They've been one of the most visible streamliners of government bureaucracy we've seen.
- Spooky23 2y ago[flagged]
- khazhoux 2y ago> You're a zealot or incapable of cognitively understanding what the words mean. Straight to ad hominem. Excellent.
- Spooky23 2y agoIf you are an advocate for the destruction of my country through your willful ignorance, you’re the problem. You don’t get to hide behind high minded ideals.
- khazhoux 2y agoI'm not sure exactly what point you are arguing. The issue in this subthread is whether or not cruelty to federal employees is "the point" of the recent actions. I claim that it's not the objective, but a side effect. I claim that the Trump administration's main objective is to dissolve these agencies, not specifically to inflict harm on employees. All of the agency de-fundings and dissolutions can be much better explained as serving some other goal: either industry profit, or to make it easier for his party (or Trump himself!) to win in 2028, or to undo some perceived left-leaning agenda. I am hardly advocating for destruction of the USA simply because I disagree with that pithy quotable, "The cruelty is the point."
- Psillisp 2y agoCruelty and profit or it isn’t capitalism
- Nevermark 2y agoYes, that is the goal, but not quite how they sell it. The sell is to individuals to get their votes, not corporations (who of course are on board, but cannot vote), and more amorphous for not being above board. About how people's hardship are being caused by "enemies" who must be punished. Thus the "cruelty is the point" observation. Simply stating their goal, "the hyper rich feel too fettered, with respect to the rights/safety/wellbeing of individuals", would fail for being overly direct and honest. (I have no doubt there is governmental waste. But their behavior is not consistent with doing the work of identifying and eliminating waste. Waste elmination here is a side effect (that can be pointed to) of mass elmination independent of waste.)
- quantified 2y agoThey are either deceptive or incredibly incompentent. There is no burden to any industry in giving the American taxpayer a free and authoritative easy way to file. Similarly, firing so many FDIC inspectors saves nothing, they are paid by the banks not the government. I'm going with deceptive.
- amiga386 2y agoThere is a burden, and a huge one at that, to the rent-seeking industry. If there's a free and authoritative easy way to file taxes, then there's no reason for people to pay for unnecessary third party services who earn ALL their money by imposing themselves between the taxpayer and IRS. They will fight like bastards to preserve their privileged position. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-fought-free-simple-tax-filing https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...
- johnnyanmac 2y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russell-vought-trump-office-of-management-and-budget https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russe... The cruelty is the point.
- Muromec 2y agoAnd I though professor Snyder was dramatic about decapitation strike. Trump will for be remembered as Gorbachov of US
- ants_everywhere 2y agoWouldn't he be Lenin, the guy who turned the country into a cynical police state? Rather than Gorbachev, the guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize and started to end totalitarianism in Russia and the Soviet empire?
- homebrewer 2y agoThis is a very one-sided take, you should ask people on the street of any Russian city what they think of Gorbachev and his policies. I agree with GP with one exception: Gorbachev probably thought he was doing good things for his nation and the actual consequences were unintentional. Probably less so in this case, but I have no desire to tell Americans how to operate their country, so pay no attention to me.
- ants_everywhere 2y agoIMO you have to take that with a grain of salt. Stalin is increasingly popular in Russia and more popular than Gorbachev. And Stalin is one of the world's most prolific mass murderers. Russia currently is run by an ex-KGB dude. The KGB opposed Gorbachev's reforms. Putin is actively trying to rehabilitate the Stalin personality cult and revive a longing for Soviet era colonialism to legitimize his war of expansion. The Russian people are amazing, but there's only so far you can go if you don't have a free press, if expressing certain facts about history is illegal and if people are murdered for being too open about their opinions. I don't doubt there are people who are still unhappy that Russia lost its status from the imperial days, just as there are British people frustrated that they're no longer an important empire. But that was happening anyway and it was only a matter of time. It's not really surprising that the average opinion in an authoritarian country aligns with the position actively promoted by the government of that country. Just like it's not surprising that the party wins by a landslide in a one party state.
- encomiast 2y agoThey don't actually know who the bureaucrats are that they want to traumatize. Anyone calling a product manager, UX designer, or software developer at 18F a "bureaucrat" simply has no idea what they actually do. They are just demonizing the scapegoat du jour. Also among these so call "bureaucrats" are psychologists at the VA helping veterans with PTSD; search and rescue professionals working for forest service, park service, fema, etc; undercover FBI agents trying to stop organized crime; NOAA scientists predicting hurricanes, the list goes on. The demonization of the civil servants of this country is a story that people who want power are telling the country in order to gain said power. It's a story as old as time.
- refulgentis 2y ago100%, when I hear it, I hear "small enough to drown in a bathtub" for a new era. A lot of people got away with saying a lot of BS for a while Vague thought-terminating cliches, and we are observing one of these formless things decay, in real time, to the point they're outré. The based to cringe pipeline, if you will
- justin66 2y ago> They don't actually know who the bureaucrats are that they want to traumatize. Anyone calling a product manager, UX designer, or software developer at 18F a "bureaucrat" simply has no idea what they actually do. "Bureaucrat" is always a pejorative for a professional person who works in a bureaucracy. It doesn't mean anything.
- chinathrow 2y agoFuck that Vought guy.
- rqtwteye 2y agoThis is just insane. Totally destructive. Checks and balances are gone.
- rayiner 2y agoExplain what you think “checks and balances” are, please.
- unplug8224 2y ago[flagged]
- saltcured 2y agoWell, Checks come from the Check Republic. A region and culture that has had its own trials and tribulations in the past century, getting over taken and reformed a few times. Balances, on the other hand, were from old lost Balancing Empire. This was really just a stubborn remnant of the Roman Empire that didn't want to admit the party was over. Together, the refrain "Checks and Balances" is normally to remind us of our ambiguous and ephemeral place in history. Are we hardy folk like the Checks who will remain even as the political landscape changes? Or are we Balances left twisting in the wind? Then, I think the earlier poster was expressing his own sense of loss in proclaiming there aren't even Checks anymore. It's no longer ambiguous, we are un-Checked and out of Balance.
- dekhn 2y agoFolks, don't fall for rayiner's in-bad-faith comments. Best not to respond, they are trying to goad you into an argument.
- rayiner 2y agoI’m not making a “bad faith argument.” I’m trying to fight the widespread misinformation that there are “checks and balances” within the executive branch. Where is Community Notes when you need it?
- 2y ago
- gunian 2y agoat some point the oil will run out it is a finite resource let them go crazy in the last 75 years EVs and all that stuff were nothing more than a toy to play the charged up games the barons / slavers play
- tenuousemphasis 2y agoThe Limits to Growth predicted (in 1972) a collapse of industrialization caused by exponential growth well before 2100. Since then we've only accelerated our rate of growth. I think we have far less than 75 years left before things go very badly.
- gunian 2y agothe barons will commit global genocide before they let their toy humans die it'll be fine oil > nuclear > some miraculous thing
- refurb 2y agoUhhh is there a full clip because 18 seconds of what looks like a speech seems like cherry picking.
- acdha 2y agoWhat kind of context do you think would excuse that sentiment? Given his extensive public record, would you argue that this is somehow out of character for him? It seems rather consistent based on the rest of his career: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/03/russ-vought-donald-trumps-holy-warrior https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/03/russ-voug...
- refurb 2y agoWhy? Because I've seen Propublica cherry pick quotes before and taken them entirely out of context? The media has been lying to us for decades and no, I don't take them at their word, especially when they share a clip that removes all context.
- hypothesis 2y ago> I've seen Propublica cherry pick quotes Wait until you see Twitter Files or whatever Elon is going to drop from DOGE.
- acdha 2y agoAre you expecting a creationist style trimmed quote where he said something like “Only a sociopath would say something like…” before the portion in that clip? It’s clear from the length and his cadence that this wasn’t a slip of the tongue or a tight clip. https://youtu.be/oBH9TmeJN_M https://youtu.be/oBH9TmeJN_M If so, I would note that it’s curious that he’s declined to comment rather than clearing his record and the Trump campaign similarly reacted by pretending they wouldn’t have him setting policy again rather than by saying that’s not what he meant.
- refurb 2y ago
- pclmulqdq 2y agoYes, I firmly believe that Trump was elected to punish the current political class in the US for failing to serve the interests of his voter base (largely working class men). The whole election and his sad little mandate is about tearing down the permanent bureaucracy in the executive branch, not about fixing anything or really even changing any systems.
- rayiner 2y agoDon’t forget us minorities! Net 20 point swing among both asians and hispanics. Little Bangladesh—note that bangladesh is literally a socialist country—in Queens, NYC swung a net 55 points to the right.
- skissane 2y agoDigressing a bit: is there any correlation between Bangaldeshi-Americans preferences in US politics (Democrats vs GOP) and their preferences in Bangladeshi politics (Awami League vs BNP vs Yunus)? Or are those largely orthogonal dimensions?
- rayiner 2y agoI think as between AL and BNP it’s idiosyncratic to the person. Our oldest family friends (BNP) became big Trump supporters during his first term, but that’s just a couple of data points. I think Yunus supporters are almost always Harris supporters, though. Either too young to know how this story will play out, or boomerlib who thinks this time will be different.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoAnd those working class men will suffer the most for the consequences of their actions. cutting off a nose to spite their face. The silver lining is that it's not too late for those people to get some upcoming elections to swing and push to a congress that will kick out Trump before it's too late.
- rurban 2y agoSays the uber-bureaucrat, Musk.
- locopati 2y agoRussell Vought, sociopath