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The obvious methodology at work here is 'fire everyone then hopefully re-hire only what is blindingly obviously needed'. There are many, many problems with this

The obvious methodology at work here is 'fire everyone then hopefully re-hire only what is blindingly obviously needed'. There are many, many problems with this approach in a business setting but even more from a governmental setting. The first, and what should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of empathy, is that these are real people who's lives are being toyed with. It isn't like you are trying out a new business process. You are literally playing with entire lives here as if they are disposable things. This alone makes what is happening inhumane. Even if it did make things more 'efficient' I would rather a humane government than whatever efficient government they are aiming for here. The second incredibly obvious reason why this is wrong is because this isn't a business. Money isn't the point. Let me repeat this one more time. Money is not the point of a government. I can't understand any argument about government efficiency that only looks at money. It is about total benefit to society, period. If you hire someone that is 'breakeven' in what they produce vs consume from a pure production point of view you could argue that for a business they should go, but from a government point of view you have employed someone and that person is churning the rest of the economy and society has one less drain. In other words all of society is way better off with that breakeven, or even net negative, person employed in government. In other words, an efficient government actually can have what would be considered waste in a corporate world and that is not only OK, but the right answer. I know of several people that are 'employed' but net negatives and society is way better off with that arrangement than having them on the streets. Is there a place for money/efficiency discussions in government? Sure, but if it is the only thing you look at then you really need to re-think things. There are many, many other ways this is morally and economically wrong but those are my top two.

stikit 2y ago
it works both ways. People quit without any notice all the time, and you can be fired for no reason and without notice. It’s not inhumane, it’s life. Your employer doesn’t owe you a job for life, and you don’t commit to your job for life.
- eggnet 2y ago
  But we aren’t talking about firing one person. There are macro effects to firing people at this scale and shutting down whole departments. Not to mention the fact that it is illegal.
- croes 2y ago
  But the government owns the public working agencies. If you fire people who are necessary you didn’t do your job as a employee.
- hiddencost 2y ago
  Spoken like someone who hasn't yet discovered how expendable they are. Government should work for us, and reasonable quality of life should be a given.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  While not owed a job for life, the arrangement of government as stable employer was a beneficial arrangement for the public: it let the government hold onto employees they might have otherwise had to pay more for their skillset because "If you're competent we won't fire you; our pockets are infinitely deep and we don't need to save money" was a perk. Take that perk away, and now they have to compete on other things to find similarly-competent staff. Things like salary. Paid by your taxes.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    > “If you're competent we won't fire you; our pockets are infinitely deep and we don't need to save money" I don’t believe this is an accurate description of how the government operates. It’s commonly repeated but it doesn’t align with personal experience or any evidence I have seen.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Clarification: doesn't align on the lack of pocket depth or on the ease of firing? My understanding for most of the bureaucracy was that there are some very solid policy guardrails set up around termination of bureaucrats; once you're in and have some time under your belt, only gross malfeasance gets you removed.
      - mulmen 2y ago
        > Clarification: doesn't align on the lack of pocket depth or on the ease of firing? Pocket depth. If the government actually had infinite money there wouldn't be so much gnashing of teeth about the budget. I don't see any assertion about the difficulty of firing so I can't respond to that. > My understanding for most of the bureaucracy was that there are some very solid policy guardrails set up around termination of bureaucrats; once you're in and have some time under your belt, only gross malfeasance gets you removed. Your understanding is commonly repeated but I'm beginning to question how true it is. "Bureaucrats" is a pejorative used to describe government workers and imply they don't do valuable work but I don't find it persuasive. I have no idea how easy or hard it is to fire someone in government or the amount of oversight involved in identifying abuse and incompetence.
- apical_dendrite 2y ago
  I have trouble believing that someone at the level of a PI at NIH would just quit with no notice (unless there was some kind of misconduct and they decided to leave rather than get fired). They are running a lab. They direct all the projects that the lab is doing and they are ultimately responsible for all the grant funding. A PI quitting without notice would be incredibly disruptive to everyone else in the lab. I'm not sure how it works with NIH intramural research, but at a university or a hospital you'd have to figure out how to transfer any grants, what to do with equipment paid for by the grants, and what will happen to the grad students, postdocs, and everyone else in the lab. It would be incredibly irresponsible to leave suddenly without addressing those things.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kergonath 2y ago
  > you can be fired for no reason and without notice. It’s not inhumane, it’s life It’s life in the same way as occasionally people get hurt, so it’s ok to hurt them on purpose. So no, it is not humane.
- mr_mitm 2y ago
  That's actually not life in a lot of countries that aren't the United States. It's not a law of nature that you can be fired for no reason and no notice. We as a society make these laws.
  - joquarky 2y ago
    Also we have social contract that says I won't steal food and other necessities if I can get employment and contribute to society. So if many people can't get stable employment, where does that leave us?
- joquarky 2y ago
  Treating the relationship purely as transactional is anti-social. And compassion and consideration go a long way in creating more productive workplaces.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
The cruelty to 'the bureaucratic class' is part of the point. The Trump admin has clearly stated so over and over both before and after the election: Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for the director of the Office of Management and Budget (a job he held during Trump’s first term), has said: “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.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrative-state-trump-bannon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  Such cruelty from the top of any organisation is a sign of impending failure. Leading by that example will only retain the vultures, who will pick the carcass of the best parts then move on. Let the ants and dung beetles deal with the shit parts once we're done. It's going to get worse before it gets better, and I hope the majority of the "worse" will remain contained in the US. The rest of the world is still going to get some in it's mouth though.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    They stacked the cards with vultures, it’s by design.
sollewitt 2y ago
A beloved Terry Pratchett character defines evil as when you treat people like things.
- euroderf 2y ago
  Well then, that's pretty much an indictment of capitalism.
  - mrkstu 2y ago
    Communism doesn't fare any better under that rubric. Any unbridled 'ism' taken to its extreme tends to fail most human centered tests.
    - croisillon 2y ago
      Like athletism for example?
      - cyberax 2y ago
        Absolutely. See: doping, steroids.
    - joquarky 2y ago
      The middle way requires an understanding of nuance that humanity seems to be unwilling to invest in.
  - croes 2y ago
    Staff department vs Human Resources
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    > an indictment of capitalism. Capitalism is the least bad system we have tried.
    - yoyohello13 2y ago
foobarbecue 2y ago
I think it's worse than that. Appears to me that the methodology here is intentional sabotage of the government. When your platform is explictly anti-government (also, explictly anti-empathy, and implictly anti-expert), and someone hands you the government, you smash it, along with the lives of all those losers who dedicated themselves to public service.
- Freedom2 2y ago
  Don't forget to say "See! Government doesn't work, we've been right all along!" after you've smashed it.
  - SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
    Exactly, I’m glad you mentioned it because there are many who can’t see through the smoke. This is the long con but I still struggle to understand the motive there, if for nothing else, is it the simple ideal that government should be small? Why go through all the trouble?
    - mulmen 2y ago
      It’s a combination of people who literally want to own everything even if the only things left are smoking ruins and the useful idiots they have recruited to do the work. I’m not even sure it’s a deliberate conspiracy. It’s more like Bryan Cantrill’s lawnmower. If you replace the country names with software products and the columns with “on prem” and “cloud” the Trump tariff charts look like an Oracle contract renewal.
    - bantunes 2y ago
      These people hate the idea of the public interest, and want to see everything replaced with a privately owned counterpart.
    - carlob 2y ago
      Because once the government is not able to provide certain things like education or public transportation they can profit by selling you private religious schools that further their agenda or tunnels filled with Teslas (see Las Vegas).
dehrmann 2y ago
The other issue is if you try to bring someone back who doesn't need the job, they have extraordinary leverage in negotiating their new contract.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - jmholla 2y ago
    Your comment is incomplete as well. They were put on leave ahead of their scheduled termination. > The researchers, who were all placed on leave with pay until their future official dismissal date, were told a “computer error” or “coding error” led to their accidental terminations.
Terr_ 2y ago
Also, it's completely destroying an incredibly valuable asset: The reputation of being a stable long-term employer! (This is possibly their corrupt intent.) The immediate "savings" reduced workforce (even assuming the same level of work gets done) can easily be obliterated by the long-term damage of needing to pay more to attract equally-qualified applicants away from the private sector. Some quick napkin-math just to illustrate: * Assume the stupid and illegal firings continue, shrinking the workforce to 90%. * Assume payroll expenses move the same, to 90%. * Now workers require 5% more to be hired at a flaky employer with dodgy benefits. * After just two years, the "savings" are erased. Every year the broken trust continues makes it worse.
- vintermann 2y ago
  If a corporation did this, we'd rightly accuse them of pumping their quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term viability.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > This is possibly their corrupt intent. Trump's OMB head has said as much: they want to demoralize the federal workforce and make them dread going to work every day. They want to give the federal government the reputation of being a bad, undesirable, unstable place to work. This is all no accident.
- fastball 2y ago
  Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce? I generally wouldn't want those people to work for my company, so not sure why I'd want them to work in my government.
  - flir 2y ago
    > Money is not the point of a government.
    - fastball 2y ago
      Yes, exactly. People who just want a stable job are in it for the (stable) money.
dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
There's no methodology at work, it's just indiscriminate firings to cull as many people as possible. This is clear from other other departments where they fired everyone they could. "Coding error" is just a modern version of "the dog ate my homework". Lame but people will swallow it. They knew what they were doing, they just regret getting caught. Sadly, once the firings, rehirings, refirings, court cases, and compensations are done, there won't be any money saved at all, probably more wasted. That public servants do important work under less than ideal circumstances and funding is entirely ignored.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > There's no methodology at work, it's just indiscriminate firings to cull as many people as possible. That is the methodology, though. Musk's biography (I believe) contains a bit about how one of his business strategies when trying to make drastic changes is to just fire, fire, fire, fire people. And if you don't realize afterward that you fired too many, and have to hire back at least 10% of them, then you didn't fire enough in the first place. It's a terrible, inhumane way of dealing with people.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    Well, that and it justified doing something which gives him a power trip anyway. Reports from his antics years earlier[1] at Tesla was that he would go on firing sprees, which was a problem they tried to manage because predictably it was enormously disruptive. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-giga...
  - joquarky 2y ago
    Treating people as fungible objects: is this not a clear sign of some serious anti-social mental problems?
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      He keeps talking about how "everyone wants a robot buddy". I think that's beyond reasonable double. He clearly does not trust any humans these days.
sagarpatil 2y ago
Rightly said. The Trump administration’s focus seems to be more on saving/making money and less about the overall effects on the people who are getting affected by it.
- autoexec 2y ago
  He will enrich himself, but he isn't saving any money. All this incompetence is going to take a lot of money out of the pockets of taxpayers.
- joquarky 2y ago
  They think they can run a government like a corporation. The problem is that corporationa tend toward brutalistic psychopathic behavior, while the role of a government should be (IMO) to nurture sustainable growth.
dyauspitr 2y ago
This is not what they are doing either. If you look at the overall “savings” so far, it’s actually negligible. This is a front for an ideological purge only and that’s the entirety of what they are doing.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Morals? Ethics? It's illegal. Any judiciary statement is ignored and unenforced. Trump will blanket pardon anyone anytime he wants to do so. Besides violating centuries of precedent and well-established policy from the age of the spoils system. The only small solace is watching the conservatives get owned by Trump's tariffs. I'm sure they'll make the best of it (fundamentally it is a consumption tax and highly regressive and probably is just regulatory moat once exemptions are bribed out of Trump).
rukuu001 2y ago
I think your second point is the most revealing: government can’t get away with externalising the costs of unemployment the way a private company can.
- vintermann 2y ago
  A country can't externalise costs at all except to other countries, and I guess Trump's government is trying to do that. Might not be so easy, though, against other governments who for all their faults have a better grip on the differences between countries and corporations.
thakoppno 2y ago
> It is about total benefit to society, period. What should we spend the next dollar on to achieve this goal?
- joquarky 2y ago
  Education is usually a safe bet.
strogonoff 2y ago
A slightly less obvious problem with trimming fat is that an amount of fat within any system is good to have if you think long-term. 1. Fat is useful leeway. In critical times, it can be trimmed without otherwise disrupting the operation. Once you have eliminated fat during the good times, you can’t do it in the bad times. 2. A lean system without any fat by definition is tailored to just the current situation. It has much fewer degrees of freedom and is harder to steer to a new course if necessary.
- arkh 2y ago
  In military term you'd call this "fat" the reserve: an unused percentage of your capacity which you can deploy to exploit an opportunity or to plug a hole. Now, the difference between those reserves and what you usually get in most administrations is that you're keeping your reserve sharp and not just letting them socialize at the water cooler and on Facebook.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    In this case it’s top scientists and people who do the grunt work for them, presumably. Regarding not letting employees socialize… I cannot speak to any presumed dysfunction in US government, but to clarify my point—employees spending every hour working at 100% efficiency on the exact thing that needs to be done right now is not indicative of a fat system (more like the opposite). Being able to spend a day pondering or exploring or maybe even indeed socializing is.
- joquarky 2y ago
  Efficiency is often at odds with Wu wei. I think if humanity strived more for the latter, we might align ourselves better with sustainable prosperity and contentment.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    What particular meaning of the term “wu wei” do you have in mind?
mulmen 2y ago
I largely agree with your take here but it still seems to assume that government spending is wasteful. From what I can see government spending is actually pretty efficient and held to a very high standard of accountability. On the other hand corporate America has a terrible track record. We have Boeing and GM who exist only because the government keeps bailing them out to prevent economic ruin. Look me in the eye and tell me Sears was an efficient operation. How many of us look at our cloud spend and think to ourselves “I’m certain we haven’t wasted a penny.” Look at all the VC money that was lit on fire to do food delivery and taxi dispatch. It works now but I can’t say that was financially efficient and it still isn’t affordable. DoorDash provides worse service for more money than a teenager with a used Corolla left to their own devices. Waste is everywhere but I’m really not convinced the government is the worst or even particularly bad.
imgabe 2y ago
> The first, and what should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of empathy, is that these are real people who's lives are being toyed with. It isn't like you are trying out a new business process. You are literally playing with entire lives here as if they are disposable things. This alone makes what is happening inhumane. This makes no sense. It is not a life, it is a job. The person isn't dead. They get a generous severance and find a new job. What are you trying to say here? That once someone is employed, the have to keep being employed forever and ever and they can never be let go even when their job was pointless and anything else is inhumane? Jobs come and go. Every rational adult understands this and makes arrangements for what they need to do if they have to find a new job. Stop acting like these are disabled children that the government is obligated to take care of.
- aszantu 2y ago
  can just speak for myself, but I wouldn't be employable after a layoff like that... I't get a mental meltdown and afterwards would probably be on disability until I got mentally better. They're literally teaching thausands of people that they aren't reliable and can't be trusted. I mean, if that's what you're aiming for, good for you, but I'd recon that you'll end up with more people that want your head now than before.
  - imgabe 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - linkregister 2y ago
      > 8 month severance package Is there any reporting of employees who actually received this, or are you referring to nebulous promise in the "Fork In the Road" email?
      - imgabe 2y ago
        As of right now, workers who took the first buyout offer are still getting paid: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/02/federal-worker-buyouts-trump-administration https://www.axios.com/2025/04/02/federal-worker-buyouts-trum... There is another offer coming up.
rafaelmn 2y ago
>It is about total benefit to society, period. Money is the best tool we have to measure that. Sure it has pathological cases, but overall it's the least bad version to assign value. In the government case it's much worse at this since it's not voluntary and measuring aggregate government services vs. tax. The consumption/price is completely unrelated, etc. >I know of several people that are 'employed' but net negatives and society is way better off with that arrangement than having them on the streets. If we are heading towards an economy with labour shortage (demographics collapse), taking up people from the economy and keeping them employed with a useless skillset is going to be a double negative.
- autoexec 2y ago
  Money is a terrible tool to measure the value of government services for society. Nobody gets rich delivering mail to remote locations, or providing food assistance, or managing forests, or letting people borrow books for free, but doing those things provides an invaluable service. There are many things we want from government that shouldn't make money. That doesn't mean that they aren't worthwhile or that they are inefficient. An efficient government isn't one that spends less money, it's one that does the best job providing services for the people. > If we are heading towards an economy with labour shortage We aren't. Especially not with the nation's largest employer hemorrhaging workers. Companies are doing everything in their power to replace workers with AI and machines as quickly as they can. There is an endless supply of immigrants who'd love nothing more than to live and work in the US. Government workers are not employed with "useless skillsets" either. Every single job in the government will involve skills that can be applied elsewhere.
- jdwithit 2y ago
  > Sure it has pathological cases It does, such as the United States in 2025. We have left the realm of theory, just open your favorite stock market app or read any economic analysis being put forth by literally anybody except the Trump administration. The current policies are disastrous.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 2y ago
wesselbindt 2y ago
Anyone with half a brain understands the argument you put forward, and there is not a single doubt on my mind that the current administration does. But the point is not the savings. The point is incapacitating the government to the point where privatization starts to looks like a viable alternative. This has been the strategy since Thatcher and Reagan, look up "starving the beast". This administration is just really good at it.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > The point is incapacitating the government to the point where privatization starts to looks like a viable alternative. Privatization is almost always going to be the worst option. If the true cost to deliver a good or service to the people is $X, the government can do the job for $X. A private company will also need $X to provide the service, but they must charge the public well above $X so that they can stuff their own pockets with money. A government's work is providing services, not generating profits for shareholders.
  - wesselbindt 2y ago
    I completely agree.
- joquarky 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast Facilitating the link because I hope more people see this.
concordDance 2y ago
> It is about total benefit to society, period. It's about benefit to society per cost. If you can fire someone over here and hire someone over there in a role that brings more benefit to society, that's good. Eg. Fire the telephone sanitizer hire the addict rehabilitator.
trilbyglens 2y ago
I think you've actually hit on one of the fundamental pillars of modern conservatism in America, which is that they don't actually believe in civil society nor do they believe that the government exists to benefit people. Conservative ideology these days pretty much limits government to maintaining trade agreements and arresting people that they don't like.
- joquarky 2y ago
  I believe that many of them read Snow Crash and yearn for pushing society into "Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities"
sirspacey 2y ago
If you haven’t worked in the federal government, this is an unserious take. Experience and context matters. Especially this one.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

stikit 2y ago

it works both ways. People quit without any notice all the time, and you can be fired for no reason and without notice. It’s not inhumane, it’s life. Your employer doesn’t owe you a job for life, and you don’t commit to your job for life.

eggnet 2y ago
But we aren’t talking about firing one person. There are macro effects to firing people at this scale and shutting down whole departments. Not to mention the fact that it is illegal.
croes 2y ago
But the government owns the public working agencies. If you fire people who are necessary you didn’t do your job as a employee.
hiddencost 2y ago
Spoken like someone who hasn't yet discovered how expendable they are. Government should work for us, and reasonable quality of life should be a given.
shadowgovt 2y ago
While not owed a job for life, the arrangement of government as stable employer was a beneficial arrangement for the public: it let the government hold onto employees they might have otherwise had to pay more for their skillset because "If you're competent we won't fire you; our pockets are infinitely deep and we don't need to save money" was a perk. Take that perk away, and now they have to compete on other things to find similarly-competent staff. Things like salary. Paid by your taxes.
- mulmen 2y ago
  > “If you're competent we won't fire you; our pockets are infinitely deep and we don't need to save money" I don’t believe this is an accurate description of how the government operates. It’s commonly repeated but it doesn’t align with personal experience or any evidence I have seen.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Clarification: doesn't align on the lack of pocket depth or on the ease of firing? My understanding for most of the bureaucracy was that there are some very solid policy guardrails set up around termination of bureaucrats; once you're in and have some time under your belt, only gross malfeasance gets you removed.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      > Clarification: doesn't align on the lack of pocket depth or on the ease of firing? Pocket depth. If the government actually had infinite money there wouldn't be so much gnashing of teeth about the budget. I don't see any assertion about the difficulty of firing so I can't respond to that. > My understanding for most of the bureaucracy was that there are some very solid policy guardrails set up around termination of bureaucrats; once you're in and have some time under your belt, only gross malfeasance gets you removed. Your understanding is commonly repeated but I'm beginning to question how true it is. "Bureaucrats" is a pejorative used to describe government workers and imply they don't do valuable work but I don't find it persuasive. I have no idea how easy or hard it is to fire someone in government or the amount of oversight involved in identifying abuse and incompetence.
apical_dendrite 2y ago
I have trouble believing that someone at the level of a PI at NIH would just quit with no notice (unless there was some kind of misconduct and they decided to leave rather than get fired). They are running a lab. They direct all the projects that the lab is doing and they are ultimately responsible for all the grant funding. A PI quitting without notice would be incredibly disruptive to everyone else in the lab. I'm not sure how it works with NIH intramural research, but at a university or a hospital you'd have to figure out how to transfer any grants, what to do with equipment paid for by the grants, and what will happen to the grad students, postdocs, and everyone else in the lab. It would be incredibly irresponsible to leave suddenly without addressing those things.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kergonath 2y ago
> you can be fired for no reason and without notice. It’s not inhumane, it’s life It’s life in the same way as occasionally people get hurt, so it’s ok to hurt them on purpose. So no, it is not humane.
mr_mitm 2y ago
That's actually not life in a lot of countries that aren't the United States. It's not a law of nature that you can be fired for no reason and no notice. We as a society make these laws.
- joquarky 2y ago
  Also we have social contract that says I won't steal food and other necessities if I can get employment and contribute to society. So if many people can't get stable employment, where does that leave us?
joquarky 2y ago
Treating the relationship purely as transactional is anti-social. And compassion and consideration go a long way in creating more productive workplaces.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

The cruelty to 'the bureaucratic class' is part of the point. The Trump admin has clearly stated so over and over both before and after the election: Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for the director of the Office of Management and Budget (a job he held during Trump’s first term), has said: “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.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrative-state-trump-bannon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...

BLKNSLVR 2y ago
Such cruelty from the top of any organisation is a sign of impending failure. Leading by that example will only retain the vultures, who will pick the carcass of the best parts then move on. Let the ants and dung beetles deal with the shit parts once we're done. It's going to get worse before it gets better, and I hope the majority of the "worse" will remain contained in the US. The rest of the world is still going to get some in it's mouth though.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  They stacked the cards with vultures, it’s by design.

sollewitt 2y ago

A beloved Terry Pratchett character defines evil as when you treat people like things.

euroderf 2y ago
Well then, that's pretty much an indictment of capitalism.
- mrkstu 2y ago
  Communism doesn't fare any better under that rubric. Any unbridled 'ism' taken to its extreme tends to fail most human centered tests.
  - croisillon 2y ago
    Like athletism for example?
    - cyberax 2y ago
      Absolutely. See: doping, steroids.
  - joquarky 2y ago
    The middle way requires an understanding of nuance that humanity seems to be unwilling to invest in.
- croes 2y ago
  Staff department vs Human Resources
- lostlogin 2y ago
  > an indictment of capitalism. Capitalism is the least bad system we have tried.
  - yoyohello13 2y ago

foobarbecue 2y ago

I think it's worse than that. Appears to me that the methodology here is intentional sabotage of the government. When your platform is explictly anti-government (also, explictly anti-empathy, and implictly anti-expert), and someone hands you the government, you smash it, along with the lives of all those losers who dedicated themselves to public service.

Freedom2 2y ago
Don't forget to say "See! Government doesn't work, we've been right all along!" after you've smashed it.
- SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
  Exactly, I’m glad you mentioned it because there are many who can’t see through the smoke. This is the long con but I still struggle to understand the motive there, if for nothing else, is it the simple ideal that government should be small? Why go through all the trouble?
  - mulmen 2y ago
    It’s a combination of people who literally want to own everything even if the only things left are smoking ruins and the useful idiots they have recruited to do the work. I’m not even sure it’s a deliberate conspiracy. It’s more like Bryan Cantrill’s lawnmower. If you replace the country names with software products and the columns with “on prem” and “cloud” the Trump tariff charts look like an Oracle contract renewal.
  - bantunes 2y ago
    These people hate the idea of the public interest, and want to see everything replaced with a privately owned counterpart.
  - carlob 2y ago
    Because once the government is not able to provide certain things like education or public transportation they can profit by selling you private religious schools that further their agenda or tunnels filled with Teslas (see Las Vegas).

dehrmann 2y ago

The other issue is if you try to bring someone back who doesn't need the job, they have extraordinary leverage in negotiating their new contract.

somenameforme 2y ago
[flagged]
- jmholla 2y ago
  Your comment is incomplete as well. They were put on leave ahead of their scheduled termination. > The researchers, who were all placed on leave with pay until their future official dismissal date, were told a “computer error” or “coding error” led to their accidental terminations.

Terr_ 2y ago

Also, it's completely destroying an incredibly valuable asset: The reputation of being a stable long-term employer! (This is possibly their corrupt intent.) The immediate "savings" reduced workforce (even assuming the same level of work gets done) can easily be obliterated by the long-term damage of needing to pay more to attract equally-qualified applicants away from the private sector. Some quick napkin-math just to illustrate: * Assume the stupid and illegal firings continue, shrinking the workforce to 90%. * Assume payroll expenses move the same, to 90%. * Now workers require 5% more to be hired at a flaky employer with dodgy benefits. * After just two years, the "savings" are erased. Every year the broken trust continues makes it worse.

vintermann 2y ago
If a corporation did this, we'd rightly accuse them of pumping their quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term viability.
kelnos 2y ago
> This is possibly their corrupt intent. Trump's OMB head has said as much: they want to demoralize the federal workforce and make them dread going to work every day. They want to give the federal government the reputation of being a bad, undesirable, unstable place to work. This is all no accident.
fastball 2y ago
Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce? I generally wouldn't want those people to work for my company, so not sure why I'd want them to work in my government.
- flir 2y ago
  > Money is not the point of a government.
  - fastball 2y ago
    Yes, exactly. People who just want a stable job are in it for the (stable) money.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago

There's no methodology at work, it's just indiscriminate firings to cull as many people as possible. This is clear from other other departments where they fired everyone they could. "Coding error" is just a modern version of "the dog ate my homework". Lame but people will swallow it. They knew what they were doing, they just regret getting caught. Sadly, once the firings, rehirings, refirings, court cases, and compensations are done, there won't be any money saved at all, probably more wasted. That public servants do important work under less than ideal circumstances and funding is entirely ignored.

kelnos 2y ago
> There's no methodology at work, it's just indiscriminate firings to cull as many people as possible. That is the methodology, though. Musk's biography (I believe) contains a bit about how one of his business strategies when trying to make drastic changes is to just fire, fire, fire, fire people. And if you don't realize afterward that you fired too many, and have to hire back at least 10% of them, then you didn't fire enough in the first place. It's a terrible, inhumane way of dealing with people.
- XorNot 2y ago
  Well, that and it justified doing something which gives him a power trip anyway. Reports from his antics years earlier[1] at Tesla was that he would go on firing sprees, which was a problem they tried to manage because predictably it was enormously disruptive. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-giga...
- joquarky 2y ago
  Treating people as fungible objects: is this not a clear sign of some serious anti-social mental problems?
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    He keeps talking about how "everyone wants a robot buddy". I think that's beyond reasonable double. He clearly does not trust any humans these days.

sagarpatil 2y ago

Rightly said. The Trump administration’s focus seems to be more on saving/making money and less about the overall effects on the people who are getting affected by it.

autoexec 2y ago
He will enrich himself, but he isn't saving any money. All this incompetence is going to take a lot of money out of the pockets of taxpayers.
joquarky 2y ago
They think they can run a government like a corporation. The problem is that corporationa tend toward brutalistic psychopathic behavior, while the role of a government should be (IMO) to nurture sustainable growth.

dyauspitr 2y ago

This is not what they are doing either. If you look at the overall “savings” so far, it’s actually negligible. This is a front for an ideological purge only and that’s the entirety of what they are doing.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Morals? Ethics? It's illegal. Any judiciary statement is ignored and unenforced. Trump will blanket pardon anyone anytime he wants to do so. Besides violating centuries of precedent and well-established policy from the age of the spoils system. The only small solace is watching the conservatives get owned by Trump's tariffs. I'm sure they'll make the best of it (fundamentally it is a consumption tax and highly regressive and probably is just regulatory moat once exemptions are bribed out of Trump).

rukuu001 2y ago

I think your second point is the most revealing: government can’t get away with externalising the costs of unemployment the way a private company can.

vintermann 2y ago
A country can't externalise costs at all except to other countries, and I guess Trump's government is trying to do that. Might not be so easy, though, against other governments who for all their faults have a better grip on the differences between countries and corporations.

thakoppno 2y ago

> It is about total benefit to society, period. What should we spend the next dollar on to achieve this goal?

joquarky 2y ago
Education is usually a safe bet.

strogonoff 2y ago

A slightly less obvious problem with trimming fat is that an amount of fat within any system is good to have if you think long-term. 1. Fat is useful leeway. In critical times, it can be trimmed without otherwise disrupting the operation. Once you have eliminated fat during the good times, you can’t do it in the bad times. 2. A lean system without any fat by definition is tailored to just the current situation. It has much fewer degrees of freedom and is harder to steer to a new course if necessary.

arkh 2y ago
In military term you'd call this "fat" the reserve: an unused percentage of your capacity which you can deploy to exploit an opportunity or to plug a hole. Now, the difference between those reserves and what you usually get in most administrations is that you're keeping your reserve sharp and not just letting them socialize at the water cooler and on Facebook.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  In this case it’s top scientists and people who do the grunt work for them, presumably. Regarding not letting employees socialize… I cannot speak to any presumed dysfunction in US government, but to clarify my point—employees spending every hour working at 100% efficiency on the exact thing that needs to be done right now is not indicative of a fat system (more like the opposite). Being able to spend a day pondering or exploring or maybe even indeed socializing is.
joquarky 2y ago
Efficiency is often at odds with Wu wei. I think if humanity strived more for the latter, we might align ourselves better with sustainable prosperity and contentment.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  What particular meaning of the term “wu wei” do you have in mind?

mulmen 2y ago

I largely agree with your take here but it still seems to assume that government spending is wasteful. From what I can see government spending is actually pretty efficient and held to a very high standard of accountability. On the other hand corporate America has a terrible track record. We have Boeing and GM who exist only because the government keeps bailing them out to prevent economic ruin. Look me in the eye and tell me Sears was an efficient operation. How many of us look at our cloud spend and think to ourselves “I’m certain we haven’t wasted a penny.” Look at all the VC money that was lit on fire to do food delivery and taxi dispatch. It works now but I can’t say that was financially efficient and it still isn’t affordable. DoorDash provides worse service for more money than a teenager with a used Corolla left to their own devices. Waste is everywhere but I’m really not convinced the government is the worst or even particularly bad.

imgabe 2y ago

> The first, and what should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of empathy, is that these are real people who's lives are being toyed with. It isn't like you are trying out a new business process. You are literally playing with entire lives here as if they are disposable things. This alone makes what is happening inhumane. This makes no sense. It is not a life, it is a job. The person isn't dead. They get a generous severance and find a new job. What are you trying to say here? That once someone is employed, the have to keep being employed forever and ever and they can never be let go even when their job was pointless and anything else is inhumane? Jobs come and go. Every rational adult understands this and makes arrangements for what they need to do if they have to find a new job. Stop acting like these are disabled children that the government is obligated to take care of.

aszantu 2y ago
can just speak for myself, but I wouldn't be employable after a layoff like that... I't get a mental meltdown and afterwards would probably be on disability until I got mentally better. They're literally teaching thausands of people that they aren't reliable and can't be trusted. I mean, if that's what you're aiming for, good for you, but I'd recon that you'll end up with more people that want your head now than before.
- imgabe 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - linkregister 2y ago
    > 8 month severance package Is there any reporting of employees who actually received this, or are you referring to nebulous promise in the "Fork In the Road" email?
    - imgabe 2y ago
      As of right now, workers who took the first buyout offer are still getting paid: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/02/federal-worker-buyouts-trump-administration https://www.axios.com/2025/04/02/federal-worker-buyouts-trum... There is another offer coming up.

rafaelmn 2y ago

>It is about total benefit to society, period. Money is the best tool we have to measure that. Sure it has pathological cases, but overall it's the least bad version to assign value. In the government case it's much worse at this since it's not voluntary and measuring aggregate government services vs. tax. The consumption/price is completely unrelated, etc. >I know of several people that are 'employed' but net negatives and society is way better off with that arrangement than having them on the streets. If we are heading towards an economy with labour shortage (demographics collapse), taking up people from the economy and keeping them employed with a useless skillset is going to be a double negative.

autoexec 2y ago
Money is a terrible tool to measure the value of government services for society. Nobody gets rich delivering mail to remote locations, or providing food assistance, or managing forests, or letting people borrow books for free, but doing those things provides an invaluable service. There are many things we want from government that shouldn't make money. That doesn't mean that they aren't worthwhile or that they are inefficient. An efficient government isn't one that spends less money, it's one that does the best job providing services for the people. > If we are heading towards an economy with labour shortage We aren't. Especially not with the nation's largest employer hemorrhaging workers. Companies are doing everything in their power to replace workers with AI and machines as quickly as they can. There is an endless supply of immigrants who'd love nothing more than to live and work in the US. Government workers are not employed with "useless skillsets" either. Every single job in the government will involve skills that can be applied elsewhere.
jdwithit 2y ago
> Sure it has pathological cases It does, such as the United States in 2025. We have left the realm of theory, just open your favorite stock market app or read any economic analysis being put forth by literally anybody except the Trump administration. The current policies are disastrous.
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wesselbindt 2y ago

Anyone with half a brain understands the argument you put forward, and there is not a single doubt on my mind that the current administration does. But the point is not the savings. The point is incapacitating the government to the point where privatization starts to looks like a viable alternative. This has been the strategy since Thatcher and Reagan, look up "starving the beast". This administration is just really good at it.

autoexec 2y ago
> The point is incapacitating the government to the point where privatization starts to looks like a viable alternative. Privatization is almost always going to be the worst option. If the true cost to deliver a good or service to the people is $X, the government can do the job for $X. A private company will also need $X to provide the service, but they must charge the public well above $X so that they can stuff their own pockets with money. A government's work is providing services, not generating profits for shareholders.
- wesselbindt 2y ago
  I completely agree.
joquarky 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast Facilitating the link because I hope more people see this.

concordDance 2y ago

> It is about total benefit to society, period. It's about benefit to society per cost. If you can fire someone over here and hire someone over there in a role that brings more benefit to society, that's good. Eg. Fire the telephone sanitizer hire the addict rehabilitator.

trilbyglens 2y ago

I think you've actually hit on one of the fundamental pillars of modern conservatism in America, which is that they don't actually believe in civil society nor do they believe that the government exists to benefit people. Conservative ideology these days pretty much limits government to maintaining trade agreements and arresting people that they don't like.

joquarky 2y ago
I believe that many of them read Snow Crash and yearn for pushing society into "Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities"

sirspacey 2y ago

If you haven’t worked in the federal government, this is an unserious take. Experience and context matters. Especially this one.

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