8 ms·

It’s a terrifying experiment in hollowing out the civil service. At some point a critical mass of Federal workers may be lost which brings the entire machinery

by pm90 1y ago

It’s a terrifying experiment in hollowing out the civil service. At some point a critical mass of Federal workers may be lost which brings the entire machinery of the Federal Government to a standstill. It’s also not clear how to recover from something like this.

exabrial 1y ago
[flagged]
- krainboltgreene 1y ago
  This is the same thought process behind layoffs and is categorically, scientifically, absurd. It doesn't pan out that you "only let go of the people you don't want" and it turns out those people you let go signal to the people you absolutely want that they should leave.
  - oldandboring 1y ago
    I don't support what the Trump administration is doing. But saying it's "categorically, scientifically, absurd" to lay people off is some next-level stuff. I can guarantee to anyone reading this, that this person has never owned a business with any kind of significant overhead.
    - rockercoaster 1y ago
      [dead]
    - krainboltgreene 1y ago
      Come on, it's 2025, you really think no one has studied the effects of layoffs on a company? https://hbr.org/2018/05/layoffs-that-dont-break-your-company https://hbr.org/2018/05/layoffs-that-dont-break-your-company > For instance, a study of one Fortune 500 tech firm done by Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School discovered that after the firm cut its staff by 15%, the number of new inventions it produced fell 24%. In addition, layoffs can rupture ties between salespeople and customers. Researchers Paul Williams, M. Sajid Khan, and Earl Naumann have found that customers are more likely to defect after a company conducts layoffs. Then there’s the effect on a company’s reputation: E. Geoffrey Love and Matthew S. Kraatz of University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that companies that did layoffs saw a decline in their ranking on Fortune’s list of most admired companies. > A 2002 study by Magnus Sverke and Johnny Hellgren of Stockholm University and Katharina Näswall of University of Canterbury found that after a layoff, survivors experienced a 41% decline in job satisfaction, a 36% decline in organizational commitment, and a 20% decline in job performance. > In a 2012 review of 20 studies of companies that had gone through layoffs, Deepak Datta at the University of Texas at Arlington found that layoffs had a neutral to negative effect on stock prices in the days following their announcement. Datta also discovered that after layoffs a majority of companies suffered declines in profitability, and a related study showed that the drop in profits persisted for three years. And a team of researchers from Auburn University, Baylor University, and the University of Tennessee found that companies that have layoffs are twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as companies that don’t have them. It also just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Also, there's no reason to cast aspersions. Feel free to actually engage anytime you want.
- staplers 1y ago
  The American people will find out either way if it was wise or not.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    They have to experience the pain to vote better. And even then, I am not terribly hopeful, based on the evidence and observations.
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      Voting? Just like the Russians and North Koreans and Iranians vote better, right? If there will be voting, it will be very vetted by the administration. No "antifa" allowed. It's too funny in a way. Like a mirror: In Russia, it's "fascists" the administration is fighting. In the US, it's "antifa" the administration is fighting.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      By “better” you mean “more consistent with what I want,” right? Because your average Trump voter voted for the guy who had Elon get on stage with a chainsaw.
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        > By “better” you mean “more consistent with what I want,” right? Because your average Trump voter voted for the guy who had Elon get on stage with a chainsaw. Do they want healthcare? Because I want Medicare for All (affordable, accessible, universal healthcare), and large swaths of conservative and rural America are going to lose their ~700 hospitals and Medicaid coverage (50% of rural births are paid for by Medicaid, a June 2025 KFF poll found that more than one in four (27%) adult Medicaid beneficiaries under age 65 are Republicans or lean Republican). Do they want to be able to export their ag to China? I was fine with farmers having their export market with federal subsidies, they voted against it (China has zeroed out US ag imports due to the tariff war, 75-80% of farmers voted for this admin). Do businesses want immigrant labor? I voted for it, they voted against it, and now they face crushing labor shortages in ag, construction, food services, hospitality, etc. Do they want their social security and veterans benefits and support systems? I voted for it, but they voted against it and now these social systems are going to rapidly degrade at scale. Do they want good paying jobs? I voted for it (pro worker, pro union, pro labor policies), they voted for the chainsaw (federal renewables subsidies cuts, federal gov workforce reductions, staunchly anti union positions, etc). Do they want universal daycare/childcare and school lunches? I want this for them, but they vote against this. I want better for these people (accessible and affordable healthcare, childcare, social security, economic success broadly speaking to live healthy, fulfilled, meaningful lives), but they keep voting to hurt people like me, minorities, and vulnerability populations while shooting themselves in the feet. It's unfortunate. Having empathy is a terrible curse on this timeline. I can only ask them to vote better or I can stand back while they get the chainsaw. The choice lies with them. "Too strong a belief in the rationality of people in general, or of the world, will lead us to seek purposive explanations where none exists."
- burnte 1y ago
  In reality there aren't that many jobs that exist but don't have to. The overwhelming majority of employees are paid to do work the employer needs to be done.
  - at-fates-hands 1y ago
    I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. It takes 10 different offices at the Department of Health and Human Services to run programs addressing AIDS in minority communities. Autism research is spread out over 11 different agencies. Eight agencies at the Defense Department are looking for prisoners of war and missing in action. And Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado has eight different satellite control centers to control 10 satellite programs. The report, by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, identifies 26 new areas where federal government programs are fragmented, duplicative, overlapping or just inefficient. Add that to the 162 areas identified in past reports, and Congress has a road map for saving tens of billions of dollars a year. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/04/08/billions-spent-on-duplicate-federal-programs/7435221/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/04/08/bill...
    - burnte 1y ago
      I stated there are actually few jobs in the world that are not needed. I didn't say government was perfectly efficient or that process changes are not needed.
- captainkrtek 1y ago
  Enjoy being on hold indefinitely with any government agency, waiting in longer lines, and emails going unanswered.
  - mrcwinn 1y ago
    So, nothing’s changing?
    - captainkrtek 1y ago
      Well it wont be getting any better hah
  - exabrial 1y ago
    This sounds like a dream, as it proves again these things don't need to exist.
kleinsch 1y ago
That's their entire strategy. Shrink government causing government to become ineffective, which provides evidence that government should shrink even more.
- xnx 1y ago
  AKA "The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."
buran77 1y ago
That's the intention of this administration. Destroy any service that the government could provide until people can genuinely think the government is useless. Then the people currently in power and their cronies will come out of the woodwork "saving" the country with their private companies and interests. Competing with an empty shell of a government is the easiest way. As a side effect, if they're to lose the next election they leave a corpse on the doorstep of the next administration. That makes it so much easier to pass on the blame. Aligns perfectly with these people's views that a country is best led like a company not like a democracy. The realistic outcome will be formally (rather than the informal one as until now) corpocracy.
- rayiner 1y ago
  There is an ulterior motive for these cuts, but please be honest about what it is. The federal bureaucracy is completely dominated by one party: https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employees-are-donating-almost-exclusively-hillary-clinton/132667/ https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe.... No matter who wins the elections, most of the actual decisions are being made by adherents of the same party. Trump had four times the support in AOC’s district in the Bronx than among federal employee donors. This is not a sustainable situation in a democracy.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Don't worry, it's probably not a democracy anymore.
  - buran77 1y ago
    > This is not a sustainable situation in a democracy. Purging your enemies from everything and instead putting your buddies (especially as dishonest and unqualified as the ones this admin brought) will fix the current "unsustainable" situation? Is it even marginally less bad? Because looking from the distance what they're doing is changing from "not great" to "awful" for democracy, and looking close up I'm sure it looks even worse. There's not a single illegal, abusive, or plain stupid thing that this admin has done where you can't find some "silver lining" that allows you to dilute the problem and make it look like you're part of some solution. "And well, the implementation may not have been perfect but we're trying to fix things". Nothing about this was for democracy or the country, and who those people donate do doesn't matter. Only who they don't donate to.
cogman10 1y ago
> It’s also not clear how to recover from something like this. You pretty much have to double spend to get out. Same way ICE is handling recruitment shortfalls. Government jobs have never had great salaries (but decent benefits) vs the private sector. You need to make those jobs actually competitive.
- burkaman 1y ago
  One of the main selling points was stability and a clear career path, and obviously that's gone now. Would probably take decades to rebuild that.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ldoughty 1y ago
The point is that they don't want it to recover. This is evidence that the US Government can't be trusted to provide the service themselves, and those functions should be privatized / contracted out instead... like how our Defense budget is so small thanks to us paying government contractors for everything we need, like $5,000 screwdrivers and $7,500 toilet seats installed by $300/hour Mechanic Specialist II's.
timr 1y ago
I'm not terrified. Just to put some perspective on this, per Pew [1], the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000. As of 2024, it was at 2.4M people. The federal workforce is dramatically bigger than it was even a few years ago [2]. Moreover, the vast majority of federal workers don't have anything to do with the kind of consumer-facing services that people think of when they think "government". More than half of all federal employees comprise: the Defense departments (Army, Navy, DoD, etc.), the Department of Homeland Security and the VA [3]. The federal workforce continues to get bigger and bigger, there's absolutely no practical incentive to stop it, and congress has abjectly failed to do its job in controlling the budget. To be clear, this is not the right way to reduce the size of the federal government, but I'm not "terrified" of losing 100k employees in a government of this size. We need more cutting, not less. [1] 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-... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/sr_25-01-07_federal-workers_1/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-... [3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/sr_25-01-07_federal-workers_4/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...
- grumbelbart 1y ago
  > the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk, as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000 That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
  - timr 1y ago
    > That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years. So what? Why does government have to grow proportionally with the size of the population? This is not a given in any other organization.

by pm90 1y ago

exabrial 1y ago

[flagged]

krainboltgreene 1y ago
This is the same thought process behind layoffs and is categorically, scientifically, absurd. It doesn't pan out that you "only let go of the people you don't want" and it turns out those people you let go signal to the people you absolutely want that they should leave.
- oldandboring 1y ago
  I don't support what the Trump administration is doing. But saying it's "categorically, scientifically, absurd" to lay people off is some next-level stuff. I can guarantee to anyone reading this, that this person has never owned a business with any kind of significant overhead.
  - rockercoaster 1y ago
    [dead]
  - krainboltgreene 1y ago
    Come on, it's 2025, you really think no one has studied the effects of layoffs on a company? https://hbr.org/2018/05/layoffs-that-dont-break-your-company https://hbr.org/2018/05/layoffs-that-dont-break-your-company > For instance, a study of one Fortune 500 tech firm done by Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School discovered that after the firm cut its staff by 15%, the number of new inventions it produced fell 24%. In addition, layoffs can rupture ties between salespeople and customers. Researchers Paul Williams, M. Sajid Khan, and Earl Naumann have found that customers are more likely to defect after a company conducts layoffs. Then there’s the effect on a company’s reputation: E. Geoffrey Love and Matthew S. Kraatz of University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that companies that did layoffs saw a decline in their ranking on Fortune’s list of most admired companies. > A 2002 study by Magnus Sverke and Johnny Hellgren of Stockholm University and Katharina Näswall of University of Canterbury found that after a layoff, survivors experienced a 41% decline in job satisfaction, a 36% decline in organizational commitment, and a 20% decline in job performance. > In a 2012 review of 20 studies of companies that had gone through layoffs, Deepak Datta at the University of Texas at Arlington found that layoffs had a neutral to negative effect on stock prices in the days following their announcement. Datta also discovered that after layoffs a majority of companies suffered declines in profitability, and a related study showed that the drop in profits persisted for three years. And a team of researchers from Auburn University, Baylor University, and the University of Tennessee found that companies that have layoffs are twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as companies that don’t have them. It also just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Also, there's no reason to cast aspersions. Feel free to actually engage anytime you want.
staplers 1y ago
The American people will find out either way if it was wise or not.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  They have to experience the pain to vote better. And even then, I am not terribly hopeful, based on the evidence and observations.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Voting? Just like the Russians and North Koreans and Iranians vote better, right? If there will be voting, it will be very vetted by the administration. No "antifa" allowed. It's too funny in a way. Like a mirror: In Russia, it's "fascists" the administration is fighting. In the US, it's "antifa" the administration is fighting.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    By “better” you mean “more consistent with what I want,” right? Because your average Trump voter voted for the guy who had Elon get on stage with a chainsaw.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      > By “better” you mean “more consistent with what I want,” right? Because your average Trump voter voted for the guy who had Elon get on stage with a chainsaw. Do they want healthcare? Because I want Medicare for All (affordable, accessible, universal healthcare), and large swaths of conservative and rural America are going to lose their ~700 hospitals and Medicaid coverage (50% of rural births are paid for by Medicaid, a June 2025 KFF poll found that more than one in four (27%) adult Medicaid beneficiaries under age 65 are Republicans or lean Republican). Do they want to be able to export their ag to China? I was fine with farmers having their export market with federal subsidies, they voted against it (China has zeroed out US ag imports due to the tariff war, 75-80% of farmers voted for this admin). Do businesses want immigrant labor? I voted for it, they voted against it, and now they face crushing labor shortages in ag, construction, food services, hospitality, etc. Do they want their social security and veterans benefits and support systems? I voted for it, but they voted against it and now these social systems are going to rapidly degrade at scale. Do they want good paying jobs? I voted for it (pro worker, pro union, pro labor policies), they voted for the chainsaw (federal renewables subsidies cuts, federal gov workforce reductions, staunchly anti union positions, etc). Do they want universal daycare/childcare and school lunches? I want this for them, but they vote against this. I want better for these people (accessible and affordable healthcare, childcare, social security, economic success broadly speaking to live healthy, fulfilled, meaningful lives), but they keep voting to hurt people like me, minorities, and vulnerability populations while shooting themselves in the feet. It's unfortunate. Having empathy is a terrible curse on this timeline. I can only ask them to vote better or I can stand back while they get the chainsaw. The choice lies with them. "Too strong a belief in the rationality of people in general, or of the world, will lead us to seek purposive explanations where none exists."
burnte 1y ago
In reality there aren't that many jobs that exist but don't have to. The overwhelming majority of employees are paid to do work the employer needs to be done.
- at-fates-hands 1y ago
  I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. It takes 10 different offices at the Department of Health and Human Services to run programs addressing AIDS in minority communities. Autism research is spread out over 11 different agencies. Eight agencies at the Defense Department are looking for prisoners of war and missing in action. And Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado has eight different satellite control centers to control 10 satellite programs. The report, by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, identifies 26 new areas where federal government programs are fragmented, duplicative, overlapping or just inefficient. Add that to the 162 areas identified in past reports, and Congress has a road map for saving tens of billions of dollars a year. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/04/08/billions-spent-on-duplicate-federal-programs/7435221/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/04/08/bill...
  - burnte 1y ago
    I stated there are actually few jobs in the world that are not needed. I didn't say government was perfectly efficient or that process changes are not needed.
captainkrtek 1y ago
Enjoy being on hold indefinitely with any government agency, waiting in longer lines, and emails going unanswered.
- mrcwinn 1y ago
  So, nothing’s changing?
  - captainkrtek 1y ago
    Well it wont be getting any better hah
- exabrial 1y ago
  This sounds like a dream, as it proves again these things don't need to exist.

kleinsch 1y ago

That's their entire strategy. Shrink government causing government to become ineffective, which provides evidence that government should shrink even more.

xnx 1y ago
AKA "The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

buran77 1y ago

That's the intention of this administration. Destroy any service that the government could provide until people can genuinely think the government is useless. Then the people currently in power and their cronies will come out of the woodwork "saving" the country with their private companies and interests. Competing with an empty shell of a government is the easiest way. As a side effect, if they're to lose the next election they leave a corpse on the doorstep of the next administration. That makes it so much easier to pass on the blame. Aligns perfectly with these people's views that a country is best led like a company not like a democracy. The realistic outcome will be formally (rather than the informal one as until now) corpocracy.

rayiner 1y ago
There is an ulterior motive for these cuts, but please be honest about what it is. The federal bureaucracy is completely dominated by one party: https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employees-are-donating-almost-exclusively-hillary-clinton/132667/ https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe.... No matter who wins the elections, most of the actual decisions are being made by adherents of the same party. Trump had four times the support in AOC’s district in the Bronx than among federal employee donors. This is not a sustainable situation in a democracy.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Don't worry, it's probably not a democracy anymore.
- buran77 1y ago
  > This is not a sustainable situation in a democracy. Purging your enemies from everything and instead putting your buddies (especially as dishonest and unqualified as the ones this admin brought) will fix the current "unsustainable" situation? Is it even marginally less bad? Because looking from the distance what they're doing is changing from "not great" to "awful" for democracy, and looking close up I'm sure it looks even worse. There's not a single illegal, abusive, or plain stupid thing that this admin has done where you can't find some "silver lining" that allows you to dilute the problem and make it look like you're part of some solution. "And well, the implementation may not have been perfect but we're trying to fix things". Nothing about this was for democracy or the country, and who those people donate do doesn't matter. Only who they don't donate to.

cogman10 1y ago

> It’s also not clear how to recover from something like this. You pretty much have to double spend to get out. Same way ICE is handling recruitment shortfalls. Government jobs have never had great salaries (but decent benefits) vs the private sector. You need to make those jobs actually competitive.

burkaman 1y ago
One of the main selling points was stability and a clear career path, and obviously that's gone now. Would probably take decades to rebuild that.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ldoughty 1y ago

The point is that they don't want it to recover. This is evidence that the US Government can't be trusted to provide the service themselves, and those functions should be privatized / contracted out instead... like how our Defense budget is so small thanks to us paying government contractors for everything we need, like $5,000 screwdrivers and $7,500 toilet seats installed by $300/hour Mechanic Specialist II's.

timr 1y ago

I'm not terrified. Just to put some perspective on this, per Pew [1], the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000. As of 2024, it was at 2.4M people. The federal workforce is dramatically bigger than it was even a few years ago [2]. Moreover, the vast majority of federal workers don't have anything to do with the kind of consumer-facing services that people think of when they think "government". More than half of all federal employees comprise: the Defense departments (Army, Navy, DoD, etc.), the Department of Homeland Security and the VA [3]. The federal workforce continues to get bigger and bigger, there's absolutely no practical incentive to stop it, and congress has abjectly failed to do its job in controlling the budget. To be clear, this is not the right way to reduce the size of the federal government, but I'm not "terrified" of losing 100k employees in a government of this size. We need more cutting, not less. [1] 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-... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/sr_25-01-07_federal-workers_1/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-... [3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/sr_25-01-07_federal-workers_4/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...

grumbelbart 1y ago
> the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk, as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000 That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
- timr 1y ago
  > That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years. So what? Why does government have to grow proportionally with the size of the population? This is not a given in any other organization.