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.
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.
The saved money and the payroll for new money are both in dollars per year, not one-time costs. So the additional premium needs to be 10%, not 5%, to erase the benefits, and it doesn't matter how many years you look at.
(I'm ignoring one-time costs like severance pay and signing/relocation bonuses which I don't think were the point of your message, and also the elasticity effect where you can pay existing workers the same even if it costs more to hire new ones. And I agree with your point in general that this is not a sensible way to save money, I just think your numbers are wrong).
> Also, it's completely destroying an incredibly valuable asset: The reputation of being a stable long-term employer! (This is possibly their corrupt intent.)
Yeah but what's the plan? They already have crappy pay and now it gets unstable - who'd want to work for the government? Only desperates.
No one and I think that's the point. The current administration seems hell-bent on making corporations able to do whatever they please. Destroying government institutions is probably a good way to go about achieving that.
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.
Nobody considers long term damage, particularly in a business sense.
If you look at the history of American company that have failed or are currently failing, there is one common denominator: short-term decision making.
As soon as business have even an ounce of success, they immediately give up on and start optimizing for the now, not the tomorrow. Take a look at Tesla. They invested a lot in the early days of their company and it paid off heavily. But as soon as they saw market success, they took a page from GM. Stop innovating immediately, start cutting quality. You’re safe now, no need to be competitive. No need to think about the future, it’s secured.
But it’s not secured, and this ambivalence is their downfall. Smarter, long-term thinking business will run Tesla into the ground, as history has shown with GM.
> Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
Yes. People looking for a stable job put down roots and grow communities. They gain deep knowledge of the systems and people they work with, and they gain valuable wisdom from experience. I have no idea why you wouldn't want people looking for a stable job at your company. Why would you want an employee who was looking to work at a place where they were likely to be fired for no reason at any moment and couldn't expect any of their co-workers to still be there tomorrow?
The comment I replied to was holding out the federal government as an especially stable employer, as compared to the private sector. Sure, you don't want a reputation for firing people a week after you hired them, but A. that is not what is happening here B. not doing that doesn't mean it is actually desireable for the federal government to be seen as a more stable alternative to the private sector.
Said another way: any company can have the reputation GC claims the federal government does, but most don't. Why is that?
Because most companies don't care about their employees. Many of America's largest private employers like Amazon and Walmart have extremely high turnover, so it's no wonder people are looking for a more stable employer. Government workers are far more likely to be unionized which means they can get better working conditions and actual pensions. Government workers can take far more pride in being public servants than they would peeing in a bottle for amazon. It's no surprise there is less turnover.
Any company could have a reputation for treating employees so well that people want to work there and stick around until they retire, but they usually don't because screwing over their employees makes them more money. Governments are freed from having to prioritize maximizing profits at the cost of everything else.
> Government workers can take far more pride in being public servants than they would peeing in a bottle for amazon. It's no surprise there is less turnover.
See, this is where you're losing me. One the one hand you are arguing that part of what makes working for the government desirable is the job itself / the work being done (which sounds good to me), but then you are immediately conflating that with a reputation for being a "stable employer" (read: not firing people when maybe you should), which is not how I want my tax dollars to be used.
I don't want the federal government to be a jobs program that keeps people on payroll just because it "isn't worried about profits". Profits aren't my concern, spending is, and the federal government should absolutely be worried about spending, because money doesn't grow on trees. I want the federal government to be exactly as big as it needs to be in order to deliver on the democratically decided goals of the American people.
If we can't attract the right talent to run the government, we should either scale back our federal ambitions or we should pay more up front.
> but then you are immediately conflating that with a reputation for being a "stable employer" (read: not firing people when maybe you should), which is not how I want my tax dollars to be used.
You're using an incorrect definition for "stable employer". Employers with low turnover rates are stable employers. The usual reason for low turnover rate is employee satisfaction with the job and their work environment, not a failure to fire people who should be fired. If you know of a government employee who should be fired you can apply political pressure on the people responsible and, if needed, vote them out of office and replace them with someone who will fire that person.
Spending is a legitimate concern, and there are situations where money in government is being wasted, people are bribed, no-bid contracts are awarded, etc. That happens much less than you'd think though and you can run into the same kinds of problems in the private sector too. It's much easier to spot when it happens in government because the books are open records.
> I want the federal government to be exactly as big as it needs to be in order to deliver on the democratically decided goals of the American people.
Consider that governments are capable of proving a service at cost while a private company cannot because on top of the cost they also need to fill their own pockets with taxpayer money. Private companies must make profit, which means that they must charge taxpayers more than necessary.
I'd agree that we want talented government workers, and we often get them, but most of all we want the goods and services we're paying for. We shouldn't have to lower our ambitions, if anything we should be demanding more from our government, and that includes getting more for our money.
>A wealth of academic research since the 1970s has established a clear and consistent inverse relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intention. Meta-analyses synthesizing hundreds of individual studies consistently report a moderate to strong negative correlation between the two variables across cultures, industries and occupations (Cotton & Tuttle, 1986; Griffeth et al., 2000; Hom et al., 2017; Tett & Meyer, 1993). In other words, higher levels of satisfaction are linked to lower probabilities employees will contemplate leaving their roles. The strength of this association has remained stable over time despite changes to workplaces and economies.
It's one of those few universal values across time and cultures. A basic query will give you all the citations you want.
> was never proposing privatizing anything.
Just magically finding the lowest number the government can get away with for functioning. Not taking into account the bus factor. Redundancy, natural turnover as people retire, die, or simply change life goals, and a dozen other factors.
And apparently not the idea that when a strained organization needs a big job done but lacks people, they bid a contract to private companies (hence, privatization). We already see the result of this with Defense in how we contract everything to be made. Trillions of dollars of "efficiency" and relatively little knowledge in-house.
This isn't even a government issue. This is basic business. You can't run 100% lean. It's never the most efficient means because a pebble means catastrophic delays.
Hard disagree. My dad worked for the federal government and he was railroaded for pointing out where money just disappeared down some corners. In his case it was untracked doctor reimbursements.
This happens everywhere in government because the taxpayer just doesn't care and spending money itself is largely considered to be the metric of effectiveness -- goodhart's law. The public generally thinks that if we allocate funding to X or Y bleeding heart cause it's magically done and we don't have to think about it anymore; conversely if we delete funds nominally allocated to X or Y it means we don't care about X or Y. By the year 2025 the system of consuming funds without voter accountability has optimized itself to do as little as possible with as high a price as possible, as evidenced by 45 billion dollars for broadband.
1. Make the taxpayer care and properly have them vote in not corrupt people. This can be from awareness campaigns, stronger community identity, or more frequent town halls as a start
2. Establish an ombudsman who can care and root this out of blatant corruption happens. So you don't feel like talking to a wall when trying to expose corrupt.
3. Blame the government as an entirely and shut it down.
So which seems more logical in your eyes?
Here's an optimistic story. Organizations managing 20 billion dollars in funding in Los Angeles had no audit records of how they used the funds. It "disappeared". A judge noticed this and came down extremely hard. Watching their future funding like a hawk
Surprise, they used the money in a proper matter and the homeless situation in LA started to improve for the first time in who knows how long. Enforcement does indeed work if someone takes the time to notify the right authorities on it. But instead we fell for decades of trying to erode authority. This one didn't even involve the voters needing to oust someone.
Some mix of all the solutions depending on how bad it is. At some point the net social benefit becomes negative. When that happens incremental reform is not preferable to tearing it down, exploring alternatives (e.g. 501c(3)s), and rebuilding as government if and only if a reasonable mechanism for accountability can be created without the meddling of the people who messed it up before.
But can we afford to tear it down? The decision sounds just as radical in the private sector as the public sector. You don't just shut down your core product without there being a very swift handover process.
The example here was doctor reimbursement. So, can we afford to just not reimburse doctors as we architect a new solution to solve corruption? That strategy seems to be what people whope to achieve with Social Security. Put it "on maintenance" for a few years to "weed out corruption".
> conversely if we delete funds nominally allocated to X or Y it means we don't care about X or Y
I am saying you can't assume that because money was allocated for something it went to the critical thing you wanted. Like 45 billion for rural broadband.
> The example here was doctor reimbursement.
Yes. If the doctor reimbursement is improper you don't pay it out. It is the hospital's job to get things right when asking for money. If the hospital sent an invoice for a procedure the patient did not actually get (this was a large amount of the waste), you REALLY DO NOT PAY, if you pay then you are signaling to the hospital that it's OK to keep overcharging the VA.
> Government workers are far more likely to be unionized
Isn't this a problem? Government workers are supposed to be working for the people, involvement in a union is a conflict of interest -- this is why FDR banned unionization of federal workers (versus the private sector where there is no obligation and the relationship is generally adversarial).
> Governments are freed from having to prioritize maximizing profits at the cost of everything else
That's a huge problem. The legitimacy of government is predicated on the ability of the voter to yank the money from the government if it's ineffective -- otherwise the government can just vote itself more and more funds for whatever without accountability. Since we're all deficit spending, the burden to repay the debt falls on future generations who can't vote against spending that happened in the past! And spending by printing money hurts the poor the hardest, which I can't imagine you would be in favor of.
> Government workers are supposed to be working for the people, involvement in a union is a conflict of interest
Whats the logic here? Unions protect against employers, not consumers. Where does "the people" come in this relationship?
Securing your ability to not be fired because the new president doesn't like the color of your suit is indeed a benefit to both of us, even if you disagree with that person's views.
>otherwise the government can just vote itself more and more funds for whatever without accountability. Since we're all deficit spending, t
Yeah, it's almost like that's a career Killing move presidents avoid like the plauge. I wonder why. Must be because the people care so little about politics.
Oh, but tarrifs? That's a great strategy.
> Since we're all deficit spending,
I wish the people at large cared even 10% as much about balancing the budget as they love to discuss about during the election season. You'd see from basic research that thr defecit oft rises during republican terms (over guess what? Tax breaks) and not as much over democrats. In fact, the fee times it fell came under democratic administrations.
So the solution? Vote in the republican. One that already set a record for the biggest deficit increase and made a tarriff war that cost Americans billions. Surely he has the solution.
> Isn't this a problem? Government workers are supposed to be working for the people, involvement in a union is a conflict of interest
I don't think so. Government workers have faced the same problems as workers in the private sector (excessive overtime, unpaid wages, pay not keeping up with inflation, workplace safety issues, etc.) and unions are the best way we have to combat those kinds of issues to ensure that workers are treated fairly.
> The legitimacy of government is predicated on the ability of the voter to yank the money from the government if it's ineffective -- otherwise the government can just vote itself more and more funds for whatever without accountability.
We can certainly vote out people who commit fraud and decide democratically what we want the government to spend money on, but we can also decide that some things are worth having even when they don't make money. Governments can even run programs at a loss if we feel that those services are worth having. That doesn't mean printing money.
They are when labor is fungible, and when you're not paid by the public. Lots of crazy effects happen when the second condition is not met, for example prison guards unions advocating for harsher laws so that prisons stay full.
> That doesn't mean printing money
In principle, it does not. In practice you can count the countries that don't deficit finance on one hand.
>prison guards unions advocating for harsher laws so that prisons stay full.
People in America always vote in attorneys who are "hard on crime though". I simply see that as unchecked reflection of the people's will. To double down on it, my state had a recent proposition rejected that would have addressed some prisoners rights regarding treatment and compensation. The bluest state you can imagine and we still can't properly say that prisoners aren't slaves.
The only people America trusts less than authority is their own people, apparently. If they vote in people who want to lock more people up instead of focusing on rehabilitating: well, that's they get what they vote for, huh?
> People in America always vote in attorneys who are "hard on crime though"
They don't. For example chesa boudin in San Francisco (there are others too). Also don't forget that those tough on crime electees get campaign funds from those unions.
> Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
Yes, if you can't offer someone market rates then you need to offer them other things to fill that void. Stability is one of them, and is actually a good thing in government, when politics is so volatile. If the workforce is fired every time a new party comes into power, you don't have a stable government.
Working with those constraints, you _can_ improve things, by building better systems and processes, that better use the resources you have. That's far better long term, but it's not as fast and does not generate headlines for DOGE.
> If the workforce is fired every time a new party comes into power
What if the workforce is never fired, and government jobs acquire a reputation for ingrained incompetence, promotion from within for the unqualified, and a management so frustrated by their inability to turn over poorly-performing workers that nearly nothing productive gets done anymore?
What if the workforce is full of appointments by the Old-Boy network, and jobs are personal favors or quid pro quo rather than based on qualifications or education?
What if we just arrested every person who broke every tiny archaic law we can think of? What if we run out of prisons and decide to outsource them to foreign counties? What about this sort of criminal system?
I don't know why we are talking in such extreme what ifs. If you really think the government let's anyone with a pulse in you never applied for a government position. At least not one in a medium-large city. You have a lot of test taking and a process that can take months. Maybe even longer if you need clearance (at that point it's best to go private sector since they'll get you cleared while you work on non-xlearajce stuff).
Yes, there is corruption and nepotism. Can you name a single industry where there isn't? How about we setup more channels to report and hold it accountable instead of using it to dismiss the concept of a government job? We'd all win there.
Internet comments really need to get pronouns & antecedents under control. Use the Scientific “we” if we’re a tenured professor or scholar with credentials.
But the GP is perhaps not a police officer, a department of corrections administrator, or legislator, so please, leave AStonesThrow out of your speculative, hypothetical scenarios and TDS bloviations?
>Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
Yes we do.
Software development is unusual in that if a coder's mind goes off the rails and he starts committing bad code, the organization can easily use `git reset` to revert his changes.
Most jobs aren't like that. For example, on the factory floor, if a machine operator gets too creative, inspired or enthusiastic about the work, people tend to start losing limbs. And the managers of the factory floor are keenly aware of that, which is why passion is not a quality they want in their machine operators and neither is wanting to change the world.
Do you want to attract talent or people who take anything they can get? People who know what they're worth aren't going to waste investing their time into an employer who can't even guarantee that they'll still have a job next week.
Mundane government employees are some of the most dedicated workers I've met. There's a deep array of jobs that aren't flashy but are foundational and depend on staff who can build up long institutional knowledge.
Thars like saying "the reason the best employees are good is that they are paid the most money". You're putting the cart ahead of the horse here.
They are dedicated partially because they can spend their time focused on doing their job and not grinding leet code looking for the next pay bump in 2 years. Those pay scales are very strict in government, and very predictable.
We had federal employee turn over every political cycle. It was horrible to the point the two parties got together and created the Federal Civil Service concept so that positions would have stability.
An aside: I've never once heard the word "blessed" used where the subtext wasn't "fuck you". It's the American equivalent of Britain's "With all due respect..." I love it.
I don’t think you really need a citation for the fact that most people work to live rather than live to work.
I mean, that doesn’t mean that people can’t enjoy their job. But enjoying your job also doesn’t mean that you’d want to work if it wasn’t for the requirement to earn money.
You just made an argument about government based on a comparison with the private sector, and now you're agreeing that government and the private secctor have fundamentally different goals. Got to admit, I'm a bit lost.
The argument wasn't based on a comparison to the private sector. The argument is based on the fact that I prefer people who passionate about their jobs vs people who just want a stable paycheck. However the argument also applies to the private sector, which is why I mentioned it.
Let's flip the script. How have young people felt about the private sector as their entry level jobs have focused more around a turnover based culture than ever? Do you feel Gen Z is passionate about work or even about trying to maximize their compensation? Do they seem happy or even tolerant of a 9-5 to (not) make ends meet?
What makes you think applying these practices to the public sector will work for the better?
Maybe a similar process occurred in Trump's head when he approved Musks cleansings. The weak point of this attitude is that those folks had a job with crappy pay but at least some stability, now they have none, so good luck finding people desperate enough to work for the government.
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.
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?
Democratic governments tends to create and maintain a lot of checks and balanced on corporations. Things like workers rights, consumer rights, product quality, environment protections, etc etc. Many things that corporations would love to do to make more money are illegal. That makes it harder to earn money. Removing such barriers seems like a pretty straightforward motive to me.
The people who want to remove these barriers are naive, because the same barriers are removed for their competitors, which ends up driving a race to the bottom.
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).
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.
5. Then outsource that government work to private firms, preferably ones run by your friends and/or lobbyists, who are both more expensive and yet do a worse job too.
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.
> 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.
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.
Mass firing is such a destructive process, you lose good people who were hard to source in the first place and it destroys moral and trust. If you're broadly firing people, you fucked up, it's not some magical skill, it means you can't plan and manage your business.
"coding error" makes it seem like some technical issue. Meanwhile, anyone in tech knows this is at best an administrative error and that there was no "coding" involved whatsoever. But you don't want to blame admins who are doing your bidding, no?
Anyone who really thinks this is "efficient" need to understand that they are firing the IRS during tax season and realize how absurd that is. It's like announcing a mass layoff the week before shilling our a product. You at least wait until shipping before the layoff wave hits
I can think of at least one (Northern European style Socialism) that is better to live under via virtually any metric for 99.99% of people - and that includes the majority of users of this site that think they are some sort of tech unicorn.
Just not having insurance tied to employment would be such a massive win.
Humanity did fine with other systems that capitalism. Hunter gather societies were well adapted to their environments, Tibetan monks dealt with human relations differently etc.
It would be crazy to assume that the whole humanity longs for capitalism whatever their situation or belief system, the same way _we_ don't assume any current form of capitalism is specially superior to other alternative forms that could better benefit our situations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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/administrati...
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.
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.
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.
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.
How you measure matters. Looking at only the individual misses the value of the organization they are with. If businesses did this then only sales would be employed since they are the only ones actually bringing in money right? Everyone else is a net negative. With government you would have to step back from even the organization level view. The National Parks Service doesn't make money right? That whole thing can be cut because they are a net negative right? If you are going to use money as a value signal, which I am arguing is a very flawed signal at the government level, then at least go to something like median income and not the individual or organization level. It is terribly flawed to say 'high median income - good country' but at least it is a money signal that, maybe, captures a few features about the utility of government. I'd argue strongly against this signal but at least then you could look at various actions as a whole and say 'overall median income is up/down because of this move' and then things like employing someone that isn't great at their job just to keep them off the street becomes an obvious win because median income is higher because of that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.
But that aside: even if we want to alter the deal, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Jobs are important because they are a big part of your life and because you need one to pay the bills. So you should try to avoid "haha so long" / "oops, clicked the wrong button, come back" kinds of situations.
> For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.
Yeah, that is definitely "for worse". The point of hiring someone to do a job is to get something useful done. Not to hand out do-nothing sinecures to lucky lottery winners. I have friends who have transitioned from private to public sector and they unanimously complain about how useless the government lifers are. This is your tax money that is being spent.
and if you aren't getting what you're owed for that money you have the ability to vote out the people responsible for that and elect people who can deliver what we're asking for. Try voting out the CEO of walmart.
Believe it or not, when a bunch of incompetents aren't dismantling them, most government agencies get their work done. There are a lot fewer "do-nothing"s than you think and a lot of hard workers who are proud to serve their fellow Americans.
You don’t need to vote out the CEO of Wal-Mart. He can’t put you in jail or confiscate your income via taxes. You just go shop at target or somewhere else instead.
The most universally hated companies are also among the richest. Voting with your wallet is a myth. The entire point of a private company is to confiscate your income. They must charge you as much as they possibly can while providing you with as little as they can possibly get away with. Maybe you've even noticed prices going up while enshittification and shrinkflation increases.
The richest companies do the most business. If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated", but you don't hear anything from the 99.9% of people who had perfectly fine, unremarkable experiences.
In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.
TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper. Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer. Air travel quality has declined, but so have prices. New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. If they kept pace with inflation, they should cost $140 to $150 now. The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s and even before inflation it's about 1/3 the price.
Food has more variety and is cheaper. Craft beer was not a thing 30 years ago. Coffee was Maxwell House freeze dried garbage from a can, not fresh roasted beans.
I'm sure there's more. The government is responsible for basically none of that.
> If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated"
The most hated companies tend to be the ones who have been causing harm for years if not decades and impacting vast numbers of people: Purdue Pharma, Nestlé, BP, Facebook, Monsanto, Comcast, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, etc. Several of the most hated companies have been directly responsible for killing millions of people. This isn't about "angry reviews online", sometimes it's about getting away with fraud or even murder.
> In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.
Your calls also used to be much more private, but now the software, devices, and services you use are spying on you and your communications to varying degrees in ways that would have been illegal when you had a landline. Call quality was also vastly better ("you can hear a pin drop" vs "can you hear me now")
> TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper.
They also take multiple screenshots of every second to spy on what you're watching, they push ads on the screen even when you're playing video games or watching DVDs, and have microphones and camera collecting your personal data.
> Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer.
Cars are also spying on everything you do and reporting your driving habits to your insurance company who will jack up your rates if you drive at night or take a corner too hard.
> New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. I
You aren't counting the fact that parts of games (including parts important to the story) are often paywalled off and the cost of games can end up in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars if you include the DLC (for example the total cost of the Sims 4 is $1,235) or the games which require ongoing subscription costs, when in the 80s there were countless free player-made mods/maps/skins/expansions etc. Also video games are being used to build psychological profiles of you which then gets sold to data brokers and used to push ads at you (https://www.wired.com/story/video-games-data-privacy-artific...).
> The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s
The PC you had in the 90s was your computer. On your phone multiple third parties like your phone manufacturer, your carrier, and the OS maker can all access your phone remotely at any time, view/modify/add/delete files, applications, and settings without any notice to you at all. They have privileged levels of access to your device while you are left with a locked down account without full access to "your" device. Your computer in the 90s was designed to work for you, but your cell phone is designed to collect your personal data for other people.
> Food has more variety and is cheaper.
Food prices are at historic highs right now and that food is less healthy than it used to be as companies have been able to strip away regulations. The same scientists that the tobacco industry paid to lie to the public and government about the harms of smoking are now being employed by the food industry to convince the government that their additives are harmless (https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/ho...) and people are eating worse now than they did in the 1980s which shows in the amount of obesity and disease. I have to admit that we have much more variety than we did. That seems to be on the decline in recent years though and people are increasingly finding empty shelves at the stores.
Some things are better today than they used to be, but many things are actually much worse. Every new technology that does something convenient for you is also being used against you in some way.
Purdue Pharma is not one of the richest companies anymore. They have been sued into oblivion. The fact that some terminally online redditors like to farm karma by posting "Fuck Nestle" every time they're mentioned because of a 40 year old scandal is not really representative of them being "most hated". To 99% of people Nestle is chocolate chips and candy bars. Most people do not care about any of this, except maybe Comcast, and that is a case of regulatory capture.
Yeah, things can spy on you to target ads. If this bothers you, block ads. They can target all the ads they want at me, I'll never see them.
Call audio quality might have been better, but video quality was nonexistent. My mom can see her granddaughter from the other side of the world and that was simply not even possible 20 years ago.
You can still root your phone and most computers are still your own, if this is important for you. For the vast majority of people, they don't even understand what the settings mean and it is a relief that they don't have to deal with them. The average consumer experience compared to editing autoexec.bat and fiddling with .ini files to get a game working on Windows 95 is a vast improvement.
> The most hated companies [...] Johnson & Johnson, 3M
You're living in a serious bubble if you think people hate the company they most readily associate with shampoo or scotch tape.
Almost all "most hated company" rankings can be broken into two categories: the ones many consumers had direct negative experiences with (Equifax, Comcast) and the ones they were told by the media they should be upset with (Anheuser-Busch).
> This makes no sense. It is not a life, it is a job. The person isn't dead
People's health insurance is tied to their job. Mass firings by the largest employer in the nation could easily result in several deaths as medical treatments are disrupted and medications missed, delayed, or changed with insurance companies.
Not that death is required to screw up your life either. This is not a great time to be out of work. Household debt is at an all time high. Credit card delinquencies and utility disconnections are skyrocketing, homelessness is at an all time high. People are already struggling. Those problems are likely to only get worse for anyone who suddenly finds themselves out of work. Adding hundreds of thousands of Americans to the already growing pool of unemployed people all at once means that jobs will be harder to find and offered wages will be lowered.
> What are you trying to say here? That once someone is employed, the have to keep being employed forever
Who said anything about forever? Maybe just don't randomly fire vast numbers of Americans indiscriminately and all at once for zero reason disrupting their lives and interfering with services that people want, depend on, and are paying for?
> People's health insurance is tied to their job. Mass firings by the largest employer in the nation could easily result in several deaths as medical treatments are disrupted and medications missed, delayed, or changed with insurance companies.
No, this could not "easily" happen. People get COBRA to continue their health coverage after losing their job. There is Medicaid and other programs for people who can't afford care. There are state exchanges where you can purchase insurance upon qualifying events like losing your job. There are a million and one ways to deal with this. Contrary to popular belief people in America do not immediately drop dead the second their health insurance lapses. This is nonsensical fear-mongering.
COBRA is a joke. It's way too expensive. Medicaid is on the chopping block, but even then it doesn't cover everything and not every doctor accepts Medicaid and "other programs". Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans die every year because they don't have insurance and can't afford the treatment they need.
1. Cobra is absurdly expensive. “Healthy” people typically opt for no insurance at all, because they’re now unemployed and poor. Some will die. We cannot ignore obvious human behavior to make your argument more convenient.
2. Medicaid is among the programs on the chopping block. Again, we cannot just ignore that little point because it’s inconvenient. This is ALL part of one conservative strategy for starving the beast.
I think the point is that is inhumane to fire someone because of "coding error", from what we know about USA not having a job is affecting your health care so might cost the person life because a "coding error" , so if you are the guy that writes a "findfWhoToFire" function please have some empathy and tripple check your code and write tests, in USA it can cost lives.
I mostly agree with your position. However there are a couple of issues that make federal government work distinct from ordinary business.
1. Fired federal workers typically do not get a severance. Those impacted by the recent reductions in force are not receiving severance packages.
2. Government salaries are usually uncompetitive compared to the private sector; the major difference is the value of the pension. Leaving government service early results in a low pension; the pension is usually only worth it after 20 years of service and if one leaves federal service close to retirement age, to max out the "high-3" pension basis.
3. Because federal jobs are partially a stimulus effort to state economies, workers will have relocated to a region where there is no other employer in their field. Relocation will be necessary to find another job. This is less of a factor for the private sector, where workers typically move to locations where multiple employers offer jobs for their field.
A necessary set of reforms will be to simultaneously a.) raise federal salaries to market rate, b.) replace pension contributions with 401k matching, c.) reduce roadblocks for performance firings for tenured employees, and d.) consolidate contractors into federal employment.
Part of the reason federal employment is inflexible is due to the comparatively low income for many fields; mid-career employees have a low incentive for joining. Likewise, the barrier to leaving early is high due to the sunk cost of the pension. A tenured employee with reduced productivity is difficult to remove. Due to the pension obligations, the government is forced to use contractors to fill out the workforce. Contracting companies often take 50% overhead just to have someone doing the same job as a federal employee.
Such a policy change would take substantial bipartisan cooperation, so it's unlikely to be done in the current political environment.
This is separate from the deferred resignation plan DOGE was offering. Under that plan employees voluntarily resigned and continued being employed for approximately 8 months, with full pay and benefits and no duties. They were free to go get another job during that time. That is more generous than most layoffs.
The pension / relocation are real issues, but if you work in a job that has a demand in the private sector (e.g. Treasury department going to finance), the increased pay from the private sector often more than makes up for the loss of the pension.
What 8 months? If you believe that, you’re a sucker.
Edit: how about all those fired "for cause" even though it's obviously not "for cause"? If you wanna call this shifting goal posts, fine, but consider this - the DOGE is doing something like a "broad spectrum" attack on government employees. Neither their firings nor offers are legal.
DOGE is destroying entire fields. Maybe you built a career in museum curatorship or international development. You don't get paid much but its a decent living and you feel that you are enriching the world.
You don't just wake up without a job. You wake up in a world where you need a totally new career.
There are lots of privately funded museums. Museums are not going to disappear.
“International development” is mostly rich failsons with politically connected parents getting funneled taxpayer money via NGOs and/or a front for the CIA. Good riddance.
"Don't worry, you've got six months of emergency fund and jobs come and go" and "good riddance I'm glad their careers are destroyed those lazy leeches" don't feel like they should be placed so close together.
I personally believe that making mobile games is less valuable to the world than handing out TB meds, but that's just me.
> Foreign governments have long accused the U.S. Agency for International Development of being a front for the CIA or other groups dedicated to their collapse. In the case of Cuba, they appear to have been right.
I don’t think Foreign Policy is considered some crackpot conspiracy theory rag.
USAID was run by the State department, which is known to provide cover for the CIA (every embassy has CIA officers working out of it). This is not a “conspiracy theory”. The CIA does exist and they do spy on other countries.
What do you think the CIA does? Do you think they go to other countries and open an office with a big sign saying “Hello, this is the CIA”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
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.
> 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.
It's worth noting that most of what is said about the federal budget in layman circles (and some Congressional circles) is basically lies. Well, no, that's uncharitable. "Grossly mischaracterizes the mechanisms and consequences of the operation of a fiat currency that is used by the world as the IMF denomination for sovereign loans" is more accurate.
The only thing that stops the federal government from printing money is its own laws. In that sense, when Congress argues about "the budget," what they're really arguing about is "We'd like to do this via honoring the current laws instead of changing them." In practice, we change them constantly; every vote to increase the debt ceiling is a vote to print more money with no (immediate (1)) consequence. In that sense, the pockets are "infinitely deep" in that they're only constrained by Congress via rules that Congress made up and can change. And firing individual bureaucrats, or even closing entire departments, is rarely worth the cost savings because bureaucrat labor is just so, so much cheaper than most things the government is spending on (like the military budget, which in the modern era is basically "A big storehouse of extremely expensive fireworks that are brutally powerful one-shot policy-changers;" maintaining that storehouse is pouring money into an arbitrarily deep hole because there's always room for one more missile in the old arsenal of freedom).
(1) This, of course, grossly oversimplifies. There are definitely consequences for putting more liquid currency into the ecosystem than taxes take out (2). The relative value of dollars in-circulation falls; it can be thought of as a "stealth tax on hoarding assets." This is, it is worth noting, a tax the government can choose to levy to encourage not hoarding assets because moving money tends to make everything better for everyone much of the time, with some extremely notable exceptions.
(2) That's, incidentally, a much better way to think of how the system actually works than "we tax people to pay for government services." Imagine the government took all the federal tax money, put it in a big pile on the Washington Mall, set it on fire, and then told the Mint to print, 1-for-1, one dollar for every dollar destroyed. Beyond the ridiculous carbon cost, this would have no impact on the US economy because, functionally, that's how the loop works: the government taxes to make money go away and prints money to make money exist. And, most importantly, the outputs and inputs are in different places to satisfy federal economic policy; broadly speaking, we take money from people who have a lot of it (to discourage resource hoarding a bit, which slows down the economy) and give it to people who have use for it and not enough of it to act on their intent (because the economy tends to be healthier when there are more, and more diverse, participants in it). The US, in particular, has special leverage to do this in the global marketplace because of its ties to the IMF, but that's a much bigger can of worms than one HN post.
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.
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.
Treating the relationship purely as transactional is anti-social. And compassion and consideration go a long way in creating more productive workplaces.
