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.

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.

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.