- "The firings targeted probationary employees, who have fewer job protections than permanent employees, but still must be fired for cause. Some probationary staff are new to the agency, while others recently promoted or transferred positions. Additionally, all "intermittent experts" — temporary employees hired at-will often for specific subject matter expertise — were terminated."
There's no pretense of firing anyone other than "the subgroup of federal employees that are technically easiest to fire". Firing everyone who was recently promoted (for one category) is objectively a very absurd selector.
Specifically, the plutocratic class wants an employment recession. Disciplining labor, and getting to drop interest rates both increase their grasp on the world.
For all of the talk about "fraud" this is exactly that. All of these thousands of people are being told that they're being let go for "performance reasons" in clearly template emails which is just false. I've been reading stories people are posting about receiving these severance emails in shock because they'd just been praised for their performance, or showing them to their bosses who are also shocked because the bosses weren't informed at all and had no issues with the employee.
There are going to be endless lawsuits about this. The expense and waste of time is going to be enormous. But it achieves their real goal of crippling these agencies and reducing oversight for businesses.
all these probationary firings, across all departments, will impact succession planning in few years. the whole reason to have 'new' people, is to keep an organization functional.
working somewhere that has no new people, is not fun when all the old people with knowledge all retire at once.
It's not just the new people though. There are people with 25 years of experience at an agency who are being fired because they had a promotion within the last 12 months which means they are technically still "probationary" in their role.
The loss of institutional knowledge right now is devastating.
This policy is not the product of unionization. Blaming unions for it makes as much sense as blaming the phases of the moon for it.
Further, "probationary" and "junior" are not the same thing. People who have recently been promoted or changed roles are in this category, even if they've been working for the federal government for decades and decades.
Once you're past your probationary period, you are likely protected by a union. Therefore it is a side-effect of unionization that these junior-est of employees are the easiest pickings.
Agree that the term "junior" here has some nuance to it, though.
So they might be in the union, but not protected by it yet. Again, "new" or "junior" enough that the admin would rather go after them than "regular" employees.
It's generally accepted that a professional civil service is superior to a spoils system. That it's better to have a civil service that promotes people based on merit and retains experience from administration to administration, than a system where most key people are political appointees serving the current administration.
A professional civil service sometimes comes into conflict with the political component of the executive branch. Because of that, civil servants need stronger employment protections than ordinary employees. For example, the administration should not be able to fire a career civil servant for politically motivated reasons and replace them with a loyalist.
But hiring obviously goes wrong from time to time. A probationary period with a lower bar for firing is a compromise that makes hiring mistakes less costly if they are detected early.
> This is the nature of union employment: seniority >> everything else.
Actors, writers, and directors are in unions in Hollywood, and the seniority plays no part in who gets which part or which crew is hired for a production.
Seniority has often been used in factories because it was easy metric where you had 'interchangeable' people doing the labour: the people were treated almost like machines/widgets themselves. But the advantage of seniority in that context was that it helped stability: you stayed at the same company so it reduced retraining / rehiring costs to the company, and in exchange for your loyalty to the company, the company was loyal to folks that didn't jump around constantly looking for greener pastures.
But there is nothing inherit in being unionized that mandates the use of seniority as a metric.
This tired trope fails to capture the accelerationism at play. Elon is firing the most ambitious people in government. 8 years in one position, 1 year promoted fired over the person 9 years in one position.
This is not the nature of union employment, it is a structural weakness in the way employment has been negotiated. Musk is exploiting that weakness.
Still, seems like it's his responsibility to explain that in the meeting. That message has infinitely more weight if he's the one saying it, otherwise you can just point to his absence and claim its only covering his add
> otherwise you can just point to his absence and claim its only covering his add
… or trying to arrange to save positions at the last minute.
I’ve seen the other side of this before.
If he’s a shit leader, he’s just hiding.
If he’s a good leader, then he is firing off e-mails and banging down doors explaining how letting go of this position or that position (or department or whatever) will create irreparable harm.
And with this administration, he probably has the added task of trying to figure out which aspects of irreparable harm the administration wants and which ones they don’t want — an extreme exercise in doublethink.
Once you’re dealing with government leaders at this level, I would default to a charitable view until proven otherwise. They aren’t perfect for sure, but they trend towards being pretty damn good at their jobs.
I get there's no worker rights in the US, but surely do people not have contractual notice period, severance etc? I mean, I'm sure not if you're in a marginal job, but US administration..???
no you are wrong.. at a certain legal era, worker rights and protections got very strong in the USA. The bounce-back from that (long ago) includes "illegal" international workers, high-tech "anything to win" business practices, and moribund, glacially paced court cases involving retirement and medical coverage.
Like education, there is a pendulum effect over time.. but the movement is such that "correcting" for one extreme happens over the enaction of another extreme.. etc
Clearly, people with employment rights and contractual rights are not fired with no cause and no severance. So I don't see how to square this with your comment.
you are citing a result, but, I guarantee you that there are a lot of lawyers involved on all sides.. nothing about employment law in the USA is simple IMHO
But he was suggested by both Obama and Trump. Is it this?
"Panchanathan highlighted how universities like ASU ought to work hand-in-hand with businesses to create curriculum that fosters the entrepreneurial traits employers look for today, in order to produce a future of innovation ecosystems."
Or does he facilitate flooding the US with cheaper H1B scientists from India?
I no longer understand why people rise to the top (this is not limited to the US, Europe is the same).
THIS is what your “disruptive” heroes have bought & paid for. Yes, I’m talking specifically about paulg and his buddies in the VC world, who’ve stepped up their funding & lobbying to levels matching folks like Adolph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaifie. They’re on an ideological vendetta to DESTROY functioning government and leave themselves with near-dictatorial private power, unconstrained by governments anywhere.
These are the folks so many commenters here worship & wish to emulate.
This is the mindless destruction you’ve all been cheering for.
May this be an opportunity for you to reconsider your goals and priorities.
The hero worship is one aspect of a much larger problem, I think, which is that technology culture is almost entirely defined by trends in the startup and VC spaces. It's been that way for at least a decade and a half, by my reckoning.
There is very little genuine technology subculture anymore that is willing to critique dominant trends, raise up our own heroes, and create alternatives.
I'm really hoping that demystifying "disruption" will create a moment of reckoning for technologists.
The decimation of science continues. I am sure the consequences of this will be seen in the future. And I truly feel sorry for people affected, people who sacrificed their lives, their pay, to work in science, and now are dealt with like garbage, and have their careers destroyed.
You've seen it used correctly many times because language evolves and "decimate" has taken on a new meaning other than the one used to describe ancient Roman military practice.
No, they aren't doing anything to improve anything. They aren't even using real criteria, instead just firing anyone whose been in their current position for less than some time. That means a lot of very senior people who happened to take promotions or transfers are being fired willy nilly.
From what I've seen (I know multiple people at places directly affected by this), the justification is "poor performance", which is clearly nonsense as theres been no time for that kind of evaluation and the actual criteria is obvious (probationary or not).
The effects on unemployment here will be absolutely unprecedented, given how many very smart, otherwise successful people are being punted. It has also killed morale at any and all government agencies and companies that work with them (pretty clearly the point, imo). Everyone knows making the entire workforce depressed and fearful helps productivity!
You might be surprised to hear this but there are people in the CIA and IC who agree with Trump and Vance on Ukraine and many things. How many, I'm not sure, but the idea that there's one US foreign policy is obscured by the political actors that rise to the top. There are very senior people who do not agree with the standard CFR/NED coalition.
You have to figure whether there is anybody out there who would reward Trump most handsomely if he succeeds in destroying American economic advantage.
Musk is on the bandwagon now, are there really that many organizations or individual decision makers who have the resources to make him more fabulously rich than he already is?
And are these in the same camp and are they aligned in any way?
If Ronald Reagan were alive today he would surely be condemning Trump as a flat-out communist, and not just a commie sympathizer as a softer reaction to his first term.
Plus, is there a counter-party who can make Trump a better offer if he were to refrain from applying his legendary bankruptcy-prone financial misdeeds to the country as a whole? After all this would realistically be his last chance for sure this time.
Remember when Trump goes bankrupt, he says how great he did because other people lost more :(
>Musk is on the bandwagon now, are there really that many organizations or individual decision makers who have the resources to make him more fabulously rich than he already is?
well, he's so rich that getting richer doesn't matter. But running the whole country is priceless
>are there really that many organizations or individual decision makers who have the resources to make him more fabulously rich than he already is?
Russia.
Putin promised Elon he would be able to pursue the North American Technate without Russian interference. Elon bought Trump and promised that Trump would stay out of prison. If one gets caught now they both go down.
yes, but no... Limited experience here in California shows a) Feds who can't attract the best talent and b) the power to outsource, subcontract and stall. It would be great to idolize every member of Federal Science but.. survey says.. no, not so simple in reality
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
Nature, Radiolab, NOVA, I probably haven't gone a week without watching or listening to something funded by the NSF since I was a kid. That's just the media stuff off the top of my head, hard to put a finger on just how much NSF funded research and projects impact our daily lives.
I actually grew up listening to talk radio; still do. The nationally syndicated stuff is whatever, but, the locally produced stuff is useful. Gotta know what the people around you are thinking and saying.
Before we had an FM radio I used to listen to a lot of Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura when I was little. Listening to something at an early age and thinking "I don't agree" was a good experience. To this day I don't like reading, watching, or listening to stuff that I "agree" with.
Where are the corporate lobbyists on this stuff?
My understanding is that public research funding (and its associated administration) periodically yields results that either turn into viable commercial products or tools for whole sub-industries.
Lasik surgery, PCR, CRISPR, MRIs are supposed to have come out of NSF projects, and these all became someone's line of business. Why are the heads of biotech or pharma or medical device companies not publicly stating that destabilizing the apparatus for early research risks shrinking these fields?
I think the "solely" part isn't necessary to the claim that the NSF is a large net benefit to industry by supporting early research. Apparently the NSF did provide support for IntraLase to pursue commercializing a device for LASIK cornea surgery.
With PCR, their own claim, which other sources seem to agree with, is that research on extremophile bacteria supported by NSF in the 1960s found the bacteria from which a heat-tolerant DNA polymerase enzyme was isolated.
I think this is actually a pretty good example of research which initially might have seemed purely exploratory that facilitates valuable applications which couldn't have been seen at the outset.
The original Taq polymerase used in the original PCR was published here https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/232952/pdf/jb... and funded by the U. Cincinnati. The NSF funding (along with Atomic Energy COmmission funding!) paid for the initial capture and isolation of Taq, but that is just one of many things that had to be done for PCR to happen. I think the NSF is stretching here to say they made a sigifnicant contribution to CRIPSR.
In summary: NSF funding is great. It played an important role in a key component of PCR. But it's still a stretch for them to tout their involvement with PCR per-se.
Per Grok, no NSF funding was used to develop CRISPR. I'm too lazy to fact check other.
This doesn't affect the NSF grants. They fired 10% of middle managers distributing the grants. The actual scientific work is not done by employees of NSF but by employees of universities etc.
Finally, it's a stretch to argue that even if NSF grants go away, the progress of science stops.
Universities have other sources of funds and I don't see why businesses need government subsidies. They are not giving free lasik surgeries or MRI scans, they can fund their products and services from profits not taxpayer (i.e. you and me) money.
“Middle managers” is a pretty gross mischaracterization of NSF program managers. They are more like investment portfolio managers, responsible for coordinating and leading the external reviews of research proposals, evaluating the proposal and reviews to prioritize which projects to invest in to achieve a good risk/reward profile for the goals of the broader program, and working with the academics doing the research to help them stay on track and increase the impact of their ideas.
I don’t totally disagree with your point about scientific progress continuing with a diminished NSF, but NSF does place a lot of emphasis on early stage fundamental high risk / high reward research, which industry has been trending away from in favor of quicker and clearer returns.
Having an evidence-based discussion about how the US should allocate resources for scientific discovery is great - but it should be a clear discussion within the norms of our democratic institutions instead of a unilateral move by a few that stand to personally gain at the expense of the broader interest of the the American people
Every professor in a scientific field that I know is telling me that their university leadership is preparing for indefinite hiring freezes and massive cost cutting in preparation for huge slashes in funding from these institutions.
The only difference is that when the Romans did it, they had a purpose in mind. What we are seeing now is the act of a Batman villain, not a general or an industrialist or a president.
Everyone in executive branch, as the saying goes, serves at the pleasure of the President of United States.
That's what constitution says.
President ordered reduction of number of government employees, as is his right and authority.
Hence NSF and other government departments are following the President orders and firing people, starting with those easiest to fire i.e. probatory workers. I'm sure that's just the beginning and they will follow with firing people for not showing up to work, having second jobs, lack of performance etc.
Congress is the other branch of government and has no power or authority here.
Contacting representatives and senators would be a waste of time.
>Congress is the other branch of government and has no power or authority here.
The judiciary is the other other branch of government and absolutely has power and authority here if laws or contractual agreements (e.g., requirements to fire for cause) are being violated.
The President isn't an absolute monarch, even within the Executive Branch.
>Contacting representatives and senators would be a waste of time.
Aside from formal legal power, Congressional Reps and Senators can apply pressure to the President to change his policies, which they will do if enough of their constituents express their anger at these actions.
Congress passes laws. Among these many laws are laws that govern the processes for hiring and firing within the executive branch and laws that govern the processes for disbursement of funds.
The unitary executive is not clearly visible in our constitution.
How could any rep either not think any of this is important or not be actively involved? This is some of the craziest shit the US government has ever seen.
Obviously Democrat politicians will make noise over this, but Trump just won an election and the Republican may believe that this is what their voters want, or at least they don't really care about it. They may be unaware of how things are actually playing out.
So the NSF has to manage $9B in grants but with fewer people to do so. That $9B will probably be less well spent now. So we're risking mis-spending $9B in order to save less than $20MM in salaries. That would be a really stupid move if the motive really was to improve efficiency.
Except obviously the motive is to not efficiency. It's about ensuring loyalty and even deliberately breaking the government to justify later actions.
So, should they hire 10% more NSF employees to be even more efficient?
Or is it your position that NSF has optimal number of employees for managing $9B of grants and adding one more or subtracting one would make NSF less efficient?
If you could provide chain of reasoning that led you to opine that the current number of NSF employees is the optimal one?
Over the years NSF, like any organization, has attempted to staff completely to their needs and faced pushback from those that control the funding. Of course that doesn't result in perfect results, but it is somewhat connected to needed staffing levels. A mandate that was written to apply to every agency in the government is totally disconnected from appropriate staffing.
Yes, changing the plan from one arrived at by people familiar with the problem sure sounds like something that would need either talking to those people or engaging with the problem for months or years.
I'm all for government efficiency, but this brainless approach is counterproductive. It's just surgery with a hatchet. They don't know anything about the systematic problems with the agencies they're cutting, and don't bother to learn them, so their approach is more likely to create inefficiencies than to eliminate the ones that were there. In cases like this, they're cutting off the next generation of scientists, along with the staff that make research feasible. To the extent—and I believe it's true—that innovation will remain America's lifeblood and saving grace in the coming decades, this catastrophically bad plan is doing more damage than any foreign adversary could hope for.
If they did it the "normal" way, there would be so much time wasted that it would be useless.
Elon already proved that taking a chainsaw to a large org has practically no effect on the outcome. He fired over 80% of Twitter and even I thought it would go down for days at a time at some point, but I was wrong. He's taking this experience and acting at scale on the Federal government.
I don't know if he's right or he's wrong, but I'm willing to try it out and live with the consequences.
If the only problem in government is that agencies are overstaffed, this move addresses it. But, if it's anything other than that, it doesn't, and at some point a plan will have to be developed on an agency-specific basis to implement real fixes. By firing people and ruining morale, Musk is leaving the remaining people to do more work with fewer resources. Since I don't assume Musk or DOGE is going to spend the time to embed with the agencies and come up with innovative, tactical, agency-specific fixes, who will? The remaining workforce, who is demoralized, and understaffed? I'm not confident that will work.
Twitter seems like a dysfunctional company at this point, and I'm not sure it's a good model for how to fix government.
What's your basis for saying this? I think the problem is Musk guessing how to fix a series of institutions he's not an expert in, which is clearly and obviously a mistake. I suppose we'll see how it turns out, but the stakes aren't low.
I assume Trump and Musk are not insane, just cynical and with some unusual objective. Now, what might that objective be? I doubt they really care about US personnel cost, it's not that much in the grand scheme of things. Violent deregulation? But what does this, or WHO membership, or nuclear safety have to do with that?
Or maybe they really are crazy. But that would be a conclusion of last resort.
My guess is that they want capital to have power over everything. Organizations that you can't buy and that have any amount of power are going to get destroyed. That's why the opposition is doing nothing about this. They're also servants of capital.
Well, fine, but FAA? WHO? NSF? I would be totally unconfused if they were (and indeed they are) going after FBI, CIA, financial regulators - the sinews of power. But they seem to be going after everything. Even really boring things that they might as well leave be so as not to create a headache for themselves.
Last time, a bunch of pieces of the federal government resisted Trump's attempts to ignore the constitution. I think the goal this time is to break everything in the government that did that last time, or might consider doing it this time.
Note well: That's my guess. I have no definite knowledge.
Pretty terrible to be fired like that with no severance. I think that's unconscionable. It looks like they targeted mostly probationary employees, which doesn't make it better.
However, is it right to be hiring so many new people when we are $36T in debt, with the debt growing $1T every 100 days. It seems like this was going to happen at some time and the original sin was to expand headcount when debt is already this high.
Ok, given the size of the US budget and size of the US both population and land mass, the federal executive workforce is likely understaffed. The amount spent on the workforce is not excessive and is ~3% of the overall US budget.
These cuts to the workforce are performative at best, or designed to destroy the federal government at worst. Given it's Musk and Trump, I think it's the later. And they are doing this under the guise of budget concerns, which is clearly bullshit when they still have a $4.5T tax cut on the table.
So it's not whataboutism, it's was a quick way of highlighting how your post was incorrect.
And the NSF headquarters is a complete joke...I use to do tempo runs down Eisenhower Ave when it was all brutalist government buildings and condo's. They ripped down the brutualist buildings and rebuilt them into commercial office space which has sat vacant for years. But then in comes the NSF and they constructed this abomination of a building that has rooftop gardens and dominates the skyline. Massive sky scrapper...And they did this when a significant portion of their employee's worked from home (I know one). Sorry if I'm not crying about layoffs with the NSF, especially after years of tech layoffs due to Section 174 (approved of by some of these same progressive NSF government employees).
> new contracts for military cyber trucks were signed just last week.
To repeat: Biden admin signed those contracts and they were last updated in December. So not new, not last week, not a deal with Trump admin.
> Space X was contracted to “fix” FAA
No. DOGE, which is a government department of ~100 people, will work to fix FAA, not SpaceX. And you don't have to use scary quotes: by their own admission traffic control system is tech from 70.
Finally, why don't you tell us which SpaceX government contract should be given to another company and how much more will that other company charge (assuming they are even capable of executing the task).
For the vast majority of people, it means "new". There's no evidence that these probationary workers are the "best workers". I think they should get severance but they don't deserve job protections when they are filling in new positions that should have been closed instead.
Have you seen credible numbers on what portion of the "probationary" workers that have been laid off were new as opposed to existing government workers who had been promoted in the past 12 months?
The administration has at points said social security and medicare won't be touched, no one's been talking seriously about defense spending cuts, and we understand there to be giant risks with screwing around with paying interest. So almost 2/3 of our 6.8T budget is off limits. The 10B for the whole NSF is like < 0.15%.
I'd love us to have a serious conversation about addressing the debt, but that can't start with asking for tax cuts and protecting existing entitlement benefits under their exact current terms.
Further: My understanding has always been that "defense" is quite a bit larger than reported as there are a lot of things that are really in the name of "defense" that aren't categorized that way in the budget.
> The administration has at points said social security and medicare won't be touched
That's also in the 2024 Republican party platform: "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE". (Shouting copied from the source).
There are however a couple reasons to doubt the sincerity of that.
First the Republican Study Committee, which around 80% of House Republicans belong to, keeps proposing that the retirement age be raised.
Second, if nothing is done to either cut benefits or raise revenue or both the Social Security trust fund runs out of money around 2035. Around 20% of benefits are paid out of the trust fund. If that is allowed to happen then the only way to not cut benefits would be for Congress and the President to make that up out of the general budget.
The only thing Republicans have said along the lines of increasing SS revenue is that their policies will lead to so much economic growth that tax revenue, including the payroll taxes for SS, will go way up and that will be enough to avert the trust fund's insolvency.
Meanwhile, many of their proposed tax cuts will shorten the time to insolvency. The proposal to eliminate taxes on tips and to eliminate taxes on SS for retirees with high non-SS income will move the insolvency up by up to a couple years or so.
Anyway, I'm sure that if the trust fund is allowed to become insolvent those who let that happen will say that since they did not actively cut benefits they did not violate the party platform.
The Democrats also have repeatedly introduced bills to address the trust fund, which concentrate on raising its revenue. The main method in these bills is to raise the cap on income subject to the payroll tax. Right now you pay 6.2% on the first $176100 (in 2025) of your pay. The Democrat proposals are to include some income above that cap in payroll tax. I believe there have been proposals to get rid of that cap, to raise the cap, or to put a cap on that cap (e.g., payroll tax on first $176100, then no payroll tax from there to $400k, then payroll tax again on income above $400k).
A poll of a proposal that would do the cap on the cap thing (with the numbers given above), gradually raise the payroll tax from 6.2% to 7.2%, make the annual COL adjustment more accurately reflect inflation, and a few other things which would result in there being a small surplus got overwhelming support from voters [1] (here's the PDF with the detailed results) [2].
Overall support is 82%. This doesn't vary much by education level or income level or age. By party affiliation support is 88% for Democrats, 82% for independents, and 74% for Republicans.
Note: the above results are for a proposed package that includes several things. The poll also looked at the individual things in isolation and at variants of them.
> […] and we understand there to be giant risks with screwing around with paying interest.
Yeah… maybe:
> "We're even looking at Treasuries," Trump said. "There could be a problem - you've been reading about that, with Treasuries and that could be an interesting problem."
> He added: "It could be that a lot of those things don't count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought."
> It was not clear whether Trump was referring to debt service or other government payments made by the Treasury Department.
Debt isn't always bad. But our current debt load is bad and will never be paid off. 50% of our tax revenues are going to be used to pay interest from our debt. That is a huge curtailing of spending because of this unsustainable debt.
Debt is actually what cements the dollar as the world currency. It's not only not bad, it's a huge positive driver of the US economy. T-Bills are a bedrock of most portfolios. Eliminating them over some bad analogies to household budgets is just misunderstanding what debt actually means for a country/government.
Heck, even inflation isn't bad. You need a little bit of it to keep companies and individuals from simply hording assets.
As far as I know majority of research on fusion / future of nuclear is financed by NOT government.
Spending $50 million on housing immigrants or $2 million on DEI programs that result in wasting employees times with "training" about white privilege will not create fusion.
If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed.
Not to mention that universities are grifting on science grants and using half the money for "overhead", not for actual research.
It's also an open secret that grants don't necessarily go to the best scientists but to best grant proposal writers and those are not the same people.
> If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed.
This is the reason that NSF exists - many exciting and potentially promising future technologies are not commercially viable. We invest in NSF to fund the foundational research to get to a place where ideas are commercially viable enough for industry to fully develop and implement them.
Also, there is also (internal) overhead in industrial research organizations, and there are similar problems of optimal resource allocation in any organization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to do better, but I think it’s selective logic to apply these critiques only to the public sector.
Hiring so many new people is a false assumption. US Federal employment numbers have grown at incredibly low rates relative to US economic growth or federal spending.
The attrition rate of the federal government is 6-7% per year. This is about 150,000 new hires a year if you maintain the same size government. You can even see it from the DOGE website showing hundreds of thousands
So yes, the vast majority are new employees. The idea that the government hasn't grown doesn't mean that new employees haven't been hire.
I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically. It doesn't have to be demeaning the way it's currently being done, but the 8 month offer was pretty generous in my opinion.
>I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically.
Or maybe you are wildly off base about how many humans it takes to corral the federal government of the US? Maybe you are more filled with propaganda of government jobs?
Maybe the people like you making government jobs the butt of jokes have been part of the problem? Maybe we should respect civil service and have high expectations of it but also understand how important it is.
Being mildly in debt is no reason or excuse to destroy democracy.
Maybe you are the one who is wildly off base as to how many people it takes to do the work in the government? Maybe you are filled with Trump Derangement Syndrome and everything he does is wrong no matter what? I actually worked in the government and saw how ridiculous things were and this was a couple of decades ago. It's only worse now.
$36T is mildly in debt? 50% of our tax revenue will be used to pay our interest on the debt in the next 5 years. It sounds like you have no understanding about how much debt we are in, especially considering that most of our debt has been bought by the Federal Reserve, which is essentially printing money.
Nothing about this destroys democracy. Managing our debt and spending allows us to enjoy more democracy not less.
If the US's budget were like a household budget, these firings would be like easing your toothpick budget to save money. It's completely asinine. This is about controlling narratives and consolidating power, nothing else.
Anyone who says saving billions isn't worthwhile isn't serious about saving money. Rebuilding all of Maui's destroyed housing would cost $5 billion, but the people have been completely ignored by the government and private equity funds are coming in and buying the land from long time residents because they are desperate.
You have to start somewhere and they're starting with the low hanging fruit. They've already gotten permission to go though the defense budget as well.
There's no pretense of firing anyone other than "the subgroup of federal employees that are technically easiest to fire". Firing everyone who was recently promoted (for one category) is objectively a very absurd selector.