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).
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.
> 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.
> 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 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 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.
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.
> 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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In general it is a good practice to assume other parties are making a good faith effort, but after so many obvious cockups, that grace has been exhausted.
My assumption is that there is a lot of blow-back so they are restoring a few high profile names so they can say, "see, we aren't stopping science!". It is good this handful of people are back on the job, but I assume the NIH is like most other organizations -- the top name isn't doing the work themselves. They lead a team of people and their expertise is used to provide them direction and as a resource to help analyze surprising results. If the top experts lose their staff, I doubt they'll get nearly as much done. Having the 65 year old braintrust spending hours pipetting and staining samples is wildly inefficient. DOGI.
Also, if you're nearing retirement and you look at this mess, you're not coming back, there won't be anything to be done.
Its a trap. They'll get these folks back, there will be nobody else to do the work and they'll come back and say "see, these people were useless, we were right in firing them".
Trust is efficient. Lack of trust is inefficient. If someone untrustworthy like Musk fired me and suddenly wanted a do-over, I'd counter with a completely selfish arrangement like a $500/hr contracting rate with some non-trivial amount due up front.
Tangential, but I almost never get to tell this story.
In 2012 I was fired from a job (on my birthday!). I hated this job, I hated my coworkers, I really hated my manager, I was pretty sure that the higher-ups were alcoholics since they always smelled like beer or whiskey, and the work was mind-numbing where quite literally 3/4 of my work was designing nametags even though I was ostensibly a "Java developer".
Anyway, I got fired, and while getting fired always sucks, I was a little relieved that I didn't have to show up anymore.
The following Monday, I got a phone call from my manager demanding that I provide the password to unlock the Macbook that they had me using. I explained to him that I think it's a bad idea to share my password with people that I don't trust. He then told me that I "had" to provide it, to which I said "I really don't think I do, actually. I don't work for <company name> anymore. What are you going to do, fire me?"
This went back and forth for another thirty seconds, and eventually I said "Here's what we'll do, I'll drive over there, unlock the laptop, and drive back home, and you pay for my entire trip. I charge $200/hour."
He was clearly pissed off, eventually hung up, and I never heard back from them. A part of me likes to think that maybe they had to trash the laptop because they were too incompetent to figure out how to wipe the drive.
Yep, exactly. I do that over far less. And otherwise, f off. People are way too nice to people screwing you over. Unlike we often see here, there are really good business owners who would (and do) sell all they have to keep all the staff through rough times. But those usually are (all I guess?) small businesses; I have the good fortune to contract (yes they even bend over backwards, both unconnected company owners, to keep their contractors) with 2 of them. And they pay well above market in the EU; American wages while they are from the EU. Most others will try to screw you and they call it 'it is not personal, it's just business'; while that's true, it rings hollow when you just did your stinking best. We are led to believe (mostly because of US tech in my case), that you need to work yourself to death while accepting everyone will throw you in a meat grinder whenever they wake up on the wrong side. Musk as poster child of this. But you make money! Sure, so especially for those, and especially in a pickle, our hourlies are bizarrely high and they still come back.
That's another standard bit of the GOP playbook: accuse the other side of a bunch of bad stuff (regardless of whether or not it's true; especially if it isn't) to distract from the fact that the GOP is already doing that bad stuff.
> In general it is a good practice to assume other parties are making a good faith effort
This has never been true for this administration, which A) already had a previous term to show us how incompetent its leaders are, and B) is working from a decades-old playbook of making government more dysfunctional so that people lose faith in it and want to eliminate it.
Is there any proof that they're coding errors? A simpler explanation, to me at least, is that they first blanket fired people by dubious criteria, and are now using this as an excuse to backpedal when they realize they've cut something important.
"Coding error" could mean anywhere from "we wrote an actual good-faith attempt to measure some sort of performance, there was a bug, and we blindly followed what it said without double checking" to "the code we wrote to 'select * from employees' when firing people was in 'error' in hindsight because we now wish to have some of those people working for us again".
No matter how you cut it, in the absolute best case scenario, the people doing the firing were so incompetent that no one can tell they weren't being malicious.
The median scenario, they were simply being malicious.
Non partisan take, in every circumstance coding errors are a euphemism for “leadership is humiliated by the outcome and wants to shirk responsibility”.
Seen this real-life: management ask for some unannounced change on prices. Everyone in IT tells them "this is gonna backfire fast". No way to budge them on it so we apply. A couple hours later support and sales are getting hammered by unhappy clients so we get to rollback as fast as possible. The official excuse? "That's an error from IT".
Nope, the code worked perfectly and did what was asked of it.
They are in charge of making cuts but never bothered to understand what the departments do, the value, or where the excesses are. Yet they still make the cuts.
I think there needs to be one more element like agency? Because under this definition of evil, a sponge elected as president is evil although it wouldn't do anything at all in any situation. Maybe that's still evil?
The Trump admin has stated over and over it is malice.
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...
Doesn't matter if it's coding error or not, the blame lies with the people executing the firings and those ordering them; blaming it on code is a way to shirk responsibilities.
I get that within a software development project, blaming on individuals isn't a healthy way to deal with bugs, but this extends beyond just loss of revenue or uptime and well into personal tragedies.
DOGE did take DOD's AutoRIF which was meant to assist with RIF calculations and modify it. It was also required to be reviewed by a human before initiating any actual separations with it, though DOGE probably went the efficient route and did a "lgtm" rubber stamp on it without looking. However it was just meant to do calculations based on RIF requirement (years in service, veterans preference stuff, and the like) not make any unsupervised decisions based on it.
This was pretty insane to me. Like, whatever systems you're claiming Biden screwed up were 100% guaranteed untouched since the last trump admin. IT in the government moves slooooooow.
"Political enemies fired by a coding error" is an obviously idiotic claim on its face. And when called on it, they immediately double down on their innocence by somehow blaming the firings on Joe Biden. Who is triple checks notes no longer involved in the US government in any way. This has been Trump's playbook forever. Outright lie about things, and if that doesn't work, pivot to a different lie. Always deflect blame. Never, ever, admit fault.
A whole lot of harm could have been averted if the media was willing to call him out on this 10+ years ago instead of embrace the profit potential. But welp.
The article somewhat buries the facts but a couple of important ones:
- They were able to get them reinstated within 24 hours.
- A presentation seen by Science said the overall NIH RIF (reduction in force) was based on administrative codes and that some “may not have been intentional.”
If this was the first "mistake" made by the new administration and DOGE, then these items would be understandable. Or the second mistake. Or the third, maybe.
This is intentional. That is the only conclusion one can draw now. From the terseness of the letters of dismissal to the unreliability of the message ('you're fired! Wait, no you're not!'), one can only assume this is part of the destruction of democratic institutions that the current administration is pursuing.
This administration has tens of billions of dollars in spending and an immense amount of waste. Even if they were 99.9% accurate by this metric or that, there's going to be many mistakes. And the media is going to work to drag out the worst of the worst mistakes. And those worst of the worst are things like this - a guy being accidentally placed on leave pending dismissal for less than 24 hours?
Obviously everybody would prefer there be 0 mistakes, but I think in general this is, ironically, quite a good indicator!
The more governments and corporations try to shove AI into everything the worse this problem is going to get. Blindly trusting computers was always a terrible idea, and now computers are getting even less reliable.
The main problem is the lack of responsibility all along the chain.
25 years and people who shifted blame and were OK with people going to prison so their bonus would not be impacted are still enjoying life out of jail.
Seeing this lack of consequence how can you expect people to behave ethically?
I still can't believe that no-one in the Post Office leadership has been prosecuted for perverting the course of justice or fraud. They "reclaimed" lots of money from the falsely accused postmasters, so I don't see why that isn't treated as fraud.
Everybody should read the public reports about the status of the social security codebase and the (previous) plans to modernize it.
A lot of this code was written before meaningful computer networks existed. Records were committed nightly to tape banks. System limitations meant that a lot of unusual situations were handled with special magic values. Like imagines the norm of returning -1 to represent an error but all over the place and stored in databases. I'm sure that some of this was avoidable, but a lot of it was natural just given that codebase is so old.
This is how you get things like Musk saying that there are a gazillion 140 year olds receiving payments and that this must be fraud when actually this is a special data case. So what happens when the codebase is rewritten to be "simple?" Those people stop receiving payments because the special case handling gets lost. All that data consistency code that exists to handle the fact that a bunch of systems don't perform atomic global updates? Lost. Oops, rows just randomly get dropped now.
We can argue about the merits of LLM-driven programming, but it should be very obvious to everybody that "rewrite the social security codebase in a month with AI" is not well suited for these tools today and requires an incredible amount of arrogance to pursue. The annoying new hire who looks at the codebase, declares that it is messy, and demands to rewrite it but x1000.
Isn't that what the IRS has already been doing the last few years, and has been making good progress on, except that they have been doing it properly so it behaves right?
It seems more than a little silly to try to rewrite something when it isn't necessary since it has already been done. And that goes double if the goal is efficiency since it cost money to do something that doesn't need to be done.
As I understand it, the source for the Master File is lost to the mists of time. But a SoA A.I. can disassemble and comment it, yes ? Prep it for recompilation ?
The source hasn't been lost. It's just that the source was written in a combination of assembly code and COBOL, before COBOL was standardised. They can turn and recompile it any time. Doesn't mean that it's easy to modify or maintain.
There were successful efforts to translate it to Java, already underway (CADE-2). They were probably going to finish somewhere in the next two years. The efforts were for bit-for-bit identical reproductions. [0]
An AI will not help you here. Because this little piece of assembly was created for mainframes, not for computers today (AS/400s, I believe). Even the concept of paths don't operate the way systems do today - the drives were direct access, and tape-based.
There is not enough material to train a model on, to make it close to accurate.
I am not american nor I live in america so I don't really have a horse in this race, but the DOGE approach seems to be the classic "move fast and break things" approach. The reactions to it are the classic reactions to that approach, competent people speak out to get broken things fixed and others are confused about what is happening.
> The spokesperson added: “This is exactly why HHS is reorganizing its administrative functions to streamline operations and fix the broken systems left to us by the Biden administration.
On previous software teams where I've worked, we had a joke that "You get to blame the guy who left for one month." That is you can do this type of complaining, "Oh man, this codebase is spaghetti, screw Bill who just left", for a month. But after a month, you no longer got to blame the guy who left - at that point, it was on you.
We said it (somewhat) tongue in cheek, but there was a real message that, at some point, it doesn't really matter what the guy before you did - we've all dealt with legacy, shitty codebases, but at some point you need to own it.
I realize taking any sort of responsibility for something that goes wrong is anathema to the current administration, but I think the "it's Biden's fault" excuse is going to start wearing really thin, even for Trump supporters if/when the economic shit show starts to affect them.
> “Even if they stopped now, a lot of damage has been done,” another NINDS investigator says. “I think it’s a sinking ship. I don’t mean my lab, I mean biomedical research.”
My point is if you don't think the ship was already sinking you are hopelessly naive. Consider the possibility that scientific funding is net social negative (scary, I know, but possible, if the only people in the system are fraudsters at the top and good scientists forced to chase after or try to replicate or refute fraudulent results for careerist reasons). Then cutting all funds would be socially good.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Even though I wouldn't be surprised at all about the fact that anything Musk and his cronies put out is chock full of coding errors, it does seem like it's just a pathetically weak excuse.
Cruely and revenge upon one's perceived ideological foes are the core organizing principles of this administration. This is a purge, similar to that of Jews of the Germany in the 1930s. The NIH in particular and civil servants in general are just one facet of this. The purge of academic ranks is another (eg [1]).
What makes this possible is hyper-individualism, decades (if not centuries) of attack on any sort of collectivism and the fomented division of ordinary people based on race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or religion. I'm reminded of this LBJ quote:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
It echoes fears of the former slave-owning class in Reconstruction that poor white people would unify with freed slaves.
It's wild to me that we're reliving Nazi Germany less than a century later while victims of the Nazi regime, direct first-hand witnesses, are still alive.
It’s wild how America is just complacent with the destruction of the federal government.
We see all of these red flags across the agencies yet there’s minimal uproar.
I have seen a few protests (50501, recently) but nothing that stops this wanton destruction.
- $6.6T sell off in market due to Orange administration trade war in just _2 days_
- USAID decimated
- US trade partners lost
- Federal agency head count losses across critical departments such as the DOJ
- Weaponized incompetence at the DoD under the Hegseth “leadership” with Signalgate being the latest blunder
- An unelected, billionaire Musk, with his supposed limited “special government employee” access and DOGE have been cutting public programs left and right. Public programs meant to be our safety nets
- Department of Education being undermined by putting incompetent leadership at the top position (a _professional wrestling promoter_) and cutting funding to critical programs for public schools. This is also purportedly to be “abolished”
- Then we have a non-medical professional, and health misinformation promoter at the head of HHS. The awful leadership during the measles outbreaks explains itself…
Wonder if this is what it was like in the months preceding the _2008 subprime mortage crisis_
Definitely not excited for this recession induced by absolute stupidity.
For most people, particularly those who don't work in government. The federal government represents problems, aggravation, frustration and general resentment. Practically no one walks away from interactions with the federal government with a positive feeling.
Dealing with the bureaucracy is generally awful. Most of the time you will go through several employees over the course of hours/days/weeks or even years and you wonder how they manage to get dressed each day. Eventually you get someone who solves your problem in about 20 seconds.
I don't know if you have ever dealt with the TSA in any meaningful capacity but they are by far the most competent government agency that interacts with the public.
I've worked with law enforcement dealing with computer forensics and our state investigators are reasonably competent. We have had to deal with people in federal agencies and it's mind boggling. I'm talking like a PDF emailed of html source code for a login page with the subject "Run this in power shell". That's coming in on a Friday at 4:55 when we have been waiting for a week and they don't respond back until Wednesday with a reply like "team is checking this out".
Eventually someone will mail you a DVD of a screen recording of them logging into a system that's running on a local IP and then 12 minutes of explaining boolean operators.
I mean, I feel like you might be aware of this, but what you're describing is literally PR and propaganda.
Many millions of people get social security/etc payments every month from the federal government, but of course that doesn't count. "Keep the gov out of my medicare!" anyone?
People have a real short memory and nobody appreciates the lack of mercury and arsenic in their sausages today, it's all about "what are you going to do tomorrow?"
I'm probably not cruel enough to do it but I wish every person who spoke like you just did would have to live a month or whatever without all of the benefits of the government.
I'm speaking to the experience of dealing with the government. It's not propaganda, this is literally what happens. Everyone independently coming to the same conclusion based on their personal experience isn't propaganda. It's reality.
Have you ever tried to deal with the government. I have unfortunately had a lot of dealing with Social security, medicare, medicaid, etc. From having to deal with aging parents. Yes, perhaps once you have gone through the extreme myriad of hoops to get everything set up and your check is automatically coming then yes it's ok. But you better hope no one gets some piece of PII and files something that throws it off.
>I'm probably not cruel enough to do it but I wish every person who spoke like you just did would have to live a month or whatever without all of the benefits of the government.
This is a horrible authoritarian justification. People shouldn't be made to starve so they can appreciate the gruel they are given versus having nothing. We should have a functional, efficient, and pleasant government that isn't adversarial to the general population.
Do you have any idea how long it can take to get a Medicare / SSI disability claim approved?
It was two years for my family member and that's with a very legitimate non-controversial terminal diagnosis. She finally got approved about 3 months before she was on Hospice. And this is someone with reasonable resources and active family members advocating for her. I can't imagine what it's like for low income people without resources or education.
That's not just me though, here's a reddit thread of lots of other people with similar or worse experiences, ( and some better).
The fact of the matter is the majority of people don't have positive experiences when dealing with the government. I'm not even sure who is supposed to be pushing this propaganda. I would love for it to be the other way around and the government provides clear value in a helpful way, but that is simply not what people experience.
And that's not even getting into what it's like when you start getting copious amounts of automated nonsensical threatening form letters from the IRS.
> Everyone independently coming to the same conclusion based on their personal experience isn't propaganda. It's reality.
I am not discounting your experience; to say this is everyone's experience or even the majority of experiences fails to take into account the "reddit thread of lots of other people with similar or worse experiences" exist because people are more likely to post a bad experience than one that goes smoothly and without issue.
It makes it look as though dealing with government agencies is a completely broken total disaster, but it simply works for the majority of people. They only notice it being "broken" when they have an experience that ran into issues and did not go as planned. I imagine with all the random cuts to employees and entire departments, these experiences will increase.
> start getting copious amounts of automated nonsensical threatening form letters from the IRS
Have not personally encountered this or know of anyone else that has, and who also deals with taxes. I do get calls and letters from the "IRS" but they are scams. Again, not discounting your experience and you would know better than I who the letters are coming from, but "IRS" scams are a thing too.
About 160 million people either actively voted for this or couldn't be bothered to vote so ostensibly think this is ok. This is what the vast majority wants.
The only way we can do something is if these actions become deeply unpopular - which they currently aren’t, still about 43% of the population are totally onboard.
All we can do is wait for the empire to tumble enough until people without empathy become personally affected and turn sour. My guess is it won’t take the full 4 years.
A problem is those people would then need to identify their dissatisfaction as a result of these haphazard cuts and policies, which will be directly contradicted by propaganda telling them this is actually proof we need to cut even more.
If the government services are being intentionally crippled so that people are unhappy with them then things are going exactly to plan and won't lead to any mass "realizations" of our mistakes.
Even if the current administration ISNT intentionally trying to cause harm and trauma (despite direct quotes posted in this thread saying they are) then the American people will end up with a choice to either cut the last bits of broken government or pay (way) more taxes and try to rebuild them.
I fear we will collectively pick the former and put our heads in the sand about the damage unregulated private companies will do when put in a position like that (like today's internet utilities, private power companies, the for-profit prison nightmare, health insurance companies denying 90% of claims using software they know is wrong, and the defense mega contractors).
I wonder how far it will go. These folks seem to like following the cliche of taking cautionary tales and reading them like manuals so maybe we'll have snowcrash style corporate 'burbs and private police armies soon.
We will never recover from the damage they are doing, at least not in our lifetimes. It is so much easier to destroy than to create, and so many of the services and research performed by the NIH and CDC are truly irreplaceable.
The top cause of death among US children is drowning, and the CDC is the only national group studying and giving prevention training to at risk kids, particularly states with high drowning deaths like Florida. That entire team is gone now, along with many others.
> Wonder if this is what it was like in the months preceding the _2008 subprime mortage crisis_
No, that was mostly people just living their lives with a few standard shows about "housing prices are high again and people are worried" followed by months of "houses are worth nothing now and lots of people cannot pay their mortgages and cannot refinance" and then a few years of "this was a 100% illegal eviction notice, did you even check or just assume none of your customers paid?"
Nothing at all like what's currently going on in the US federal government right now.
There were some pretty big protests Saturday. But, realistically, we aren’t going to have the sort of protests that, like, overthrow governments in the US. We tend to have rallies and marches rather than riots and rebellions. These are really
1) exercise in venting/speaking out/awareness raising
2) networking events for activists.
Eventually the activists and movements aim to get votes in the next election. Get funding for the opposition party’s legal fights and campaigns. That sort of thing.
So, for the most part it’ll be the Trump & Friends show until the midterms at least. It isn’t complacency I think, I mean the opportunity to pick an alternative happened in the past. Is it complacency to live in the outcomes of what has already happened?
In regards to Federal agencies, a lot of it comes down to many people just not knowing much about these agencies, and much of what they do know are the scary bits and pieces capitalists have broadcast through their media (I hesitate to just call them conservatives, as their agenda is completely separate from moving law and government in a slow, conservative manner).
I for one didn't even know we had an agency like USAID, which sounds like it has done wonderful work around the world. Most people (again, myself included), probably don't know just what the DOE's main function is. Turns out it's a pretty hands-off agency, and shutting it down will mostly just harm kids with disabilities. Why we shut these agencies down is beyond me, but I guess it makes them look like they're doing something without going after the actual big fish, like our national "defense" apparatus. Oh no, there we're going to build a "golden dome". A very "efficient" one I'm sure.
What kind of protest do you imagine could stop Trump from being Trump? His own staff tried that for four years (2016-2020) and made next to no progress.
Now he's surrounded himself with enablers, and the Dems won't even make a real effort to oppose the stuff he's doing.
He'd love to call in the National Guard and gun down a few hundred "terrorists".
Send a few thousand more of them to El Salvador and MAGA will celebrate.
The kind where he is forced to leave office and/or the country.
Like sedition is a crime still so I'm not going to advocate for the downfall of the US government, but if you're asking "what kind of protest can stop Trump" then there are dozens of examples over the last twenty years to look at for "protests that result in the head of state no longer being the head of state."
> Wonder if this is what it was like in the months preceding the _2008 subprime mortage crisis_
Some people were warning about possible problems in the markets, but no, in general the media were chugging along as normal, they're most excitable when they're either against the ruling force or there's blood in the water. This reminds me of 2016-2020.
Do people just want to rage? Because a lot of what is being said here, and even the article's headline are not supported by what the article says. In particular:
- The workers were never fired. They were put on paid leave.
- They were fully reinstated less than 24 hours after it became clear a mistake had been made.
- The headline is also misleading. The reason for the firing was 'based on administrative codes that “may not have been intentional.”' So it was a "coding" error in the sense of administrative codes, not programming.
The way people are responding to this, and then hyperbolizing each other, just looks like mob mentality. I'm certain this will be downvoted for the exact same reason. People don't want facts.
For what it's worth, if you get put on a RIF plan then you treat it like a firing. Them being on paid leave isn't them not being fired yet, it's severance.
You're not getting downvoted because "people don't want facts" but because your list is misleadingly incomplete or, in some instances, wrong.
- The workers were put on paid leave pending termination, for procedural reasons (they could not legally be fired immediately).
- Only ten were reinstated, and nobody knows why. The agency that reinstated them (NINDS) is not the same agency that issued the firing (HHS directly)
- The staff in question were explicitly told a "computer error" (quotes as such in the article) led to their termination notices.
This is not how a functioning management system works. It's also not an effective way to operate a government research program. There's no hyperbole here; it's just bad work.
Look at the comments in this post. People think they were fired, because that's what the article claims. You have people in the top post of this thread social mediaizing each other about how now they'll get to renegotiate their contracts, or maybe not even come back, and all this nonsense. Except none of this is true. Similarly, look at how everybody is interpreting "coding error." As the editor certainly intended, everybody is just assuming it means programming, and just jumping off the deep end from there.
Everything I have said would lead a person reading it to understand the facts with near to complete accuracy (I do agree I should have added that they were put on paid leave pending dismissal). Yet in this thread people are discussing the article with basically 0% accuracy, so far as the facts are concerned. And this is a recurring trend in these topics.
This is semantics though. They were for all intents and purposes fired. Being placed on leave pending termination has been the standard playbook for most of these RIFs, and I would bet is what happened to all of the others that were fired at the same time as these researchers and weren't reinstated.
If people interpret something you say in a wildly different way then what happened, then it's not simply semantics. People are talking about issues and other aspects of this that simply do not exist, because they're being actively misinformed by the article's headline. Obviously people should read entire articles and not just headlines, but of course that's not what happens in practice.
Except it's the same in literally all of these articles. Some relatively minor mistake is taken and blown up into some huge degree of maliciousness or unprecedented incompetence. People then 'social mediaize' it all by taking it at face value, and then getting each other even more riled up - exactly like a mob.
It's easy to see where this is coming from because each writer of these sort of articles likely had colleagues and/or friends who were intentionally terminated, and so they're writing with a tremendous chip on their shoulder. But they're doing a disservice to themselves because anybody who is not particularly upset by these changes is going to completely eyeroll each time another one of these articles appears, and those who are genuinely upset are increasingly living in a world detached from reality.
The end result is of course conflict and confrontation, which I suppose is the point. But I don't think this is something anybody would have ever wanted if we imagine how things might look in hindsight, before we get there.
Basically nobody believes the world is flat. The reason the media, and some people, seem to believe this is because of a simple aspect of large numbers. If 0.01% of people believe the world is flat then in a world of billions that'd be millions of people. It still doesn't change the fact that 0.01% is reasonably called "basically nobody."
In this case they've cut tens of billions of dollars in spending and an immense amount of waste. Even if they were 99.9% accurate by this metric or that, there's going to be many mistakes. And I don't really think people are losing patience. His poll numbers are slightly down but not much more than that and I think that's probably more attributable to his failures to end the Ukraine War, continuing support for Israel, and other such unpopular things.
It's mostly the same people raging. Even the "protests" have been largely farcical rent-a-protest type events.
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:
If a corporation did this, we'd rightly accuse them of pumping their quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term viability.
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).
> This is possibly their corrupt intent.
Trump's OMB head has said as much: they want to demoralize the federal workforce and make them dread going to work every day. They want to give the federal government the reputation of being a bad, undesirable, unstable place to work. This is all no accident.
> 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.
> who'd want to work for the government?
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.
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Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
I generally wouldn't want those people to work for my company, so not sure why I'd want them to work in my government.
> 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 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 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.
> The usual reason for low turnover rate is employee satisfaction with the job and their work environment
Citation almost certainly needed, especially when the government is being presented as exceptional in this regard.
And I do not know why you have started talking about private companies taking taxpayer money – I was never proposing privatizing anything.
> That happens much less than you'd think though
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.
> 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 about that sort of workforce?
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>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 we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
Yes, absolutely.
Governments are not startups. Boring and predictable is what the public and the markets want.
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.
> Mundane government employees are some of the most dedicated workers I've met
And you think the reason they are dedicated is because they mostly care about having a "stable job"?
> Money is not the point of a government.
Yes, exactly. People who just want a stable job are in it for the (stable) 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.
Have you considered that government employees accept less pay because they are passionate?
So this begs the question why we need "stable employment" as a hallmark of the government sector in order to attract talent.
Hard to be passionate about a job that might not be there tomorrow.
99% of people who work are just in it for the money.
You’re a very blessed individual if you’re doing it for the love of the job rather than because you have to pay the bills and buy food.
Citation needed, otherwise this sounds like psychological projection.
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.
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.
Don't forget to say "See! Government doesn't work, we've been right all along!" after you've smashed it.
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?
These people hate the idea of the public interest, and want to see everything replaced with a privately owned counterpart.
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.
Yes, this is the GOP playbook in a nutshell.
1. Rail against the idea that any social program can work, or that the government can do a good job administering it.
2. Fight for amendments to bills around it that reduce its funding or scope in key, critical ways.
3. Let the new thing fail, because you crippled the bill that authorized it.
4. Crow about how you were right all along, that government can't do this or that, and that these social programs are doomed to fail.
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.
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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.
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.
Treating people as fungible objects: is this not a clear sign of some serious anti-social mental problems?
Well, that and it justified doing something which gives him a power trip anyway.
Reports from his antics years earlier[1] at Tesla was that he would go on firing sprees, which was a problem they tried to manage because predictably it was enormously disruptive.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-giga...
"The computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody"
A beloved Terry Pratchett character defines evil as when you treat people like things.
Sounds also a lot like the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative.
Jackie Treehorn treats object like women, man!
so, anthropomorphism to be safe?
Well then, that's pretty much an indictment of capitalism.
This is an indictment if bad leaders and politics, which also happens under other economic systems as we have clearly seen
Staff department vs Human Resources
Yep. Just look at countries with unbounded capitalism, like Russian Federation after fall of Soviet Union. It was a mess.
Developed countries installs thousands of regulations (100k - 2M regulatory acts per developed country) on top of wild capitalism to tame it.
However, even heavily regulated liberal capitalism is better than other systems.
> an indictment of capitalism.
Capitalism is the least bad system we have tried.
Therefore we should never talk bad about it or look in to alternatives.
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Openly and fairly regulated capitalism, yes.
Who is "we" ? How many systems has "we" actually experienced first hand, and were the results such as you report them ?
"We" - humanity.
"We" actually experienced all social systems "we" invented so far, which are allowed by "our" productivity.
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.
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.
A: That's not socialism!
B: What is it then?
A: It's free-market capitalism with good regulation and a comprehensive social welfare system.
B: Well, let's do that!
A: No, that's socialism!
Communism doesn't fare any better under that rubric. Any unbridled 'ism' taken to its extreme tends to fail most human centered tests.
The middle way requires an understanding of nuance that humanity seems to be unwilling to invest in.
Like athletism for example?
Absolutely. See: doping, steroids.
US government is used to doing this with non-us persons. I guess that's partly why there's no real pushback against this practice this time.
Fascism being colonialism returned home was a big lesson from the middle of the 20th century that not enough people learned.
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.
Efficiency is often at odds with Wu wei.
I think if humanity strived more for the latter, we might align ourselves better with sustainable prosperity and contentment.
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.
The other issue is if you try to bring someone back who doesn't need the job, they have extraordinary leverage in negotiating their new contract.
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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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Facilitating the link because I hope more people see this.
> 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.
I completely agree.
>It is about total benefit to society, period.
Money is the best tool we have to measure that. Sure it has pathological cases, but overall it's the least bad version to assign value. In the government case it's much worse at this since it's not voluntary and measuring aggregate government services vs. tax. The consumption/price is completely unrelated, etc.
>I know of several people that are 'employed' but net negatives and society is way better off with that arrangement than having them on the streets.
If we are heading towards an economy with labour shortage (demographics collapse), taking up people from the economy and keeping them employed with a useless skillset is going to be a double negative.
> Money is the best tool we have to measure that.
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.
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.
> Sure it has pathological cases
It does, such as the United States in 2025. We have left the realm of theory, just open your favorite stock market app or read any economic analysis being put forth by literally anybody except the Trump administration. The current policies are disastrous.
If you haven’t worked in the federal government, this is an unserious take.
Experience and context matters. Especially this one.
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.
I think your second point is the most revealing: government can’t get away with externalising the costs of unemployment the way a private company can.
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 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.
I believe that many of them read Snow Crash and yearn for pushing society into "Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities"
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.
They stacked the cards with vultures, it’s by design.
> It is about total benefit to society, period.
It's about benefit to society per cost. If you can fire someone over here and hire someone over there in a role that brings more benefit to society, that's good. Eg. Fire the telephone sanitizer hire the addict rehabilitator.
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.
He will enrich himself, but he isn't saving any money. All this incompetence is going to take a lot of money out of the pockets of taxpayers.
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.
Morals? Ethics?
It's illegal. Any judiciary statement is ignored and unenforced. Trump will blanket pardon anyone anytime he wants to do so. Besides violating centuries of precedent and well-established policy from the age of the spoils system.
The only small solace is watching the conservatives get owned by Trump's tariffs. I'm sure they'll make the best of it (fundamentally it is a consumption tax and highly regressive and probably is just regulatory moat once exemptions are bribed out of Trump).
> It is about total benefit to society, period.
What should we spend the next dollar on to achieve this goal?
Education is usually a safe bet.
> 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.
Funny that you end your comment this way, as the government is one of the few organizations that readily employed the disabled.
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.
> 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.
In my lifetime, I've gone from $20 copays with no deductible to $60 copays with a $7000 deductible.
> 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.
> People get COBRA to continue their health coverage
You obviously live in an ivory tower.
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.
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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.
> Fired federal workers typically do not get a severance. Those impacted by the recent reductions in force are not receiving severance packages.
Not true: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-admi...
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.
As of right now, workers who took the first DOGE buyout offer in February are still getting paid:
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/02/federal-worker-buyouts-trum...
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.
Then you are free to spend your own money to hand out TB meds instead of buying mobile games. That’s your prerogative.
I have indeed started giving large amounts of money towards TB aid since Trump gutted things.
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.
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> 8 month severance package
Is there any reporting of employees who actually received this, or are you referring to nebulous promise in the "Fork In the Road" email?
As of right now, workers who took the first buyout offer are still getting paid: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/02/federal-worker-buyouts-trum...
There is another offer coming up.
And how are they going to do that without social services, hmm?
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.
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.
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.
> you can be fired for no reason and without notice. It’s not inhumane, it’s life
It’s life in the same way as occasionally people get hurt, so it’s ok to hurt them on purpose. So no, it is not humane.
But the government owns the public working agencies.
If you fire people who are necessary you didn’t do your job as a employee.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In general it is a good practice to assume other parties are making a good faith effort, but after so many obvious cockups, that grace has been exhausted.
My assumption is that there is a lot of blow-back so they are restoring a few high profile names so they can say, "see, we aren't stopping science!". It is good this handful of people are back on the job, but I assume the NIH is like most other organizations -- the top name isn't doing the work themselves. They lead a team of people and their expertise is used to provide them direction and as a resource to help analyze surprising results. If the top experts lose their staff, I doubt they'll get nearly as much done. Having the 65 year old braintrust spending hours pipetting and staining samples is wildly inefficient. DOGI.
Also, if you're nearing retirement and you look at this mess, you're not coming back, there won't be anything to be done.
Its a trap. They'll get these folks back, there will be nobody else to do the work and they'll come back and say "see, these people were useless, we were right in firing them".
>Its a trap.
Trust is efficient. Lack of trust is inefficient. If someone untrustworthy like Musk fired me and suddenly wanted a do-over, I'd counter with a completely selfish arrangement like a $500/hr contracting rate with some non-trivial amount due up front.
Tangential, but I almost never get to tell this story.
In 2012 I was fired from a job (on my birthday!). I hated this job, I hated my coworkers, I really hated my manager, I was pretty sure that the higher-ups were alcoholics since they always smelled like beer or whiskey, and the work was mind-numbing where quite literally 3/4 of my work was designing nametags even though I was ostensibly a "Java developer".
Anyway, I got fired, and while getting fired always sucks, I was a little relieved that I didn't have to show up anymore.
The following Monday, I got a phone call from my manager demanding that I provide the password to unlock the Macbook that they had me using. I explained to him that I think it's a bad idea to share my password with people that I don't trust. He then told me that I "had" to provide it, to which I said "I really don't think I do, actually. I don't work for <company name> anymore. What are you going to do, fire me?"
This went back and forth for another thirty seconds, and eventually I said "Here's what we'll do, I'll drive over there, unlock the laptop, and drive back home, and you pay for my entire trip. I charge $200/hour."
He was clearly pissed off, eventually hung up, and I never heard back from them. A part of me likes to think that maybe they had to trash the laptop because they were too incompetent to figure out how to wipe the drive.
Yep, exactly. I do that over far less. And otherwise, f off. People are way too nice to people screwing you over. Unlike we often see here, there are really good business owners who would (and do) sell all they have to keep all the staff through rough times. But those usually are (all I guess?) small businesses; I have the good fortune to contract (yes they even bend over backwards, both unconnected company owners, to keep their contractors) with 2 of them. And they pay well above market in the EU; American wages while they are from the EU. Most others will try to screw you and they call it 'it is not personal, it's just business'; while that's true, it rings hollow when you just did your stinking best. We are led to believe (mostly because of US tech in my case), that you need to work yourself to death while accepting everyone will throw you in a meat grinder whenever they wake up on the wrong side. Musk as poster child of this. But you make money! Sure, so especially for those, and especially in a pickle, our hourlies are bizarrely high and they still come back.
The entire republican party setup a self-fullfilling prophecy of distrust, deep state, etc etc.
That's another standard bit of the GOP playbook: accuse the other side of a bunch of bad stuff (regardless of whether or not it's true; especially if it isn't) to distract from the fact that the GOP is already doing that bad stuff.
Who's they? The Department of Health and Human Services?
There are proximate causes and there are the real causes. Yes, HHS let them go, but the reality is DOGE told HHS to cut them.
The article states:
> "It’s unclear to what extent the employee lists used in the RIFs were influenced by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) .."
The lack of transparency around DOGE is a feature.
DOGE has embedded itself into every federal cabinet department. They've got the gumroad guy poking around in the VA right now.
> In general it is a good practice to assume other parties are making a good faith effort
This has never been true for this administration, which A) already had a previous term to show us how incompetent its leaders are, and B) is working from a decades-old playbook of making government more dysfunctional so that people lose faith in it and want to eliminate it.
It's quite possible that the playbook they are looking at is more similar to C) starting a fire in the reichstag...
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Is there any proof that they're coding errors? A simpler explanation, to me at least, is that they first blanket fired people by dubious criteria, and are now using this as an excuse to backpedal when they realize they've cut something important.
Software doesn't fire people, people fire people.
"Coding error" could mean anywhere from "we wrote an actual good-faith attempt to measure some sort of performance, there was a bug, and we blindly followed what it said without double checking" to "the code we wrote to 'select * from employees' when firing people was in 'error' in hindsight because we now wish to have some of those people working for us again".
No matter how you cut it, in the absolute best case scenario, the people doing the firing were so incompetent that no one can tell they weren't being malicious.
The median scenario, they were simply being malicious.
Non partisan take, in every circumstance coding errors are a euphemism for “leadership is humiliated by the outcome and wants to shirk responsibility”.
Seen this real-life: management ask for some unannounced change on prices. Everyone in IT tells them "this is gonna backfire fast". No way to budge them on it so we apply. A couple hours later support and sales are getting hammered by unhappy clients so we get to rollback as fast as possible. The official excuse? "That's an error from IT".
Nope, the code worked perfectly and did what was asked of it.
Unless perhaps they can furnish a really good post-mortem on the bug. Which is unlikely here.
It's either an actual 'coding error' because DOGE doesn't actually understand WTF they're doing or it's what you're suggesting.
So it's Incompetence or Malice. Pick your poison.
It's 2025. Never attribute to incompetence or malice that which can adequately be explained by both.
I love this, thanks for posting. I mean, I hate that it is true. But it is perfect for this moment.
At this point the onus is on them for pleading their offenses as just incompetence or just malice.
Both scenarios are incompetence and malice.
They are in charge of making cuts but never bothered to understand what the departments do, the value, or where the excesses are. Yet they still make the cuts.
Its's Evil (Evil = Incompetence + Power)
Evil = Incompetence + Power - Empathy
I think there needs to be one more element like agency? Because under this definition of evil, a sponge elected as president is evil although it wouldn't do anything at all in any situation. Maybe that's still evil?
I sometimes wonder those people are evil or just incompetent, but it feels like those two are indistinguishable.
Serial incompetence without regard for due caution is indistinguishable from malice. Don't cut yourself with that rust old Hanlon's razor.
The Trump admin has stated over and over it is malice.
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...
The Boys coming true, in banal form.
Doesn't matter if it's coding error or not, the blame lies with the people executing the firings and those ordering them; blaming it on code is a way to shirk responsibilities.
I get that within a software development project, blaming on individuals isn't a healthy way to deal with bugs, but this extends beyond just loss of revenue or uptime and well into personal tragedies.
DOGE did take DOD's AutoRIF which was meant to assist with RIF calculations and modify it. It was also required to be reviewed by a human before initiating any actual separations with it, though DOGE probably went the efficient route and did a "lgtm" rubber stamp on it without looking. However it was just meant to do calculations based on RIF requirement (years in service, veterans preference stuff, and the like) not make any unsupervised decisions based on it.
It’s purely political.
“… fix the broken systems left to us by the Biden administration.…”
This was pretty insane to me. Like, whatever systems you're claiming Biden screwed up were 100% guaranteed untouched since the last trump admin. IT in the government moves slooooooow.
"Political enemies fired by a coding error" is an obviously idiotic claim on its face. And when called on it, they immediately double down on their innocence by somehow blaming the firings on Joe Biden. Who is triple checks notes no longer involved in the US government in any way. This has been Trump's playbook forever. Outright lie about things, and if that doesn't work, pivot to a different lie. Always deflect blame. Never, ever, admit fault.
A whole lot of harm could have been averted if the media was willing to call him out on this 10+ years ago instead of embrace the profit potential. But welp.
The article somewhat buries the facts but a couple of important ones:
- They were able to get them reinstated within 24 hours.
- A presentation seen by Science said the overall NIH RIF (reduction in force) was based on administrative codes and that some “may not have been intentional.”
> but a couple of important ones
If this was the first "mistake" made by the new administration and DOGE, then these items would be understandable. Or the second mistake. Or the third, maybe.
This is intentional. That is the only conclusion one can draw now. From the terseness of the letters of dismissal to the unreliability of the message ('you're fired! Wait, no you're not!'), one can only assume this is part of the destruction of democratic institutions that the current administration is pursuing.
This administration has tens of billions of dollars in spending and an immense amount of waste. Even if they were 99.9% accurate by this metric or that, there's going to be many mistakes. And the media is going to work to drag out the worst of the worst mistakes. And those worst of the worst are things like this - a guy being accidentally placed on leave pending dismissal for less than 24 hours?
Obviously everybody would prefer there be 0 mistakes, but I think in general this is, ironically, quite a good indicator!
> A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
It was true in 1979, it's true today.
Blaming "coding" for this is an explicit admission that someone is shirking their accountability.
These people are shameless and will lie at the drop of a hat to get out from under any responsibility.
At least they only got fired. Not prosecuted for fraud like the British postal service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
> In all, between 1999 and 2015, over 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted and 236 went to prison.
The more governments and corporations try to shove AI into everything the worse this problem is going to get. Blindly trusting computers was always a terrible idea, and now computers are getting even less reliable.
The main problem is the lack of responsibility all along the chain.
25 years and people who shifted blame and were OK with people going to prison so their bonus would not be impacted are still enjoying life out of jail.
Seeing this lack of consequence how can you expect people to behave ethically?
I still can't believe that no-one in the Post Office leadership has been prosecuted for perverting the course of justice or fraud. They "reclaimed" lots of money from the falsely accused postmasters, so I don't see why that isn't treated as fraud.
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The modern corollary is
> ... therefore a computer must make all management decisions
I stg DOGE is going to rewrite the Social Security software stack and it's going to crash and burn on the first person whose last name is "Null"
Everybody should read the public reports about the status of the social security codebase and the (previous) plans to modernize it.
A lot of this code was written before meaningful computer networks existed. Records were committed nightly to tape banks. System limitations meant that a lot of unusual situations were handled with special magic values. Like imagines the norm of returning -1 to represent an error but all over the place and stored in databases. I'm sure that some of this was avoidable, but a lot of it was natural just given that codebase is so old.
This is how you get things like Musk saying that there are a gazillion 140 year olds receiving payments and that this must be fraud when actually this is a special data case. So what happens when the codebase is rewritten to be "simple?" Those people stop receiving payments because the special case handling gets lost. All that data consistency code that exists to handle the fact that a bunch of systems don't perform atomic global updates? Lost. Oops, rows just randomly get dropped now.
We can argue about the merits of LLM-driven programming, but it should be very obvious to everybody that "rewrite the social security codebase in a month with AI" is not well suited for these tools today and requires an incredible amount of arrogance to pursue. The annoying new hire who looks at the codebase, declares that it is messy, and demands to rewrite it but x1000.
Oh, little Bobby Tables. Such a trickster.
To be fair, this is already a very real and annoying problem for unfortunately named folks, predating any DOGE work: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/null-last-name-computer-scient...
They're going to try and rewrite the IRS' Individual Master File, and not care if it changes the way it behaves.
Isn't that what the IRS has already been doing the last few years, and has been making good progress on, except that they have been doing it properly so it behaves right?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewleahey/2024/09/06/from-co...
It seems more than a little silly to try to rewrite something when it isn't necessary since it has already been done. And that goes double if the goal is efficiency since it cost money to do something that doesn't need to be done.
The team responsible for doing it right, have been fired, before the project's completion.
As I understand it, the source for the Master File is lost to the mists of time. But a SoA A.I. can disassemble and comment it, yes ? Prep it for recompilation ?
The source hasn't been lost. It's just that the source was written in a combination of assembly code and COBOL, before COBOL was standardised. They can turn and recompile it any time. Doesn't mean that it's easy to modify or maintain.
There were successful efforts to translate it to Java, already underway (CADE-2). They were probably going to finish somewhere in the next two years. The efforts were for bit-for-bit identical reproductions. [0]
An AI will not help you here. Because this little piece of assembly was created for mainframes, not for computers today (AS/400s, I believe). Even the concept of paths don't operate the way systems do today - the drives were direct access, and tape-based.
There is not enough material to train a model on, to make it close to accurate.
[0] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2020/10/...
If a coding error can ruin people's lives like this than you're doing it wrong
The quotation marks in this article are under a heavy load.
Blaming people you just fired for a mistake you made firing people is as timeless as it is pathetic.
I am not american nor I live in america so I don't really have a horse in this race, but the DOGE approach seems to be the classic "move fast and break things" approach. The reactions to it are the classic reactions to that approach, competent people speak out to get broken things fixed and others are confused about what is happening.
Since it's a coding error, let's run git blame and see what comes out.
Being on the receiving end is never fun. For my case, after I was reinstated, I left shortly after. It was never the same with my colleagues.
Yep, the ‘ol ”my finger slipped and I accidentally pushed ‘select * from table;’ instead of a complex and thoughtful set of filters”
That type. It happens, we’ve all been there
I doubt the outcome would've been much different had they used their complex and thoughtful set of filters (sys.rand)
> The spokesperson added: “This is exactly why HHS is reorganizing its administrative functions to streamline operations and fix the broken systems left to us by the Biden administration.
On previous software teams where I've worked, we had a joke that "You get to blame the guy who left for one month." That is you can do this type of complaining, "Oh man, this codebase is spaghetti, screw Bill who just left", for a month. But after a month, you no longer got to blame the guy who left - at that point, it was on you.
We said it (somewhat) tongue in cheek, but there was a real message that, at some point, it doesn't really matter what the guy before you did - we've all dealt with legacy, shitty codebases, but at some point you need to own it.
I realize taking any sort of responsibility for something that goes wrong is anathema to the current administration, but I think the "it's Biden's fault" excuse is going to start wearing really thin, even for Trump supporters if/when the economic shit show starts to affect them.
Sounds super efficient.
It’s a scream test with people.
> “Even if they stopped now, a lot of damage has been done,” another NINDS investigator says. “I think it’s a sinking ship. I don’t mean my lab, I mean biomedical research.”
It already was, though. We lost about 2 decades of alzheimer's research and probably about 30 drug candidates, and that's just one subfield.
Will we ever remember that?...
So what is your point?
My point is if you don't think the ship was already sinking you are hopelessly naive. Consider the possibility that scientific funding is net social negative (scary, I know, but possible, if the only people in the system are fraudsters at the top and good scientists forced to chase after or try to replicate or refute fraudulent results for careerist reasons). Then cutting all funds would be socially good.
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“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
https://archive.is/RkCst
Color me dubious about "coding errors" when Musk and his lap DOGE-ies are involved.
Even though I wouldn't be surprised at all about the fact that anything Musk and his cronies put out is chock full of coding errors, it does seem like it's just a pathetically weak excuse.
Hey don't worry, they're going to rewrite all the SSA software next!
'Ooops, computer did it.' will become the number one lame excuse by decision makers in the age of AI.
Everything is computer.
"These are not serious people"
Everybody hates government until they need it
Gotta have a ton of faith these same coding clowns are shooting off rockets and building (hacking) self driving cars
What could go wrong
Cruely and revenge upon one's perceived ideological foes are the core organizing principles of this administration. This is a purge, similar to that of Jews of the Germany in the 1930s. The NIH in particular and civil servants in general are just one facet of this. The purge of academic ranks is another (eg [1]).
What makes this possible is hyper-individualism, decades (if not centuries) of attack on any sort of collectivism and the fomented division of ordinary people based on race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or religion. I'm reminded of this LBJ quote:
It echoes fears of the former slave-owning class in Reconstruction that poor white people would unify with freed slaves.It's wild to me that we're reliving Nazi Germany less than a century later while victims of the Nazi regime, direct first-hand witnesses, are still alive.
[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/3/29/harvard-cmes-di...
hopefully they found a new job already
It’s wild how America is just complacent with the destruction of the federal government.
We see all of these red flags across the agencies yet there’s minimal uproar.
I have seen a few protests (50501, recently) but nothing that stops this wanton destruction.
- $6.6T sell off in market due to Orange administration trade war in just _2 days_
- USAID decimated
- US trade partners lost
- Federal agency head count losses across critical departments such as the DOJ
- Weaponized incompetence at the DoD under the Hegseth “leadership” with Signalgate being the latest blunder
- An unelected, billionaire Musk, with his supposed limited “special government employee” access and DOGE have been cutting public programs left and right. Public programs meant to be our safety nets
- Department of Education being undermined by putting incompetent leadership at the top position (a _professional wrestling promoter_) and cutting funding to critical programs for public schools. This is also purportedly to be “abolished”
- Then we have a non-medical professional, and health misinformation promoter at the head of HHS. The awful leadership during the measles outbreaks explains itself…
Wonder if this is what it was like in the months preceding the _2008 subprime mortage crisis_
Definitely not excited for this recession induced by absolute stupidity.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/u-s-stock-futures-fall-fu...
For most people, particularly those who don't work in government. The federal government represents problems, aggravation, frustration and general resentment. Practically no one walks away from interactions with the federal government with a positive feeling.
Dealing with the bureaucracy is generally awful. Most of the time you will go through several employees over the course of hours/days/weeks or even years and you wonder how they manage to get dressed each day. Eventually you get someone who solves your problem in about 20 seconds.
I don't know if you have ever dealt with the TSA in any meaningful capacity but they are by far the most competent government agency that interacts with the public.
I've worked with law enforcement dealing with computer forensics and our state investigators are reasonably competent. We have had to deal with people in federal agencies and it's mind boggling. I'm talking like a PDF emailed of html source code for a login page with the subject "Run this in power shell". That's coming in on a Friday at 4:55 when we have been waiting for a week and they don't respond back until Wednesday with a reply like "team is checking this out".
Eventually someone will mail you a DVD of a screen recording of them logging into a system that's running on a local IP and then 12 minutes of explaining boolean operators.
I mean, I feel like you might be aware of this, but what you're describing is literally PR and propaganda.
Many millions of people get social security/etc payments every month from the federal government, but of course that doesn't count. "Keep the gov out of my medicare!" anyone?
People have a real short memory and nobody appreciates the lack of mercury and arsenic in their sausages today, it's all about "what are you going to do tomorrow?"
I'm probably not cruel enough to do it but I wish every person who spoke like you just did would have to live a month or whatever without all of the benefits of the government.
I'm speaking to the experience of dealing with the government. It's not propaganda, this is literally what happens. Everyone independently coming to the same conclusion based on their personal experience isn't propaganda. It's reality.
Have you ever tried to deal with the government. I have unfortunately had a lot of dealing with Social security, medicare, medicaid, etc. From having to deal with aging parents. Yes, perhaps once you have gone through the extreme myriad of hoops to get everything set up and your check is automatically coming then yes it's ok. But you better hope no one gets some piece of PII and files something that throws it off.
>I'm probably not cruel enough to do it but I wish every person who spoke like you just did would have to live a month or whatever without all of the benefits of the government.
This is a horrible authoritarian justification. People shouldn't be made to starve so they can appreciate the gruel they are given versus having nothing. We should have a functional, efficient, and pleasant government that isn't adversarial to the general population.
Do you have any idea how long it can take to get a Medicare / SSI disability claim approved?
It was two years for my family member and that's with a very legitimate non-controversial terminal diagnosis. She finally got approved about 3 months before she was on Hospice. And this is someone with reasonable resources and active family members advocating for her. I can't imagine what it's like for low income people without resources or education.
That's not just me though, here's a reddit thread of lots of other people with similar or worse experiences, ( and some better).
https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialSecurity/comments/1c0e8uk/how...
The fact of the matter is the majority of people don't have positive experiences when dealing with the government. I'm not even sure who is supposed to be pushing this propaganda. I would love for it to be the other way around and the government provides clear value in a helpful way, but that is simply not what people experience.
And that's not even getting into what it's like when you start getting copious amounts of automated nonsensical threatening form letters from the IRS.
> Everyone independently coming to the same conclusion based on their personal experience isn't propaganda. It's reality.
I am not discounting your experience; to say this is everyone's experience or even the majority of experiences fails to take into account the "reddit thread of lots of other people with similar or worse experiences" exist because people are more likely to post a bad experience than one that goes smoothly and without issue.
It makes it look as though dealing with government agencies is a completely broken total disaster, but it simply works for the majority of people. They only notice it being "broken" when they have an experience that ran into issues and did not go as planned. I imagine with all the random cuts to employees and entire departments, these experiences will increase.
> start getting copious amounts of automated nonsensical threatening form letters from the IRS
Have not personally encountered this or know of anyone else that has, and who also deals with taxes. I do get calls and letters from the "IRS" but they are scams. Again, not discounting your experience and you would know better than I who the letters are coming from, but "IRS" scams are a thing too.
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Baha
About 160 million people either actively voted for this or couldn't be bothered to vote so ostensibly think this is ok. This is what the vast majority wants.
Don't forget Monday futures are limit down.
You can hope for a relief rally Tuesday after they hit the circuit breakers.The only way we can do something is if these actions become deeply unpopular - which they currently aren’t, still about 43% of the population are totally onboard.
All we can do is wait for the empire to tumble enough until people without empathy become personally affected and turn sour. My guess is it won’t take the full 4 years.
A problem is those people would then need to identify their dissatisfaction as a result of these haphazard cuts and policies, which will be directly contradicted by propaganda telling them this is actually proof we need to cut even more.
If the government services are being intentionally crippled so that people are unhappy with them then things are going exactly to plan and won't lead to any mass "realizations" of our mistakes.
Even if the current administration ISNT intentionally trying to cause harm and trauma (despite direct quotes posted in this thread saying they are) then the American people will end up with a choice to either cut the last bits of broken government or pay (way) more taxes and try to rebuild them.
I fear we will collectively pick the former and put our heads in the sand about the damage unregulated private companies will do when put in a position like that (like today's internet utilities, private power companies, the for-profit prison nightmare, health insurance companies denying 90% of claims using software they know is wrong, and the defense mega contractors).
I wonder how far it will go. These folks seem to like following the cliche of taking cautionary tales and reading them like manuals so maybe we'll have snowcrash style corporate 'burbs and private police armies soon.
We will never recover from the damage they are doing, at least not in our lifetimes. It is so much easier to destroy than to create, and so many of the services and research performed by the NIH and CDC are truly irreplaceable.
The top cause of death among US children is drowning, and the CDC is the only national group studying and giving prevention training to at risk kids, particularly states with high drowning deaths like Florida. That entire team is gone now, along with many others.
> Wonder if this is what it was like in the months preceding the _2008 subprime mortage crisis_
No, that was mostly people just living their lives with a few standard shows about "housing prices are high again and people are worried" followed by months of "houses are worth nothing now and lots of people cannot pay their mortgages and cannot refinance" and then a few years of "this was a 100% illegal eviction notice, did you even check or just assume none of your customers paid?"
Nothing at all like what's currently going on in the US federal government right now.
There were some pretty big protests Saturday. But, realistically, we aren’t going to have the sort of protests that, like, overthrow governments in the US. We tend to have rallies and marches rather than riots and rebellions. These are really
1) exercise in venting/speaking out/awareness raising
2) networking events for activists.
Eventually the activists and movements aim to get votes in the next election. Get funding for the opposition party’s legal fights and campaigns. That sort of thing.
So, for the most part it’ll be the Trump & Friends show until the midterms at least. It isn’t complacency I think, I mean the opportunity to pick an alternative happened in the past. Is it complacency to live in the outcomes of what has already happened?
In regards to Federal agencies, a lot of it comes down to many people just not knowing much about these agencies, and much of what they do know are the scary bits and pieces capitalists have broadcast through their media (I hesitate to just call them conservatives, as their agenda is completely separate from moving law and government in a slow, conservative manner).
I for one didn't even know we had an agency like USAID, which sounds like it has done wonderful work around the world. Most people (again, myself included), probably don't know just what the DOE's main function is. Turns out it's a pretty hands-off agency, and shutting it down will mostly just harm kids with disabilities. Why we shut these agencies down is beyond me, but I guess it makes them look like they're doing something without going after the actual big fish, like our national "defense" apparatus. Oh no, there we're going to build a "golden dome". A very "efficient" one I'm sure.
What kind of protest do you imagine could stop Trump from being Trump? His own staff tried that for four years (2016-2020) and made next to no progress.
Now he's surrounded himself with enablers, and the Dems won't even make a real effort to oppose the stuff he's doing.
He'd love to call in the National Guard and gun down a few hundred "terrorists". Send a few thousand more of them to El Salvador and MAGA will celebrate.
The kind where he is forced to leave office and/or the country.
Like sedition is a crime still so I'm not going to advocate for the downfall of the US government, but if you're asking "what kind of protest can stop Trump" then there are dozens of examples over the last twenty years to look at for "protests that result in the head of state no longer being the head of state."
We're just not there, yet.
The revolution will not be planned on Hacker News.
well said.
> Wonder if this is what it was like in the months preceding the _2008 subprime mortage crisis_
Some people were warning about possible problems in the markets, but no, in general the media were chugging along as normal, they're most excitable when they're either against the ruling force or there's blood in the water. This reminds me of 2016-2020.
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So we're firing people with PHP now?
ChatGPT
Likely TCL
Seems like it might be more efficient with WebAssembly.
Can't wait for the Rust rewrite.
Do people just want to rage? Because a lot of what is being said here, and even the article's headline are not supported by what the article says. In particular:
- The workers were never fired. They were put on paid leave.
- They were fully reinstated less than 24 hours after it became clear a mistake had been made.
- The headline is also misleading. The reason for the firing was 'based on administrative codes that “may not have been intentional.”' So it was a "coding" error in the sense of administrative codes, not programming.
The way people are responding to this, and then hyperbolizing each other, just looks like mob mentality. I'm certain this will be downvoted for the exact same reason. People don't want facts.
For what it's worth, if you get put on a RIF plan then you treat it like a firing. Them being on paid leave isn't them not being fired yet, it's severance.
You're not getting downvoted because "people don't want facts" but because your list is misleadingly incomplete or, in some instances, wrong.
- The workers were put on paid leave pending termination, for procedural reasons (they could not legally be fired immediately).
- Only ten were reinstated, and nobody knows why. The agency that reinstated them (NINDS) is not the same agency that issued the firing (HHS directly)
- The staff in question were explicitly told a "computer error" (quotes as such in the article) led to their termination notices.
This is not how a functioning management system works. It's also not an effective way to operate a government research program. There's no hyperbole here; it's just bad work.
Look at the comments in this post. People think they were fired, because that's what the article claims. You have people in the top post of this thread social mediaizing each other about how now they'll get to renegotiate their contracts, or maybe not even come back, and all this nonsense. Except none of this is true. Similarly, look at how everybody is interpreting "coding error." As the editor certainly intended, everybody is just assuming it means programming, and just jumping off the deep end from there.
Everything I have said would lead a person reading it to understand the facts with near to complete accuracy (I do agree I should have added that they were put on paid leave pending dismissal). Yet in this thread people are discussing the article with basically 0% accuracy, so far as the facts are concerned. And this is a recurring trend in these topics.
This is semantics though. They were for all intents and purposes fired. Being placed on leave pending termination has been the standard playbook for most of these RIFs, and I would bet is what happened to all of the others that were fired at the same time as these researchers and weren't reinstated.
If people interpret something you say in a wildly different way then what happened, then it's not simply semantics. People are talking about issues and other aspects of this that simply do not exist, because they're being actively misinformed by the article's headline. Obviously people should read entire articles and not just headlines, but of course that's not what happens in practice.
If only were an isolated incident, and not the latest in a long train of abuses and usurpations.
Except it's the same in literally all of these articles. Some relatively minor mistake is taken and blown up into some huge degree of maliciousness or unprecedented incompetence. People then 'social mediaize' it all by taking it at face value, and then getting each other even more riled up - exactly like a mob.
It's easy to see where this is coming from because each writer of these sort of articles likely had colleagues and/or friends who were intentionally terminated, and so they're writing with a tremendous chip on their shoulder. But they're doing a disservice to themselves because anybody who is not particularly upset by these changes is going to completely eyeroll each time another one of these articles appears, and those who are genuinely upset are increasingly living in a world detached from reality.
The end result is of course conflict and confrontation, which I suppose is the point. But I don't think this is something anybody would have ever wanted if we imagine how things might look in hindsight, before we get there.
Seems like these idiots are making a lot of ‘minor mistakes’, and people are losing patience.
Basically nobody believes the world is flat. The reason the media, and some people, seem to believe this is because of a simple aspect of large numbers. If 0.01% of people believe the world is flat then in a world of billions that'd be millions of people. It still doesn't change the fact that 0.01% is reasonably called "basically nobody."
In this case they've cut tens of billions of dollars in spending and an immense amount of waste. Even if they were 99.9% accurate by this metric or that, there's going to be many mistakes. And I don't really think people are losing patience. His poll numbers are slightly down but not much more than that and I think that's probably more attributable to his failures to end the Ukraine War, continuing support for Israel, and other such unpopular things.
It's mostly the same people raging. Even the "protests" have been largely farcical rent-a-protest type events.
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