Cirrus
19d ago
Good write-up. I’ll just offer my own personal experience here, as a federal government employee of many (10+) years.
- In my office (outside of DC), about ten percent took the voluntary buyout in February. One was a staunch conservative and Trump supporter, who is competent to get a private sector job. Another was ex-military. These are not #Resistance types. My guess is that those who took the buyouts are disproportionately more competent and able to land on their feet with a private-sector job. Animosity to Trump was not a motivating factor. This kind of evaporative cooling will make the surviving federal workforce weaker.
- My workplace is being offered a second round of buyouts, but this time it’s targeted at the more politically charged functional areas. If enough of those positions don’t get buyouts, then there will be a RIF (reduction in force, i.e. layoffs), again starting with the political areas and then moving to the general workforce as needed to get up to a certain percentage of employees gone.
- The more damaging, long-term policy is the hiring freeze, which applies to the entire federal government. Every agency needs a pipeline of new employees to replace those who retire, quit, etc. Recruitment will also suffer especially if Congress cuts federal benefits like pensions, in addition to remote work curtailments.
- Increasing the scope of Schedule F is the only thing I really agree with the Trump administration so far. Most of the federal employee workforce—contrary to popular opinion—are not Democrat slugs entrenched in #Resistance ideology. But many of the top policymakers and agency heads are, and they should go. (And many have gone, through early retirements of their own accord.)
When you disrupt people’s workplace culture and benefits, they become resentful. Apolitical and even pro-Trump employees will become opposed to the administration, and DOGE is a stupid idea for this reason. It plays to the Fox News audience well. But this will undercut Trump’s long-term efforts to reform the bureaucracy. Government services will suffer and the voting public will blame him for it.
Cirrus
23d ago
the fact that these tariffs are self-destructive.
This is an opinion, not a fact. The United States government received most of its revenue from tariffs until the Civil War, and they still played an important role until the corporate and income taxes were imposed in the early 20th century. The US existed for 125 years with this ‘dumb’ idea without self-destructing. As always the question should be: who benefits? Some people certainly will, and some certainly won’t.
Respectfully, this comment smacks of the kind of naïveté expressed by progressives worldwide at the turn of the 20th century. Mankind is perfectable, we can use science and reason to deduce optimal ideologies, organizing society is like a mathematical problem with a solution, etc. And that thought process produced fascism, communism, and the deadliest conflicts in world history. Difficult and dangerous work, indeed…
I used to put my trust in man, now I put my trust in God.
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