Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
Donations are not a good proxy for voting intentions, not the least because Dems are more likely to make donations. A Federal Times survey indicates civil servants do indeed lean left, but nowhere near as dramatically as many conservatives like to imagine.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
What's really interesting to me about that group is that they're an incredibly niche subreddit while their right-wing equivalents are running the Republican party.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
It might not work in the government the same way it would in a business because public sector entities have wildly different incentives, constraints, and feedback structures than private sector ones.
When a private company cuts staffing by 90% and discovers that doesn't actually double total productivity, they can reverse course (or more likely just go out of business and get replaced by another firm that didn't blow their own dick off). When the civil service gets handed an impossible directive, they can just keep failing forever while politicians bury their heads in the sand and insist that any minute now the plan will start working.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
That's a pretty underwhelming argument.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
Or they replace the fired workers with Republicans and the bureaucracy goes from 95-5 to 70-30.
What's your source for Federal employees being 95% democrat?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
how did the US survive with government spending per capita dramatically lower than now for the first couple hundred years of its history
Since I'm sure you're aware of the differences, at least at a high level, I will note that there's quite a bit of daylight between "the country would not survive" and "abolishing these programs would be a net negative". Especially given, as mentioned, that the major cost drivers are politically untouchable.
where the profit motive demands efficiency
The profit motive in the private sector largely doesn't apply to individual employees (or rather, doesn't demand efficiency), who are mostly incentivized to work just hard enough to not have to worry about being fired.
What the market really does is punish (too much) inefficiency. But that logic can't be applied to the government, because the government can't fail (at least, not in the way a mismanaged firm fails).
So I have to suppose that bloat is off the scales where no such motive exists.
Per FRED, Federal staffing was approximately 2.3 million in 1955 and 3 million in 2025 (and has remained steadyish since the late 60s). The US population in 1955 was 160m; in 2025 it was 340m.
Fed staffing is a politically contentious issue and there is a lot of pressure to keep it low even as the country grows. Bloat largely comes in the form of contractors - since hiring adequate civil servants is politically impossible, contractors are used to make up the shortfall, and if you thing the Feds have bad incentives, wait until you meet the contractors. USG habitually overpays for services for the sake of keeping nominal headcount down.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
Did you also maybe believe that Milei would fail in Argentina
No, but then, Argentina is not the US.
Twitter would collapse when Elon fired 80% of staff
Twitter is a billionaire vanity project (or alternatively, an influence op). It is markedly worse as a service post Musk takeover and sacking 80% of the staff hasn't made it any less unprofitable.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
The question is if it's purposefully crude
Depends on what you mean by 'purposefully crude'. Most government-waste-cutting enthusiasts have a dubious understanding of the causes of government inefficiency, have an ideological presupposition that government spending is a waste, and have never heard the term 'market failure'. The result tends to be that they approach the problem by driving a bulldozer through Chesterton's fence. My view is that "they have no idea what they're doing" is significantly more likely than deliberate clumsiness.
There's a side problem wherein the major drivers of government spending are politically untouchable but you need to grandstand about how you're making cuts so you attack the Everything Else bucket even though it tends to be short-sighted penny-wise behavior.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
are there any interpretations of why Trump tried so hard to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign other than the maximally-cynical one?
The maximally cynical one seems like the most parsimonious.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
Insecurity, uncritical jingoism, contempt for the poor and the weak, proud ignorance, prioritizing the privileges of the elite over the well-being and rights of ordinary people, the South, brutality against the least members of society masquerading as "law and order", Christian nationalism...
Fake disagreements are Trump's go-to for domestic performances. He likes to present himself as a tough, ruthless dealmaker, but like much of Trump's image that is mostly kayfaybe. E.g. during his first term he renegotiated NAFTA, supposedly to get a better deal for the US. This produced the USMCA, a trade agreement that looked an awful lot like NAFTA with some minor tweaks.
This might be a 'win' for Trump domestically insofar as he gets to say he won a pissing match and a certain kind of voter eats that up, but as far as Trump being an effective president this seems like further vindication of the view that he is all hat and no cattle.
bad diplomacy (because it makes you look like a boor)
As somebody who is solidly on team "don't be a dick", the position is more substantial than trying to avoid looking boorish. It's the view that the US derives a great deal of its power/influence from its network of allies, and gratuitously alienating friendly nations for the sake of tough guy posturing degrades US power by making them less likely to cooperate in the future. (And more generally that shakedown diplomacy is extremely short-sighted and signals that you're an untrustworthy partner).
The view, expressed elsewhere in this thread (not by you), that the naysayers are simply being prissy is a remarkable failure to model the thought processes of people who disagree. We may, of course, be wrong, but the core complaint is not that Trump is being uncouth. The US has neither the interest nor the ability to force everyone to fall in line, so cashing in goodwill in order to entertain domestic audiences is hurting America for minimal benefit.
That seems like an extraordinary claim. What is your basis for thinking a small group of redditors constitutes the unelected shadow government of the United States?
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