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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   38103 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Donald Trump vs. the Blob Part 2 : Electric Boogaloo

Ladies and gentlemen, it's been 4 years since our last bout. In one corner, we have the undisputed champ, the greatest of all time, the BADDEST man on planet Earth, the king, the DC blllooob! And in the other corner, the challenger, the next Hitler, the orange man, the Donald himself, Donaaallld Trump.

Let's.. get... ready.. to... rumble!

Holy shit it's been a crazy week for the current members of the Federal bureaucracy. Let's review:

  1. Trump issued an Executive Order that almost all federal workers will have to return to office five days a week

  2. All federal workers also received an offer to resign immediately. If they accept, they will get their current salary and benefits until September (an incredibly generous 8 month severance package). All they have to do is reply with the word "resign".

  3. But also, workers will have to prove that they haven't been working a second or third job (in Reddit parlance, a J2, J3, etc..) It turns out this is actually a crime punishable by prison.

On the other hand side, we have the Reddit hivemind.

  1. There is a Reddit for federal workers called /r/fednews. It's a revealing glimpse into an entitled and mentally ill slice of our federal workforce. Much like every other website, and especially themotte.org, they post almost exclusively during working hours.

  2. These "workers" also may be violating federal law by explicitly campaigning on the behalf of one political party over another. Even posting on Reddit may be illegal.

So who wins?

It's a tough call. On one hand, in theory, Trump controls the executive branch. On the other hand, he doesn't control the judiciary who will ultimately decide the outcome. Already, many lawsuits have been filed on behalf of aggrieved federal employees.

Furthermore, not counting the military, there are 2 million federal employees. This is a massive army of people who, though already 95% anti-Trump, are now galvanized into action to prevent the erasure of their generous pay and benefits.

Has Trump bitten off more than he can chew? Will the champion remain undefeated? Or will the challenger land enough blows to sway the judges. You decide! Respond in the comments below.

Trump issued an Executive Order that almost all federal workers will have to return to office five days a week

Apparently, at the last minute Biden signed some union contracts that explicitly codify the right to remote work for certain departments—and Trump is attempting to ignore those contracts. As authority he cites a decision where the Supreme Court stated that "the President cannot choose to bind his successors by diminishing their powers". However, that ruling was about a situation where the members of a board within the Securities and Exchange Commission could be removed only by the SEC commissioners rather than by the President, so it doesn't seem super relevant at first glance, and the largest federal union disputes its applicability.

second or third job (in Reddit parlance, a J2, J3, etc..)

Now I get why that J6 crowd was so angry.

But also, workers will have to prove that they haven't been working a second or third job (in Reddit parlance, a J2, J3, etc..) It turns out this is actually a crime punishable by prison.

How are they supposed to prove that? Tax returns?

Much like every other website, and especially themotte.org, they post almost exclusively during working hours.

LOL

More efffort than this, please.

The most charitable take on this is that since Trump has been getting some pushback for ordering people back to the office, he's giving them an opportunity for an out. My IRS friend mentioned in the comment below says that they're phasing in the full return over the next month. So if you're WFH and don't want to go back you can resign now and get an 8 month runway to find a new job. It doesn't seem like a totally unreasonable option, given that he could have just ordered everyone back and left it at that.

The problem is that it's executed so poorly it isn't even entirely clear what is being offered, and it doesn't do much to inspire confidence in the US Government as an employer. If any normal employer were offering something akin to this, the email announcing it would only be an announcement. Someone from HR would go to every department to give a presentation to interested employees and answer any questions. There would be a packet explaining everything in detail. There would be paperwork to sign. There wouldn't be a mass email that didn't provide any details and required employees to accept within a week by texting "RESIGN" to 48463 (standard messaging and data rates may apply). The speed at which this was depolyed suggests that OPM didn't do a thorough job of identifying who to offer this to. I mean, no one in the administration even can say what's going to happen to anyone who takes this offer. I don't know why anyone would except it (except maybe if you had planned on leaving anyway), and the matter in which it came about would make me suspicious of anything coming from my employer.

Might it be possible that you don't need all that ceremony and can just do things?

Yeah, the email seems pretty sloppy and incompetent which is no doubt fueling a lot of the conspiracy theories.

That said, how does one reform an org of 2 million people with the limited resources of the Presidency. Apparently, the admin only has 4,000 political appointees, of which 1,200 need Senate confirmation. So there just isn't enough manpower to steer an organization 1000x the size which is 90% composed of people who hate you.

With a business, the CEO can easily promulgate orders down the chain of command because there isn't a large group within the org actively resisting.

All federal workers also received an offer to resign immediately. If they accept, they will get their current salary and benefits until September (an incredibly generous 8 month severance package). All they have to do is reply with the word "resign".

I can't help but perceive this as being a way to get federal workers to give up their retirement benefits but I am not a legal expert. You can read the full email here. Relevant paragraph:

Given my impending resignation, I understand I will be exempt from any “Return to Office” requirements pursuant to recent directives and that I will maintain my current compensation and retain all existing benefits (including but not limited to retirement accruals) until my final resignation date.

Is the implication of that last clause that ones' benefits ("including but not limited to retirement accruals") will not be maintained post-resignation date? "Give up whatever pension you've earned for 8 months pay" sounds less good I think? Although that probably depends on how much you've accrued. There's also a federal law that restricts how long agencies can put employees on administrative leave to no more than 10 days per year.

So by law you're probably going to have to work most of the time beyond when you've accepted this offer through the actual resignation. Logistically it seems like people who accept will be getting paid out as if they were working (a biweekly check or whatever) rather than as a lump sum. The deal seems to be "keep working for 8 months and then quit." I guess the idea is your agency cuts back your duties in a way that is not legally "leave?" Seems like the only way this could work.

I can't help but perceive this as being a way to get federal workers to give up their retirement benefits but I am not a legal expert.

This is clearly not what it means, although Reddit is awash with some pretty insane conspiracy theories at the moment.

It just means that, even though you will not be working, you continue to accrue retirement benefits during the 8 month period as if you had worked.

My point, and what I assume workers would be concerned about, is that you don't get certain parts of your retirement (specifically the Basic Benefit Plan) if you resign your position with the government (as opposed to retiring). The OPM page on the Federal Employee Retirement System specifies:

FERS is a retirement plan that provides benefits from three different sources: a Basic Benefit Plan, Social Security and the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Two of the three parts of FERS (Social Security and the TSP) can go with you to your next job if you leave the Federal Government before retirement. The Basic Benefit and Social Security parts of FERS require you to pay your share each pay period. Your agency withholds the cost of the Basic Benefit and Social Security from your pay as payroll deductions. Your agency pays its part too. Then, after you retire, you receive annuity payments each month for the rest of your life.

So you get 8 months of pay but you don't get your post-retirement annuity (unless you get another job with the government and retire through that).

FERS should be a moderate part of a good retirement plan, for anyone saving for retirement their TSP (the government's version of a 401(k) plan should be the lion's share of retirement benefits. FERS is 1% per year of your highest income years average salary. CRS was the true government pension and most current workers started after it was phased out.

The word stochastic terrorism is rightfully derided, but what do you call this kind of speech, which received 42k votes?

To my fellow Feds, especially veterans: we're at war Announcement

We watched this goon try to overthrow the government on live tv four years ago. Now, we are witnessing him try to overthrow it from within. We are the last line of defense against fascism.

We are being led by the same types of people our grandparents fought against in

They want to harm you. Do not give in to this nonsense and remember your oath to the constitution and the people of America. I don't know what the future holds, but I refuse to bow down to this fascist authoritarian elite class. Nobody is coming to save us but we have strength in numbers. It's time to buckle up, and continue protecting freedom and democracy.

Edited for brevity. If you convince a person that they are at war with Hitler, and in fact the last line of defense against Hitler, what do you think the end result is?

Just an observation, but back when I used to use Reddit, that "42k" number (or thereabouts) would constantly appear under some of the most inflammatory left-type posts I'd see. I'm pretty sure it's a 'goldilocks' number. It was so pervasive I just presumed it was either astro-turfing or Reddit's patented "show whatever number you want" system. Frankly, I figured it was the CCP having a laugh.

Seeing it now...all I can say is I have my doubts. ...Except about ditching Reddit. No regrets there. Best decision I made since leaving Twitter and Facebook.

You call it what it is: treason.

The subreddit needs to be passed on to Trump's team and every single one of these people needs to be rooted out, identified and fired at a bare minimum.

/r/somethingiswrong2024 posters keep wondering when the military and 3 letter agencies will take out Trump. Also more confusingly wondering how NATO can assist. Of course they use "saving democracy" type rhetoric.

They never use the word "coup" when describing this. And I don't think they get that democracy would not be restored post-coup. As though a cabal of CIA and military leaders would overthrow the elected government and then decide to appoint Kamala as President. They explicitly talk about Kamala being made President.

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.

  • -17

Their right wing equivalents would be the Q believers, who are not running the republican party, although they're often cynically exploited for votes by farther right wing factions within it.

They are indeed Qanon, but for progressive democrats. Including trying to find secret messages that they are obviously imagining. And completely wild conspiracy theories.

That niche group appears to be running much of the federal government regardless of election results, which should interest people. If that's the case it doesn't much matter who's running the parties.

That niche group appears to be running much of the federal government regardless of election results

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?

I finally realized they're convinced because of the statistical differences between 2020 and 2024 election results. I think they've proved 2020 was very anomalous, I wonder if any of them will realize it and get very quiet.

Of course they use "saving democracy" type rhetoric.

I'm reminded of so much of the rhetoric, often out of Europe, about Hungary and its "democratic backsliding," its "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy," how it maintains a "quasi-dictatorship" by winning elections (by giving the majority what they vote for); and the invocation of various "democracy indices" whose inner workings reveal a definition of "democracy" in which elections and the will of the voters play a relatively tiny part, and it becomes "undemocratic" to respect the outcomes of elections when the electorate 'votes wrong.'

And I don't think they get that democracy would not be restored post-coup.

Sure it will, given — per my previous paragraph — the way they define "democracy." After all, as I once saw some wag online put it (in a snowclone) "'Democracy' is when Democrats are in charge; the more Democrats are in charge, the more democratic it is."

I mean, I've exposed to a lot of melting-down lefties over on Tumblr, and there's quite a few coalescing around the position that if "democracy" means giving the voters a say, but a majority of American voters are either so stupid or so evil to support racist rapist Fascist felon Trump and his pure evil Nazi Party 2.0 over Kamala Harris's "flawless campaign" of "joy, hope and unity" and a Democratic Party that stands for all that is good and right in the world, then "democracy" has got to go — proposed solutions start with massively rolling back the franchise (such as requiring a bachelor's degree to vote), through "reeducation camps," to "kill all Trump supporters."

They explicitly talk about Kamala being made President.

Well, who do you think "a cabal of CIA and military leaders," deathly opposed to Trump, Vance et al, and seeking to save the Left's hold on the permanent bureaucracy, would choose to install as their puppet in the White House? Newsom? Hillary? Liz Cheney?

I'm reminded of so much of the rhetoric, often out of Europe, about Hungary and its "democratic backsliding," its "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy," how it maintains a "quasi-dictatorship" by winning elections (by giving the majority what they vote for)

I view this as further proof of my presumption that the only way for liberalism to capture a society through democratic (non-violent) means is by boiling the proverbial frog; rhetoric of the sort you mentioned is what is used when this project fails. Boiling the frog does not just entail the Gramscian long march through institutions but also incremental steps to secure limited but permanent political gains while at the same time avoiding generating worthy opposition that actually may be dangerous to your project; all this is to take place while society is distracted by ultimately irrelevant other stuff.

I mean, I've exposed to a lot of melting-down lefties over on Tumblr, and there's quite a few coalescing around the position that if "democracy" means giving the voters a say, but a majority of American voters are either so stupid or so evil to support racist rapist Fascist felon Trump and his pure evil Nazi Party 2.0 over Kamala Harris's "flawless campaign" of "joy, hope and unity" and a Democratic Party that stands for all that is good and right in the world, then "democracy" has got to go

To steelman this perspective, my lefty sister explained to me that, on a trivial level, democracy doesn't just mean tyranny of the majority: a necessary precondition of a functional democracy is ensuring that everyone who ought to be entitled to the franchise has it and is able to exercise their voting right. If every other Republican was diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia by a malicious Dem-voting psychiatrist and carted off by the men in butterfly nets (hence unable to go to the polls), everyone would recognise that this wasn't a fair election in any real sense. Likewise if gangs of Antifa goons were bussed in to red states to stand outside polling stations and level AR-15s at anyone in a MAGA hat.

From the perspective of these Dems, if you take them at their word, they believe that Trump will do something like this to American democracy. Either he'll abolish it entirely and crown himself Dictator-for-Life (the less outlandish version of this talks about him abolishing presidential term limits); or he'll use various procedural tricks to manipulate election outcomes - taking away the franchise from assorted reliably Dem-voting demographics, straight-up shipping them off to concentration camps, or simply instructing police officers to look the other way when members of these groups are assaulted or mudered. Thus, in order to ensure the long-term survival of American democracy, actions which are surely undemocratic in the short-term must be undertaken, as a "pre-emptive strike" to prevent the destruction of democracy in the long-term.

Needless to say, I don't agree with any of this. No concentration camps will be constructed during Trump's second term, the rate at which black Americans are stripped of their voting rights (e.g. because of felony disenfranchisement) will be no different than under Biden, the murder clearance rate will be largely unchanged (i.e. there will no massive spike in unsolved murders of black Americans, LGBT people etc.).

But if you were one of these people who sincerely believed that the long-term destruction of American democracy was imminent, I could certainly imagine thinking that, therefore, short-term undemocratic actions might be justified to protect. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.

[who] "a cabal of CIA and military leaders," ... would choose to install as their puppet

I would guess it would be a Pinochet situation. The cabal would rule and select one of their own to be the figurehead†. "Let's loop in Kamala" wouldn't cross their minds. Some public facing cabal member would be the new official leader. A Smedley Butler for 2025.

†Mild academic Pinochet of course seized control and his co-conspirators lived in fear of his wrath and never got the chance to co-rule with him. But I think Americans could pull off a ruling council that doesn't degenerate into helicopter rides and torture camps.

Probably Hakeem Jeffries.

I give him much better odds than Kamala.

This reminds me of the Roman republicans who naively assumed assassinating the king-adjacent Julius Caesar would re-establish the Republic. Oh how wrong they were.

Assassinating Julius Caesar did re-establish the Republic. The problem is that it didn't fix the problem that made the Republic unstable to Caesar in the first place, so we see exactly the same process happen again within about a year. (Formation of a triumvirate, eventual fall of the weakest triumvir, civil war between the other two, winner established one-man rule).

One of the recurring elements of the resistance to Trump is that those decrying Trump and his supporters as a fascist don’t understand they are engaged in a self fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t think Trump and his supports are fascist, I generally think that fascism is not a live political force of any real consequence in the USA. I think people who throw the term around loosely almost always don’t understand what fascism actually is, and why it arose.

I cannot think of a better way to actually facilitate the birth of a real American homegrown fascism than killing or jailing Trump and successfully using extralegal methods to suppress the maga movement and stifle their (very popular) core political agenda.

It’s as if these people are trying to do a Weimar Republic speed run. If they got what they wanted, they’d likely also subsequently get what they are afraid of and what they deserve.

It’s as if these people are trying to do a Weimar Republic speed run.

While I agree that murdering Trump would be terrible for the US, I want to point out that the Weimar Republic was basically cuddling up to right-wing extremists. "Oh, he lead a Putsch attempt in which a few cops died. But look at him, he was provoked by all these bloody centrist forces. And nobody who feels as German as he does could possibly be a bad person, so let's just give him the tiniest slap on the wrist to teach him to respect the rule of the law when taking power."

We remember it that way because of how it ended up, but the Weimar was absolutely lousy with serious, revolutionary communists and honeycombed with the most stomach churning levels of sexual and cultural degeneracy ever witnessed in the west at that time. It very easily could have gone the other way.

My general feeling on this matter is that a healthy society capable of self government with aligned values and incentives would have never produced the Nazis in the first place, so if you’re frightened of a reappearance of them the moral imperative is not to produce the same levels of abject moral depravity that produced them in the first place.

Up until very recently, I felt that we were obviously failing that. I feel much more hopeful now.

Weimar was absolutely lousy with serious, revolutionary communists

I recommend reading The Outlaws by Ernst von Salomon. He battled these leftist revolutionaries and wrote about his experiences.

He was too young to be a WW1 vet and Freikorp member. He was a young regular soldier in post-WW1 Germany. So he fought against all sorts leftist revolutionaries circa 1919. But there was a strange issue in which his squad is killing socialists, but a few squad members were secretly socialists and he himself was very socialism-curious.

We exchanged shots with snipers. We tore around corners, hugging the walls, looking for openings; we crouched behind hastily piled-up barricades; we lay behind advertising columns and lamp standards; we forced doors and stormed up dark staircases; we shot anyone carrying arms who did not belong to our company; and every now and then men would fall who had not been carrying arms; and sometimes women and even children; and the bullets whistled over their bodies.

Behind our line prostitutes were strolling about. They sauntered up and down the Friedrichstrasse while shooting went on in the Unter den Linden. They approached anyone who stood to rest for a moment, giving us, who were still in the grip of this confused battle, who were still sighting the enemy over our rifles, a curious feeling of nausea. It was not the whispered solicitation that seemed so intolerable, it was the calm matter of fact way in which they snatched at our bodies - those bodies which a moment before had been exposed to rivers of bullets pouring from the machine-guns. We forced our way through the disorder in the streets, all our nerves strung up to their highest pitch. We pushed past hordes of beggars, of wounded soldiers, of blind men, and from time to time people spoke to us one offering cocaine, another a diamond ring, a third Kiesewetter's latest political verses.

It is so crazed. The casual acceptance of both mass desertion and slaughter of communist uprising. The wild chaos of that time could have led to the Soviet Union consuming Germany. Instead it led elsewhere in the desperate struggle against communist revolutionaries.

An easier way to facilitate American homegrown fascism would be to let Trump and conservatives do whatever they want. What would result is not precisely fascism, but it would be close enough for all intents and purposes.

I have argued in the past that Trump does not pose any serious risk of fascism because the rest of society would be able to exert sufficient counter-force to prevent the true right-wing extremists around Trump from getting much done.

I might have been wrong. The left seems to have quietly accepted defeat, and the right is quite energized. The counter-force I expected is, so far, not materializing. And certainly plenty of people around Trump would create a form of fascism if they could.

  • -12

Your entire analysis is wrong because your framing is wrong; Trump is the counter-force.

The ideologically motivated fracking of the American genetic, cultural and social foundation is pure Weimar-style dangerous nonsense that has been going on since at least 2012.

Failure to apply this counter force will convert a legitimate immune response to a real problem (MAGA) into a full on auto immune disorder. I don’t want to be around to see that.

Trump is Gracchus. If no course correction, then comes Sulla. Then the Caesars.

Tiberius Gracchus, perhaps, but his much less temperate brother carried on his legacy- and after a bit more rotting, Marius, then Sulla, then Pompey, Caesar, and then Octavian and Marc Antony.

It’s as if these people are trying to do a Weimar Republic speed run. If they got what they wanted, they’d likely also subsequently get what they are afraid of and what they deserve.

Unfortunately, so would the rest of us. And there's no spare United States to save us.

As a high IQ right winger, a hypothetical American fascist takeover would probably be good for you and your immediate circle.

That wouldn't go well.
"Unteroberfeldwerble Nybbler, you can either stop kvetching for five minutes, or we start an Eastern front to send you to!"

"... I'll get my bags"

Tell it to the SA. Fascists, like Commies, have a tendency to purge their early backers.

I agree, avoiding this is incredibly important.

An additional irony is that, like the modal “shitlib” resistance type I am also very frightened of fascism. But like, the real thing and not the fake & gay secular satan stand-in for non conformity to the vagaries of fashion, but rather an actual militaristic totalizing death cult.

“Please stop doing Weimar stuff, for the love of god.” Is my actual point of view.

I cannot think of a better way to actually facilitate the birth of a real American homegrown fascism than killing or jailing Trump and successfully using extralegal methods to suppress the maga movement and stifle their (very popular) core political agenda.

Yes, but so what? Why can't they then just crush said "American homegrown fascism" like Hitler was crushed?

And I remember a comment on Tumblr from someone arguing that "fascism" is hard to pin down. First, because many fellow leftists use it as a boo word meaning "anything I don't like." But more, that to the extent that it has a narrower, more concrete definition than that, but a broader definition than "the specific Italian ideology of Mussolini and co." (such that even Hitler and the Nazis "aren't really Fascist), then it refers to a sort of cluster with overlapping traits (what, per here, was called a "family resemblance" by Wittgenstein), where no specimen has all the associated traits, and no trait is shared by all members — Hitler and Franco had different positions on religion, Mussolini and Pinochet on economics, Imperial Japan lacked a clear "strongman" figure, Orban uses electoral democracy differently, and so on. But it is a cluster, which includes (but is not limited to) Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Salazar, Hussein, Pinochet, and Orban (and, according to some people, China from Qin to Qing); and thus, Trump — particularly as he is now — fits into that cluster; into what, if you reject the label of "fascist" for the whole thing, is still a space containing fascism, and other unacceptable right-wing regimes adjacent to it.

This is again, a position I encounter from people all over the multi-dimensional political spectrum, from old school conservatives to libertarians to progressives to self-described "fascists," that it's acceptable (or at least tolerable) to be socially right-wing, as long as you're also in favor of "free markets" and "small government" — to the point you prioritize those over social issues — and categorically opposed to actually ever trying to use government power (as opposed to the classic libertarian bits about "seizing power and ruthlessly leaving people alone" and "drowning government in the bathtub"), but the moment right-winger actually try to wield power — rather than just block the left from using power and "standing athwart history yelling 'stop'" — they've gone in to forbidden territory, too close to Hitler to ever be allowed.

Why can't they then just crush said "American homegrown fascism" like Hitler was crushed?

Same reason America lost in Vietnam and to the Taliban. Occupying America would be enormously harder.

Same reason America lost in Vietnam and to the Taliban.

I wish I could find again the essay I read a couple years ago by a retired general, talking about the risk of civil war in America, and why it needs avoided at all costs because neither side could win, and would thus grind on forever.

The key part I would reference was the part where he reasons that whichever side the US military goes with cannot lose, because the US armed forces cannot be defeated. He specifically mentions Vietnam and Afghanistan, arguing that the US military did not lose, was not defeated, in either of those cases, they were forced to quit and go home by politicians more sympathetic to the commies/Taliban. He then notes that in a civil war, you can't "pack up and go home" because home is where you're fighting; any politicians more sympathetic to the other side are on the other side, are part of the enemy you're fighting and not people who can give you order; and no one's just "calling it quits" while not losing militarily, because while nobody in the upper levels suffered any consequences for the Afghanistan withdrawal, giving up in a civil war has much more dire personal consequences.

Of course, he then went on to argue that the US military could not win a civil war either, taking a position much like yours, except that the reason he gave for the US's failures in counter-insurgency operations was…

…that counter-insurgency is and has always been completely impossible. Indeed, he went on to make arguments about the inevitability of the populace perpetually rising up to throw off any occupier, such as to imply that military conquest is impossible. Do I need to point out how ahistorical that is? Per his view, we should expect present-day England to be wracked with violence from Anglo-Saxon insurgents still fighting to throw off the Norman yoke. It was reading this essay that led me down a rabbit hole of looking up and reading works on Roman methods of suppressing rebellion, as well as a few discussions of why Anglo-Saxon peasants didn't rise up against the Norman conquest, and some of the "fourth-generation warfare" experts on why American counter-insurgency strategies are so terrible (basically, that there are two effective strategies, but since we lack the patience for one and the stomach for the other, we try to do something half-assed in between that ends up the worst of both worlds; and also over-focusing on technological superiority and "precision" strikes as the go-to "solution").

Most of the material I've read on the history of guerrilla warfare points out that guerrillas usually lose. Further, that the image of their effectiveness in the popular imagination is mostly a holdover of Communist (and particularly Maoist) propaganda of the "invincible Marxist guerrilla." Also, they "work" best as an adjunct to a professional military force — for example, despite the over-inflated reputation of the Viet Cong, they were mostly gone before the war was over, and pretty much all the real damage and progress against the US was accomplished by the North Vietnamese Army.

I can't remember if it was Max Boot, or someone else's work citing his, but I recall reading a work on guerrilla warfare that laid out three preconditions, which are necessary but not sufficient, for a successful insurgency.

  1. At least one foreign ally providing material and financial support to the guerrillas

  2. At least passive cooperation from the general population

  3. and to be fighting against a foreign occupier.

That last one is the most important. No "guerrilla" or "terrorist" insurgency has ever won a civil war against a domestic enemy.

And beyond all this discussion of insurgencies and military matters, why would crushing "American Nazis" ever even rise to that level? Why couldn't it just be done by civilian law enforcement, with each "cell" of "real American homegrown fascists" getting Waco'd the moment the state learns about them?

After all, AIUI, the reason there "hasn't been any more Wacos" isn't that, as some would have it, that the government was soundly deterred from ever trying again by what happened there, and by Oklahoma City. No, my understanding is that local law enforcement wanted to arrest Koresh and a bunch of other leading Branch Davidians, and had various opportunities to do so, but were held back from doing so by the Feds, because Janet Reno wanted to make a big show of rolling the whole group up all at once. And thus, what the FBI, ATF, etc. learned from the resulting debacle was to let local law enforcement break them up.

The reason we don't "see more Wacos" isn't that the government has stopped trying to shut down groups like the Branch Davidians, it's that its become so effective at shutting down such groups, with arrests by local cops, long before they ever reach the "armed compound" stage, that it never makes the news.

No "guerrilla" or "terrorist" insurgency has ever won a civil war against a domestic enemy.

ISIS? Syria?

That last one is the most important. No "guerrilla" or "terrorist" insurgency has ever won a civil war against a domestic enemy.

Mao probably counts. The Houthis count. The Syrian rebels probably count.

Granted, all three had both of the first two points, but your statement here is false.

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I would not see the lineup for the breakdown towards which the US is currently slouching to feature guerilla insurgents operating on their own -- there are an awful lot of big powerful States that are diametrically opposed to each other. (as with v1.0, of course)

Wouldn't a more realistic scenario be various Red States snatching up military assets within their borders, and using them in support of both set-pieces and terrorism/guerilla activity nibbling at the (vast) rural regions of the adjoining Blue ones? (VC/NVA would be a pretty realistic model actually)

The only one of your three points not potentially present in rural Blue States is the first one -- and if a true break were to occur in the Union, that one manifests in about ten seconds.

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In my personal experience, growing up in Northern Virginia, all of the most obnoxious, mediocre, self obsessed people I know are government bureaucrats. They literally can't describe what they do at all, but they constantly brag about random brownie points they've collected on their way up the career ladder, like anybody else cares. They brag about what abstract and meaningless code level of bureaucrat they've gotten to. H10 or G34 and other random letter and number combinations I've never felt any desire to learn the meaning behind. It's a profession made up almost entirely of easily mollified, brown nosing teachers pets. And the seriousness with which they treat their zoom jobs disgust me. It lays bare that all they really do is ritualistically go through meetings where check boxes get ticked by the performative act of repeating managerial chants and "delegating" anything that requires knowledge, expertise, action, or even the assumption of responsibility down a memory hole where presumably it becomes somebody else's problem on the other side. Do this enough times, and take a few more meaningless certifications and they go up another level of bureaucrat!

If I and my spouse had a bullshit job, both pulling in 6 figures a year, we'd be multi millionaires by now. Fuck, on my single income, with a family, through shrewdness, luck and daring I attained the meaningless distinction of being a "qualified investor" last year. I think that's pretty OK for 40. But these bureaucrats, despite the profound and unearned government stipend they've lucked into, are constantly broke and in debt. Every penny earned goes towards conspicuous consumption to show off how "well" they are doing. I mean, bragging about the pay bump they got when they hit T76 isn't enough, they need to show off the $1000 leased vehicle they just got too! There is a level of overcompensation to show that their jobs are "real" that is hard to believe unless you've grown up around it.

In the last 10 years a bunch of them decided they were poly, which was just the extra gross cherry on top of their DINK lifestyles. As these were often people so dysfunctional interpersonally, it was terrifying to contemplate them being in a single relationship, much less multiple. And somehow it all becomes part of their conspicuous consumption lifestyle. I just became a G14-8 and to celebrate my wife, my wife's boyfriend and I all went to Spain!

Leaving Northern Virginia was the best decision I ever made. It may be up there with South Park's old depiction of San Francisco getting high off their own farts. They need a humbling experience or twelve just to show them the world doesn't revolve around them, and that bad things are allowed to happen to them too. It's not just for the little people who live outside the beltway.

government bureaucrats. They literally can't describe what they do at all

all they really do is ritualistically go through meetings where check boxes get ticked by the performative act of repeating managerial chants and "delegating" anything that requires knowledge, expertise, action, or even the assumption of responsibility down a memory hole where presumably it becomes somebody else's problem on the other side

Just to be clear, you are excoriating only the managers who do (or claim to do) nothing but coordination, and not the engineers, scientists, planners, etc. who do the actual work? Because some would include those engineers/scientists/planners in the "bureaucrat" category as well.

Doesn't the federal government contract out almost all of that actual wrench-turning work? E.g., NASA doesn't build rockets (Boeing/ULA/SpaceX), satellites (Lockmart, Northrup) or probes (JPL, Northrup). But they do a shit-ton of paperwork.

I can offer some insight into that. That's the perception but the reality is more complicated and it depends.

A little over half of NASA's government workforce of ~18,000 are engineers of some kind according to data from OPM's FedScope. While you're correct that most (not all) hands on hardware are from contractors, NASA-proper is heavily involved in the design and engineering.

Man, I've got stories to tell about my experience with "NASA Engineers", but I'm afraid they'd be too specific and out myself in my relatively small industry.

Let's just say this. Every now and again when I'm shooting the shit and people are talking about their work, I start griping about the NASA people I have to work with. And normies undoubtedly go "Oh wow, NASA?!" And I have to remind them, this isn't the NASA that put a man on the moon. This is the NASA that wasted a billion dollars because they didn't convert feet to meters correctly.

Jesus... even just this last week....

But like I said, I can't risk outing myself.

Presumably. But all the contracts I've worked on with three letter agencies have had probably a 5:1 ratio of managers to productive people. It's truly incredible. I'll be in an explicitly technical meeting, with explicitly planned technical goals (test connectivity, simulate some activity across systems, etc), and there will be literally 10 project managers hobnobbing for the entirety of the planned time, and myself and one other sad overworked engineer on the other side. Eventually the meeting reaches it's planned end time, all the project managers excuse themselves to attend other meetings, and myself and my technical counterpart finally get to do the work the meeting was planned around in the first place, an hour or two after the start of the meeting, eating into time we were supposed to be doing other shit.

But these fucking asshole project managers just invite themselves from meeting to meeting, destroying productivity, and treating it like a social function. It's been like this for the last 5-8 years I've been on contracts with federal government agencies. At least when this first started, if I had technical questions 8 of the project managers would look around scared and one grizzled old white guy project manager who'd been cowed into silence would finally speak up and show that not everyone there was a sinecure. That hasn't happened in the last 4 years. You just get shouted down by the PMs for asking technical questions in an explicitly technical meeting. They're utterly shameless now.

one grizzled old white guy project manager

He retired last year at our company. We only have the other sort now. The outcomes are shit but we still get challenge coins for the great 'success' of projects.

fucking asshole project managers just invite themselves from meeting to meeting, destroying productivity

They have to account for their time to tenths of hours against relevant charge codes, that's near 90% of their job.

So much of current year feels like managed decline.

This comment seems "boo outgroup" but the characterization is so novel I need to study it. I can imagine fart huffing San Franciscans but can't really imagine what you're describing here.

It's "boo ingroup" if it's anything. I've lived around these people, worked around these people, gone to school and higher education with these people. They were my neighbors, my collaborators on contracts, people in pick up games at FLGS, or that we'd run into at breweries. I'd say some of them were friends, but I'm not sure they experienced friendship the same way normal humans do. Some of them were family.

Sometimes in my darkest moments, I think back over my life at the ways I've been like them and I cringe myself into a coma.

Hits really close to home. I, a young autist-in-training from the provinces, was enamored of DC and the chance to influence world events in high school. I duly went off to study international affairs at an inside-the-beltway school and immediately ran into a brick wall of these people and suffered basically a minor nervous breakdown at the shock of having my ideals shredded right in front of me. Not a pleasant part of the bildungsroman.

I have a friend who fits this description, at least the obnoxious, mediocre, self-obsessed part. She's the kind of person who will ask a question and interrupt your response to ask another question. She watches Real Housewives. If the people she's with are having a conversation she isn't interested in she'll interrupt to say she doesn't care about that and change the topic. She speaks loudly and has an irritating voice. She complained that someone put a sign near her townhome development that pointed the direction to another, less-prestigious townhome development because she was concerned people would think she lived in that one (for the record, no one outside the immediate vicinity has ever heard of wither of these developments, let alone their relative prestige levels). She regularly professes ignorance of basic concepts that one would assume all educated adults are aware of.

The twist is that she's also a trump supporter. We watched the election returns together and, not knowing my political opinions, she referred to Team Red as "we". I had to explain to her how the electoral college worked. She referred to electoral votes as "points". She works in some kind of low-level management position with the customer service department of the IRS; if there are more expendable positions in the US government, I can't think of any. She's constantly complaining about how stupid and entitled the people who work under her are. I have no reason to doubt her on this, considering the kind of people that become supervisor. I don't exactly want her to lose her job, but I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't take a small amount of pleasure seeing her hoisted by her own petard.

You know, admittedly, I got sucked into @jeroboam's framing below commenting on the political swing of Northern Virginia, that this is somehow a Democrat problem. But I don't think I mentioned Democrats at all in my post, and I don't think it's a Democrat problem at all. It's the fact that the federal government takes midwits or worse, and massively subsidizes their status. Gives them a stipend they don't come close to earning, and lets them feel good about themselves with real or imagined authority they don't have the maturity, intelligence, or ethic to wield non-destructively. Virtually nothing is asked from them, they get a fun gamified career path, and they get to live better than most of their peers nationwide. It goes to their head in ways that are unpredictable in their specifics, but absolutely predictable in the general trend of making them worse human beings.

I think something like that would cause brain rot in almost anyone doing it for a living. It’s a system of pretended power where the entire system revolves around not being the person making the decisions. And so most of the job is Kafaybe— you pretend to be powerful and push any actual work to others while claiming credit and ducking responsibility. Nobody cares if they’re wrong, they certainly don’t because as long as they tick off the boxes, the results don’t matter.

"Kayfabe" is a great way to describe the whole bureaucratic rot; it applies to a good deal of corporate jobs as well.

The stultifying status competition struck me when my girlfriend lived in the DMV — it just seems so insane to me to care about things that are so trivial, like your bureaucrat code or whether you live in Bethesda or Rockville “North Bethesda.” I just don’t get it. The sort of raw, fruitless ambition, disconnected from anything that ambition might actually reward, like a more enjoyable job or more flexibility for your family.

I can grok the love of status and I can grok the love of money, but for me those things are always concretely connected to their ability to relieve stress, provide for loved ones, and increase slack. To love them for their own sake is just strange… though it perhaps shouldn’t be so strange, as I’m fascinated by network switches and could stare at blinkenlights all day, and those are just tools to many people.

increase slack

We've found the Sub-genius. All glory to Bob!

Alas, that was presumably in reference to Zvi and not the Church.

The stultifying status competition struck me when my girlfriend lived in the DMV

I've heard that the lineups can be long, but this is ridiculous!

(Although I must say that a ragged group of people living in the DMV, scrabbling for status, survival, and (perhaps) the opportunity to exit does sound like a nice setup for a postmodernist horror movie -- or maybe a reality show?)

Man Survives 78 Days On Wild Berries Looking For Shinjuku Station Exit 27K

"DMV" can stand for "DC/Maryland/Virginia area" as well as for "Department of Motor Vehicles".

Was it always like this? My impression is that northern Virginia has undergone a big leftward shift in the last 20 years, one of the biggest in the country.

It looks like Virginia as a whole went from +8 (R) in 2004 to +5 (D) in 2024.

It used to be that if you could make it to Harrisonburg you were safe. These days I don't even know how far you have to go to avoid it.

I moved to Frederick, MD from Chicago. Pretty wild difference. It seems like we're just outside of the "North Bethesda" type personality. Every time we run into them when we go to one of the local craft breweries.

So my old-timer boss grew up in Northern Virginia, but this goes far enough back (like sixties and seventies) and my understanding is that the entire area was largely rural but even then was growing as DC was growing. Fast-forward a generation and the area had become largely suburban and purple. Fast-forward to today and move further away from DC and the pattern has pretty much repeated, with more of the Virginia boonies becoming suburban and shifting from red to purple while Northern Virginia has become more urban and shifted from purple to blue.

Yeah, it seems that people don't really understand how big the DC area is because of how stats are presented.

The larger urban area has a population over 10 million, making it the third largest conurbation in the US, ahead of Chicago. But so much of it is just sprawling suburbs.

The effect of high government wages is pervasive. Consider that Maryland, a state that includes Baltimore, has the second highest median income of any state, trailing only New Jersey. I guess it makes sense that when you turn on a faucet of money over a place, people will gather near the faucet.

Well I mean, I was an adult in Northern VA for the last 20 years, sooooooo.

But even as a kid, the annoying in debt DINKs that I'd occasionally meet at my dad's company Christmas parties, or because they were his golf buddies, or the parents of my friends at school, or neighbors down the street were weird. Not least of all because of the bizarrely inappropriate conversations they'd obliviously have in front of children.

But it's hard to pick up on a vibe as a child, and then articulate it with more clarity as an adult. For starters, memories of childhood are always unreliable. They get colored by decades of being told, or telling yourself, stories about how things happened. They get colored by the experiences you have as an adult. Gun to my head, I'd say the vibe I was picking up on as child was the same manic over compensation with conspicuous consumption I witness today. Put the gun down though, and I can't confidently say what I was picking up on. Just that those people seemed weird.

This, and especially the ill-fated federal grant pause, suddenly revealed to me all the friends I have who have hitched their households’ wagons to the US federal government.

I’m libertarian and always understood taking taxpayer money to be a political position; I’ve been asked to join the FBI several times by one acquaintance who’s an agent and never pretended to even consider it. But many people seem to be of the persuasion that if you make yourself utterly dependent on it, then it can’t be political. I’ve had three different conversations already with other friends this week stressed out about their work situations because they couldn’t imagine a world where the federal government wouldn’t give them money.

They all seemed to think that these defunding moves were uncontroversially terrible, as if public policy should have absolutely no power to mess with their public salaries.

I don’t know, man… I’m sad my friends are in this position, but I would love for this to shake them loose or at the very least convince other young people that it’s not a great career choice.

More on topic, this will on net make Trump less popular. Like I said, federal money is sacred to a great share of the American workforce, and messing with it is considered way outside the scope of party platforms. They depend on it, so it must be necessary.

Man...this is kind of my sister, and it's super hard as a guy who's been tumbled about his entire adult life by the wiles of the workplace. My loosey-goosey feeling is, "yeah, that's too bad, I don't want you to lose your job, but a lot of people have lost jobs in the base couple of decades. Why should yours be saved?"

To be fair to your friends, they grew up in a world of constantly expanding federal government and a nearly universal bipartisan consensus (in practice if not always in rhetoric) that huge government is a good thing. It is not surprising if to them, a huge federal government seems like a constant of the universe. Almost no person alive today remembers a world without a gigantic US government. Even Trump is unlikely to seriously address spending waste in Republicans' favorite government areas, like the military.

My assumption is that a rapidly growing number of people now see that while some government agencies or departments initially have clear or beneficial missions, their focus shifts from fulfilling their original purpose to ensuring their own survival. In other words, the bureaucracy is gonna bureaucracy.

Inefficiency? Check

Mission Creep? Check

Ideological capture? Check

Resistance to Change? Check

At some point, the concern goes from serving public interest to self-interest. I get it. No person in these agencies is willingly going to sacrifice their own job for the betterment of society. They've already convinced themselves that their position and agency is incredibly important. I would too. That being said, these opinions should not matter to the public. The results matter, and the administrative bloat has become absurd.

The results matter, and the administrative bloat has become absurd.

Is there anyone would disagree with this statement? The actually controversial part is how to cut the deadwood and I'm increasingly concerned the Trump admin are incapable of this.

Based on Elon's moves in the OPM, it seems like the priority is sinecures for their friends (including apparently a high school kid who has a work history of camp counselor and bicycle repair) (and possibly punitive measures for regulatory bodies that fine or slow down Musk companies) rather than improving the organization overall. The Twitter style RTO layoffs are another example of a sweeping move that surely makes fox news viewers happy, but systems minded folk will note changes the incentive structures to reinforce incompetent and ideologically motivated people.

The sweeping federal grant pause is again counterproductive for the stated aim of reducing spending because stopping federal projects (and state and city projects with federal funding) dramatically increases the costs of those projects if resumed and the questionnaire itself is more like a university admissions style DEI statement but in the other direction (both are bad uses of these institutions' resources). If the goal is to weed out bad grants and ideological use of federal funding, it would have made more sense to take over some level of approval for all new grants rather than increasing the cost basis of all these projects.

Is there anyone would disagree with this statement? The actually controversial part is how to cut the deadwood and I'm increasingly concerned the Trump admin are incapable of this.

The controversial part is considering any rank and file employees deadwood. According to Reddit (not necessarily /r/fednews, I've never read it, but I imagine they would agree) all problems with low performance in organizations are because management is incompetent and/or corrupt and the noble rank-and-file employees are all blank slates who would excel if the organization properly set them up to succeed.

The whole project of identifying bad performers and cutting them is considered evil, any answer to "how to cut" is rejected by definition.

Identifying and removing bad performers would be ok if its only white men who get affected. When it turns out, inevitably, that the performance distribution is heterogenous in the opposite direction of liberal platitudes, then a straightforward 'cut the deadwood' turns into 'racist federal employment fires blacks and trans workers'. We are at least approaching the point where this concern is less important than 'social cohesion' because even with these sinecures in place there is little social cohesion, so how much worse can things get.

punitive measures for regulatory bodies that fine or slow down Musk companies

I speculate that if Musk did this it would be net good. If he punished them for slowing down other companies and not just his own then it would be enormously good. A small decrease in the rate of growth in the economy compounded over decades is a gigantic difference in prosperity. The people pumping the brakes should be treated as enemies of human flourishing.

Not that I suppose Elon can significantly battle these people.

I think some people would disagree with it, either because their livelihood directly depends on it or because their livelihood indirectly depends on it (see Democrat politicians). Between those two types, there will be enough squeaky wheels to conflate the real issue of administrative bloat and Elon & crew's mishandlings of its reduction. I think its coverage and the reactions will largely depend on how badly the Trump Admin and Elon manage to piss everyone off in the moderate camp. Your concern about them replacing one biased regime for another is fair, just so long as you can openly admit that the one being ousted was also biased.

I doubt the goal is to weed anything out in a surgical manner. In fact, I think the idea is to not get into the weeds, but simply cut right through them.

Your concern about them replacing one biased regime for another is fair, just so long as you can openly admit that the one being ousted was also biased.

If it helps, I'm very conservative, have voted for Trump three times now, and am deeply disgusted with the state of our country and our government. I have an intense and burning disdain for Biden and the Dems in general and a vague positive feeling toward Trump.

Coming from this position, though, my chief priority is fixing systems where possible, not punishing the other tribe or trying to enforce my values from on high. The reality about wokeness and the decline of conservative values as such is that these things didn't happen because Obama decreed they must and hired a bunch of libs into the bureaucracy. These values, ones I deeply dislike, won so to speak in the market in that they both captured institutions which allow them to propagate and more importantly spread organically through the early internet and ground level organizations. The libertarians put up a fight but the conservatives silod themselves and ceded the battleground in many ways.

I doubt the goal is to weed anything out in a surgical manner. In fact, I think the idea is to not get into the weeds, but simply cut right through them

If the goal is to cut costs or remove ideology from government spending, this is counterproductive. If the goal is spectacle, then I suppose this is a win (but is it a flattering or damaging spectacle?). If the goal is to punish blue tribe, then I'm not sure how much collateral damage red tribe is willing to take. I've heard from veteran coworkers (very red) that their benefits and loans applications were being possibly being impacted or at least paused until the details are worked out. It will take time for the trickle down to work through, but the effects on infrastructure projects on every level are going to disproportionately impact the red tribe who dominates construction and engineering. If the goal is to win Vance-types (red tribers trying to escape bad situations) scaring everyone about impacting FAFSA is counterproductive.

I think the immigration crack down is being handled much better. The focus on criminal illegals first has many benefits - much lower cost in political capital and headlines about rapists being deported are an easy win, early success is a foot in the door to broaden scope later without freaking the public out, it can be used to force though mandatory everify by linking it to punishing criminal illegals etc. This is a much more deliberate and thoughtful approach to illegal immigration than we are seeing on other issues.

If the goal is to cut costs or remove ideology from government spending, this is counterproductive.

I actually disagree here despite ostensibly being on the other side. The alternative to these programs getting cut isn't that they just stick around and everyone is happy - the US is currently on an utterly unsustainable course and if nothing serious is done the US will lose the ability to actually pay for all these jobs anyway when reserve currency status goes out the window. Given your stated priorities you probably don't care about the environmental/resource issues underlying these problems in the same way I do, but I'm sure you can recognise that fiscally at least there's no option to just leave these jobs or spending as they are forever - just the option to kick the can down the road, building up even more of a hangover for when the bill finally comes due. The cut is coming no matter what - ending these positions now, when there's still a lot more slack left in society, is a kindness.

The idea of fixing systems, whether they be bureaucracies within the government or institutions outside of it, would ideally start on a very fundamental level. That said, I'm not convinced the anti-progressive or moderate segment in our country has that ability right now. The progressive movement maintains that ability because, as you mentioned, they still have the institutions. Things like Entertainment, Higher Ed, etc. aren't conservative in the slightest. They're not even really moderate. As a result, our conveyor belt of future government workers all align themselves on one side. Therefore, the notion of operating within these systems that progressives have taken over (and will continue to replenish) doesn’t sit well with many people, myself included. It seems harder to win that way.

I will acknowledge that what matters to a lot of people are the services that are being provided by the government, and that some people really need those services. I can see how Elon and Trump proposing and implementing drastic measures is concerning to those people, but I still believe the goal is efficiency, not pure destruction. It's fat trimming, except this time it may be done with a cleaver instead of a fillet knife because the fillet knife just doesn't seem to work. I'm also not interested in making political opponents suffer for the sake of making them suffer. I am interested in strategies that will actually address a problem without getting bogged down in the system that is designed to bog things down.

Yes, this also frustrates me greatly. I'm dependent on grant money for my current job, but I have little problem admitting that it's perfectly fair for the public to decide to stop funding me. It doesn't even need to be for a good reason, it's their money! But unfortunately, many people feel entitled to get government money. This is one reason why expanding governments are so hard to reduce in size; Most people primarily vote on how they are themselves short-term impacted, and a safe & cushy low-intensity government feels really great, so getting that taken from you sucks hard.

More on topic, this will on net make Trump less popular. Like I said, federal money is sacred to a great share of the American workforce, and messing with it is considered way outside the scope of party platforms. They depend on it, so it must be necessary.

This is one of the biggest problems with the modern government, IMO. It effectively takes a huge share of people out of participation in the market, leading to horrible incentives.

generous pay and benefits.

This is greatly overstated, especially for tech workers (who typically can double their salaries by becoming a contractor). It's true the federal government is one of the few employers that still offers a pension, but that's also pretty paltry compared to the benefits everyone imagines feds get based on what their boomer grandparents got.

Also, to be clear, having a second job as a fed is not illegal. Working another job (eg running a side hustle) while on the clock for your federal job is illegal.

Fair enough. It's a good deal for 90% of workers, but a bad deal for high performers.

I know that when the CIA and NSA recruited at my college their pay and benefits package was a joke compared to what Microsoft was offering (and this was before the FAANG era when tech salaries went parabolic).

Still, on average, jobs working for the federal government are quite good considering all pay and benefits. In the private sector, the median full time wage is about $60k. This only counts people who work full time. The actual median job pays less, about $25/hr or $50k a year.

For federal workers, the median salary is now just over $100k a year and the benefits package is worth another $44k.

I know that among us cultural elites (heh), $100k doesn't seem that great, but it is very much a high salary even for the U.S.

Median federal job is not the median job so the comparison is not apples to apples.

High-skill federal workers are almost always paid less than private sector.

Source: former fed

How do you prove you don't have another job?

Won't this have averse selection? The best employees will be the most likely to take this offer while those who stay will be those who know they can't get easily hired elsewhere.

Getting multiple W-2’s and having taxes withheld for the IRS would show you have multiple jobs. Also, all federal employees have to sign annual ethics forms that, among other things, require them to list all sources of income outside their job.

I've been reading here since the SSC days but only posted a short message once before. I wanted to weigh in on some of the stuff discussed in this thread, though.

I'm currently a federal employee for the second time, and evem though I'm at the top of the GS scale with the DC cost of living adjustmeny, I still toom roughly a 100k pay cut to come to my current job. Largely, it was because of stress and hours worked, and because my wife, who works here, liked it so much, although with the commute (I had to come in 5 days a week prior to the EO but worked from home in my private industry job), it ends up being a long day anyway. The first time I was a federal employee, I was a theoretical physicist at a DoD lab--unlike DoE national labs, where the employees are contractors, DoD lab employees are federal employees--but I made a lot less money than I do now.

First of all, I wanted to mention that only one person I know where I work has received this buyout email. I didn’t. If I had, and I thought it was legitimate, I might take it, because I wouldn't have trouble getting another job. I somehow still end up getting emails from recruiters despite having deactivated my LinkedIn account. I have literally no reason to be here if they’re going to try to turn it into a bad work environment.

Second of all, with respect to DEI--the office that our agency had previously labeled DEI mainly handled EEO complaints and reasonable accommodations. DEI was almost like an afterthought and essentially only ge erated various legally mandated demographic reporting requirements and planned the occasional heritage celebration event, whoch was always optional. Both EEO and reasonable accommodations are still mandated by law, so they can't get rid of those--so now we just have an EEO office which is mostly the same as it was before, except maybe now they don't have to generate as many reports (although that's not even clear). They've also done some silly things like remove letters from various acronyms if they could be construed as relating to DEI, so the acronyms don't actually spell words anymore.

The general sense I get when I talk to people at other agencies about the "buyout" is that there's a lack of belief in it's legitimacy. If you reply "resign" to an email, is there any gaurantee that they have to pay you for the full 8 months? Can they fire you or lay you off in that time? Can they require you to come into work?

Finally, anybody who works with money in the federal government knows all kinds of ways that government agencies could save money. Not rewarding people for spending their entire budget and penalizing them for having money left over for example. However, the executive branch is powerless to change most of this. Laws, congressional oversight, and demands for transparency and congressional control force things to get done in a particular way. Frankly, whatever small amount of money gets saved by trying to get workers to resign and through other reductions in force (which i expect won't be as significant as some people here think. The hiring freeze, for example, doensn't even apply to the DoD) will be a drop in the bucket compared to what could be done if things were done in a smarter way. Is DOGE going to somehow make it possible to do those things? I'll believe it when I see it.

Edit: I almost forgot, regarding the J1 J2 thing. Maybe that's illegal if you're doing them in the same hours, but my agency explicitly allows you to have outside employment if you get it approved and if it doesn't interfere with your work schedule. During my old non-government job, I was working weekends for a startup, and I considered trying to get it approved so I could continue here, but ultimately, I didn't want to spend the extra time working.

what could be done if things were done in a smarter way

The things will never be done in a smarter way though. That's not how bureaucracies work - they are reluctant to do things in a smarter way because smarter way often implies less arbitrary power to various petty middlemen and gatekeepers, and who needs that?

That’s interesting that dod scientists are still feds. I work in doe land as a contractor and was always a little jealous of earlier employees because of the pension (I think most doe scientists where transitioned to contractor status in the early 2000s).

I also agree that there are millions of ways we could save money, but that management explicitly prohibits for a combination of legal and protecting managements jobs reasons.

As for DEI stuff, I think it was a little worse (no where near as bad as what you got in universities), for example there was a grant program that would funds to get an intern (if the intern was a women or minority), while our normal internship program required (which doesn’t discriminate based on race or gender) required me to fund any interns I hired. A full time intern can easily cost 30-60k so this a huge inducement. As someone who recently came out of college (and worked hard to get internships), I acutely how it felt to be explicitly excluded from these and other opportunities.

Do Asians and Indians count as minorities? If so then by pure coincidence every intern I've worked with is a minority.

Not counting myself before graduating from college.

Yes they did. It was literally a program for basically everyone who wasn’t a white guy.

Well said. Especially this part:

I still took roughly a 100k pay cut to come to my current job. Largely, it was because of stress and hours worked, and because my wife, who works here, liked it so much, although with the commute (I had to come in 5 days a week prior to the EO but worked from home in my private industry job), it ends up being a long day anyway. The first time I was a federal employee, I was a theoretical physicist at a DoD lab--unlike DoE national labs, where the employees are contractors, DoD lab employees are federal employees--but I made a lot less money than I do now… The general sense I get when I talk to people at other agencies about the "buyout" is that there's a lack of belief in it's legitimacy. If you reply "resign" to an email, is there any gaurantee that they have to pay you for the full 8 months? Can they fire you or lay you off in that time? Can they require you to come into work?

As someone in a similar situation (former private sector, now federal employee who received this email) I made the change and accepted a pay cut because of the better working accommodations. If the Trump administration wants federal employees to work like private sector workers, will they be paid like private sector workers?

The ‘resign’ email is poorly worded and leaves a lot of open questions, like you said. Where will the money come from? Does it require Congressional appropriations? Which agency will pay it? Like you noted, will employees who accept the offer be expected to work through September 30, or will they be placed on admin leave immediately?

This idea has Elon’s DOGE written all over it. It’s a bold move, using the OPM to communicate directly to all federal employees and circumvent their various agencies, but seems easy to be challenged in court.

If the Trump administration wants federal employees to work like private sector workers, will they be paid like private sector workers?

The average federal government worker does NOT want that. The experience of a theoretical physicist is not at all like that of a typical federal worker who would likely take a massive pay cut or be unhirable in a private context.

In any case, if you are the GM of a baseball team, you don't get a better team by paying your existing players more.

You get a better team by signing new players at high salaries, and dumping the old ones.

Aside from the benefits, one of the attractions of government work was always that it was usually a job for life. Obviously you can still be fired for cause, but there was no concern that you'd be caught up in a corporate downsizing or let go because a manager gives you a bad performance review. The actual buyout or deferred resignation plan or whatever you want to call it was a nothingburger; the concerning part of the letter that no one is talking about is the part at the end where it says:

If you choose to remain in your current position, we thank you for your renewed focus on serving the American people to the best of your abilities and look forward to working together as part of an improved federal workforce. At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity and will be afforded the protections in place for such positions.

The White House is trying to claim that the offer is nothing more than an opportunity for employees who don't want to go back to the office to resign and be given an 8 month exemption they can use to find new work. In light of that paragraph, however, it looks more like he's trying to give people the opportunity to get out now before he starts eliminating positions. There was already some indication that anyone who accepted the offer would be placed on paid administrative leave, so they wouldn't be getting any work out of them during the 8 months, though the letter didn't actually say this, so anyone resigning has to assume they would still have to work.

The upshot is that Federal employment no longer has the perceived stability that it once did. Forget side benefits like WFH, at least in the private sector mass layoffs only happen at occasional, unforeseen intervals when market conditions change. If the Federal government has the same firing power as the private sector, every job essentially becomes a four year contract position, subject to renewal at the whim of whatever administration takes power. As someone who has worked his fair share of contract positions, I can assure you they don't come cheap.

I can assure you they don't come cheap.

In the paradigm most of us have become accustomed to, this is true. It appears that we're entering a new reality, where AI is likely to make obsolete millions (if not hundreds of millions) of jobs globally. For all the handwringing about bullshit jobs, a great number of people may soon find they preferred having to act busy versus having nothing to do at all.

So who wins?

I want to put another provocative claim in here. Supposing Trump wins and 500K of the 2M federal employees take the severance or otherwise leave. And then even suppose everything goes reasonably OK. Unless Congress actually cuts the appropriation or otherwise changes the statute, the next D administration can simply rehire them, making sure to layer on the extra progressive nature of the new hires.

OTOH, if Trump could convince Congress to actually cut appropriation or otherwise change statues, then he doesn't need this gambit at all.

So ultimately I think the play here is really and all-or-nothing shot -- it's gotta work to get people to resign or be fired (e.g. for not RTO) and then everything has to continuing functioning well enough and then Congress has to see that this level of staffing is OK and not catastrophic.

Or they replace the fired workers with Republicans and the bureaucracy goes from 95-5 to 70-30.

I think the right is waking up to the fact that who/whom matters more than rules and regulations.

It would be very awkward for Trump/DOGE/etc. to add significant numbers of federal employees to the rolls.

Isn’t Trump’s plan to fire most of the senior bureaucrats and replace them with partisan hires that are either conservative Catholic lawyers(don’t care about DC schools) or direct from red state administrations?

Unless Trump also orders more departments to move to Kansas or other non-coastal states.

Even in red states, the cities are blue islands.

He should be careful not to flip districts or states blue.

Imagine the change to the GDP of Mississippi if we decided to move the entire federal government over there.

I've heard this argument from arcotherium and others on Twitter. I think it probably doesn't matter much.

There are few Republicans in the bureaucracy. And this would only apply to those hired in the post 2020 era. And then some would move anyway.

So let's say 10% of the bureaucracy is Republican. Let's also say 15% of the bureaucracy live in a different city then their job. And, of those, 40% of Dems will quit but 60% of Republicans will.

Running the numbers, the bureaucracy goes from 10% (R) to 9.7% (R). I just don't think it moves the needle much.

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?

We don't know how they vote, but we can make an informed guess by who they donate to. Open Secrets tracks this. Summary here.

Majority dem, but not 99% aggregated across all groups. These groups are different sizes so it is a bit hard to average the values, first order estimate in the mid 80% dem.

The Department of Justice had more than $2.3 million in donations with 87.6% going to Democrats.

The agency with the highest percentage going to Democrats was the Federal Communications Commission ... 99.29% of donations from people in this agency went to Democrats.

The agency with the highest percentage going to Republicans was the Department of State with 46.14%.

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.

gestures broadly at everything

That's a pretty underwhelming argument.

Donations were ~80% democratic, allegedly as of late.

https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/292573?context=8#context

As I noted elsewhere, donations are a bad indicator.

How are donations a bad indicator of political leanings?

Please explain or provide a link.

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This article indicates that donations made by federal employees to presidential campaigns were 95 percent Democrat in 2016, but only 60 percent Democrat in 2020. This article indicates that donations were 84 percent Democrat in 2024.

What percent of federal employees are making donations at all?

All federal workers also received an offer to resign immediately. If they accept, they will get their current salary and benefits until September (an incredibly generous 8 month severance package). All they have to do is reply with the word "resign".

Unfortunately this usually selects for people who can find alternate employment, i.e. the actually competent people who are happy to take an eight month paid vacation and get back to work afterwards. The guys who barely got their current job really can't afford to lose it and are happy to enshittify our institutions until they get their pension.

You know, I thought this about the tech layoffs that tried the same tactic, and those didn't seem to turn out disastrously?
It's strange because the incentives seem terrible, but if you pair it with a credible threat of "quit now or you will be hunted down and fired with all your benefits stripped," it could selectively get rid of the laziest traitors who'd provide cover for the really dedicated subversives you're interested in rooting out.

Unfortunately it probably also selects for the 64 year old guys who were the only ones keeping everything running, and are all going to retire at once

I thought this about the tech layoffs that tried the same tactic, and those didn't seem to turn out disastrously?

Yes, but that was reducing 10,000 down to 1,000 and not 1,000,000 to 100,000. Also, the Twitter layoffs affected in demand and relatively intelligent people closer to the start of their careers, while mass bureaucrat layoffs would affect relatively stupid ones at a much more critical time- too old to meaningfully reskill, but too young to retire.

The underlying problem with the American economy that has been punted on since FDR is that there are too many people for the economy to sustain on its own. That's partially why corporate welfare, which most bureaucrat jobs are, is as sacred of a cow as it is.

there are too many people for the economy to sustain on its own

I’m struggling to understand why or how you think that is the case. Could you elaborate?

In this case it might select for those who believe they are likely to be fired for cause, for example posting political statements on social media or having a J2.

It might also remove people who are extreme partisans who can't imagine working under Donald Trump.

The ultra progressives don’t have a J2. That was always something for relatively ambitious tech guys, not your aggrieved fat blue hair for whom even 10 hours a week of fake work is trying.

A lot of them have a J2 as reddit mods or Wikipedia admins, but you'd have to really work building up a posting history vs their work hours to nail them for that.

There's a guy with a masters in Recreation Sociology who works for the park service (from DC of course), and spends his entire workday in political struggles on Wikipedia. This is exactly the sort you want to get rid of, but none of this policy seems set up to get him.

A lot of them have a J2 as reddit mods or Wikipedia admins, but you'd have to really work building up a posting history vs their work hours to nail them for that.

Surely that's just a hobby? Not that practicing your hobby during work hours isn't potentially a firing offense. But trying to construe that sort of thing as "working a second job" in a manner incompatible with holding a government job seems very square-peg-round-hole.

If they’re making political content during work hours, that’s a hatch act violation.

That's also entirely fair, I just don't think that should be construed as a job.

They do it for free!

A fed bureaucrat and a Jannie? This is pushing the absolute limits of my disdain.

There's a guy with a masters in Recreation Sociology who works for the park service (from DC of course), and spends his entire workday in political struggles on Wikipedia.

Is he on Wiki under his real name?

I'll try and find him. Remember him from the "holiday parade tragedy caused by an SUV" article naming controversy or similar event, but most of those have multiple archived talk pages

The way to do this properly would be to condition it on the signature of an agreement to never work for USG again for the rest of your life, but I'm not sure that would fly.

Then you'd lose only the guys who are sure they can get a private sector gig, who are probably even higher quality employees.

If losing the competent people means also losing the people who are smart enough to maintain the deep state apparatus as the true power center of DC, then this would be a feature, not a bug.

I do not think that the people whose motivation is to use their civil service positions to influence politics are likely the ones who would jump at the opportunity of a generous retirement package.

In general, running a first world government in a tolerable way requires many more specialists than a running a resource extraction (be it oil, fruits or cocaine). Sure, Trump can put people whose primary qualification is being MAGA believers in every political position, but that is not enough to see his policies enacted. The Dems (and the pre-Trump Reps, to some degree) can draw from a large pool of PMCs who are politically aligned with them, DEI and all that.

By contrast, I doubt that Trump could staff the federal bureaucracy with Trumpers without lowering government efficiency. Sure, there are likely enough people in ICE willing to deport migrants, and the military-industrial complex will also not give him trouble while he stays within the constitutional limits with his orders, but plenty of other agencies will try to resist.

I mean, a majority plurality of voters cast their ballots for Trump 11 weeks ago. It seems like he's got a pretty good sized pool of people to draw from.

More likely it would mean losing the guys who can actually process paperwork, resulting in wait times going to infinity.

In the long term, you route around the problem, spin up a group 10% of the size that does the work twice as fast as the old group ever did.

Of course, that might not work in the government the same way it would in a business because of resistance from within.

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.

Good luck attracting 10x bureaucrats to government positions.

I imagine for a certain young idealistic person this would be a good sell. Come help save the US government!

Not everyone is a mercenary. Most people are motivated by a combination of factors. Optimizing to attract mercenaries is a great way to get the worst staff possible. Which is why we have government workers who are protesting by not doing their jobs. Ultimately, they think the point of their job is to deliver money to their bank account, not to serve the American people.

Come help save the US government!

It's a fun marketing line but it'll wear off after you review the thousandth TPS report.

Optimizing to attract mercenaries is a great way to get the worst staff possible.

Hedge funds pay employees stupid amounts of money and the firms make stupid amounts of money. I shudder to think what they could do if they weren't apparently getting the worst staff possible.

Which is why we have government workers who are protesting by not doing their jobs.

They are doing this because they have no fear of getting fired, not because it's all about the money.

What's the lawsuit argument? The federal government can't do layoffs?

There’s a million things. I think someone is trying to argue that the President is not allowed to send federal workers an email. 🤷

Doesn't seem initially crazy to me. Not following established processes was frequently used to prevent Trump policies in term one. If you have a rule that something has to be done a certain way, you need to revoke that rule. If you're too brash to figure out how the system works first, you probably need to slow down and understand what you're trying to do.

you probably need to slow down and understand what you're trying to do.

And then, 4 years later, the problem is solved by the election of a different President. This logic enshrines the power of the deep state forever.

The power of the bureaucracy to enforce procedural rules would exceed the power of elected officials to run the executive branch.

And then, 4 years later, the problem is solved by the election of a different President.

I think you misunderstood me. The problem is solved by changing the rules to ones you can work with or by using the established procedures to accomplish what you're trying to do. This is basic institutional competence and I would hope that given effectively a do-over, Trump would be hiring people who can navigate these types of obstacles since he himself isn't expected to do so.

The power of the bureaucracy to enforce procedural rules would exceed the power of elected officials to run the executive branch.

I mean this is just a maximally uncharitable reading of the situation. No one doubts Trump's authority to do much of want he wants to do but due process obligation and the administrative procedure act are one of the great limiters of federal overreach. The failing as such falls on whatever staffers aren't capable of reading documentation or consulting with white house legal before trying to do whatever they're trying to do.

I understand that frustrates people who want to punish the other tribe or who want results today and not tomorrow, but it's probably worth considering how much worse things would be for cultural conservatives under Bush/Obama/etc if the president really was able to rule by diktat.

I mean this is just a maximally uncharitable reading of the situation

You haven't really given much of an argument for that,

No one doubts Trump's authority to do much of want he wants to do but due process obligation and the administrative procedure act are one of the great limiters of federal overreach

(...) but it's probably worth considering how much worse things would be for cultural conservatives under Bush/Obama/etc if the president really was able to rule by diktat.

As far as I remember Bush and Obama did both rule by diktat, including by sending letters, if not e-mails.

You haven't really given much of an argument for that

Explain, please. The bureaucracy simply doesn't have powers that supercede the executive. Claiming otherwise is throwing your hands up and calling it impossible at the first signs of resistance. Consider the example of DACA where SCOTUS decided the Trump admin full and well had the authority to rescind the program but because the announcement was just Sessions loudly pooing (rightfully) on Obama, it didn't meet the relatively low bar required by the APA to show that the action actually had a reasoning behind it rather than failing the "arbitrary and capricious" test. That isn't the bureaucracy being so powerful the president can't do anything, that's the president relying on people who don't know what they're doing to execute his agenda.

As far as I remember Bush and Obama did both rule by diktat

Yes, ruling by executive order has been a thing for a long time. My point is that the process requirements are guardrails established by Congress that allow judicial review of some of the most arbitrary ones.

The bureaucracy simply doesn't have powers that supercede the executive.

They have the power to pretend they're totally following orders, but drag their feet until the next guy is elected.

it didn't meet the relatively low bar required by the APA to show that the action actually had a reasoning behind it rather than failing the "arbitrary and capricious" test.

These are all just words that bureaucrats said, not an objective fact. What evidence is there that it failed any such test, and that they'd totally allow it if it didn't?

Yes, ruling by executive order has been a thing for a long time. My point is that the process requirements are guardrails established by Congress that allow judicial review of some of the most arbitrary ones.

Why did you skip the later part of my sentence, which gives an example of ruling by diktat, that does not involve executive orders?

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"Dear Colleague,"

From /r/fednews: "Supervisor told us to stop posting on Reddit: We just had a meeting about employees posting memos and meeting topics on Reddit and were told to stop “leaking” information. DONT STOP, the people deserve to know the information." With 69k net upvotes.

It's an incredible bubble that federal employees live in. A big hurdle for the right is that there was plausible deniability, and the Deep State was considered a conspiracy theory. /r/fednews is directly showing that it's worse than even the conspiracy. "Yes, the Deep State is real, and it's a bunch of anti-American commies undermining everything." Keep resisting kids!

Send out memos to your employees, but each one has a small unique change. Immediately know which one of them put it on reddit.

There are (unfounded?) rumors that my employer adds digital watermarks to some internal documents and they'll know you leaked if a journalist has your document. I'm rather skeptical but it doesn't matter because I'm not going to violate my NDA.

To me, the workaround generally seems to be to compare your version of the document with that of a colleague. If it is identical, then there is nothing to indicate which of you leaked it. Otherwise, one might create two lossy versions which are indistinguishable.

(In general, you could add more complex watermarks, where any k copies would have bits which are the same for all of them, but used for watermarking outside their group. That would enable you to tell "Bob, Alice and Eve conspired to scramble all the bits which were different in their respective copies." However, once the conspirators know what kind of features you are using for watermarks, they could just use a technique which adds enough noise to the document to generally smear out the watermarks everywhere.)

Not breaking NDAs (unless you feel you have a strong civic obligation to do otherwise) is probably wise.

Yeah, I just don’t understand the mindset that “my boss told me to stop posting private information on social media, so I’m doubling down.” No business im aware of would not fire you instantly if you get caught. Hell Walmart employees got fired for pointing out how hard it is for someone to get accidentally locked in an oven. But of course they see themselves as above laws and rules and so they have a right to break any laws they please. They see themselves as untouchable priests of the global order, and they seem to honestly believe that there are no consequences to those actions.

No business im aware of would not fire you instantly if you get caught.

You’re right, but the federal government is not a business. It has special rules and laws it has to follow that private businesses don’t. The key sections of law here are 5 U.S.C. §2301-§2306 and 5 U.S.C. §7511-§7515 if you want to get a feel for what the administration is going up against, but there are reams and reams of rules like this.

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