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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37398 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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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.

Killing remote work probably disproportionately causes Republicans to leave the bureaucracy. Single gay lefties will just pick up and move when it comes down to it. It's less likely that they're productive enough to have many other options, anyway. It's the Republicans who have families and roots in Red areas who are going to seriously consider leaving. Many of us working for the military have known from the beginning that we were taking a pay cut in order to have some stability and help out the military. There are other options for us.

If everyone is getting told that they must uproot and move to an area with local Blue control, Blues without roots will do it. Reds with roots won't. I'm not gonna send my kids to DC schools.

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?

Schedule F they call it. That will accomplish Trump's goals getting at the high-levels. Killing remote work is if anything net harmful to Trump's goals. It's purging your own. The ones who didn't want to live under Blue control. The high-levels weren't remote anyway. They bleed DC Blue.

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.

The overall numbers will be small like you say but then they're nowhere near what anon was saying with 500K. Killing remote work doesn't do much except purge some number of Republicans who don't want to live in Blue cities.

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.

Not every subgroup of the population is equally likely to make political donations. In particular, during the Trump era Democratic voters are significantly (~2x) more likely to make campaign contributions as Republicans. Certainly, if we took donations as indicative of political leaning, Harris should have won a historic landslide instead of a narrow loss.

(Also, since anecdotes are considered a valid form of evidence on this forum, I'd note that the idea that civil servants are a bunch of woke progressives is high comedy. It's correct to say that they lean left, but lean is the operative word. Plenty of them are quite conservative, especially socially. Not terribly surprising - they're significantly older on average than the general US workforce)

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?

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