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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:
Trump issued an Executive Order that almost all federal workers will have to return to office five days a week
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
We've found the Sub-genius. All glory to Bob!
Alas, that was presumably in reference to Zvi and not the Church.
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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
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"DMV" can stand for "DC/Maryland/Virginia area" as well as for "Department of Motor Vehicles".
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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.
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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.
Handy visualization of the New York–Washington corridor's urban areas
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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.
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