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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
It's a fun marketing line but it'll wear off after you review the thousandth TPS report.
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.
They are doing this because they have no fear of getting fired, not because it's all about the money.
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