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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.
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.
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.
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