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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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