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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 want to put another provocative claim in here. Supposing Trump wins and 500K of the 2M federal employees take the severance or otherwise leave. And then even suppose everything goes reasonably OK. Unless Congress actually cuts the appropriation or otherwise changes the statute, the next D administration can simply rehire them, making sure to layer on the extra progressive nature of the new hires.
OTOH, if Trump could convince Congress to actually cut appropriation or otherwise change statues, then he doesn't need this gambit at all.
So ultimately I think the play here is really and all-or-nothing shot -- it's gotta work to get people to resign or be fired (e.g. for not RTO) and then everything has to continuing functioning well enough and then Congress has to see that this level of staffing is OK and not catastrophic.
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.
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.
Unless Trump also orders more departments to move to Kansas or other non-coastal states.
Even in red states, the cities are blue islands.
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