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The reports of DOGE's demise may have been premature. Things apparently move at lightning speed now, so the easiest thing is a timeline of what happened this morning to resurrect DOGE before the weekend.
Elon posts a poll asking if the fired DOGE employee should be rehired: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887867644814020902
JD Vance quotes the poll, giving his support to the fired employee: https://x.com/JDVance/status/1887900880143343633
In the press conference with the Japanese Prime Minister, Trump is asked about his opinion. He says 'I don't know...I'm with the Vice President': https://x.com/GuntherEagleman/status/1887950091937530324
Elon says 'he will be brought back': https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887957783783391423
It's like for the first time in my lifetime people said 'no, we don't do that anymore.' And our leaders now share values sufficiently enough that they didn't ignore the sentiment or just listen and commiserate, they actually...obeyed. Pretty much instantly.
I had made a comment earlier today after Elon posted the poll about how the ideal scenario would be to quickly hire him back before the Super Bowl/whatever new developments break on Monday. Beyond that, I don't want to write too much about my own personal opinion because it's fairly scattered as I'm more than a little giddy from surprise at the moment. But, I am interested in your thoughts as this seems positively seismic.
I've predicted that the DOGE would be highly effective. So far it's exceeded my already high expectations.
Every day, there is the steady drip, drip, drip of taxpayer money being saved. People might scoff at the value of cutting small programs that "only" cost $20 million. But if the average taxpayer pays $500k in taxes over their lifetime, that's 40 people working for their entire lives to give the government that statue of Fauci or whatever else they are doing. Wasting money destroys societal trust.
Not that every fraud and waste is small potatoes. Just today the NIH cut the "tax" that schools like Harvard and Yale are allowed to charge to run their government research. Previously, for example, Harvard grants on average charged 69% above the cost of doing research for institutional overhead. (I think we can all imagine where that ends up). NIH just capped that tax at 15%. This will save $4 billion per year. That's $53 for every one of the 75 million Americans who paid federal income tax last year.
Savings like this are happening every day. So far DOGE has saved $69 billion according to U.S. Debt clock.
But of course they haven't gotten to the biggest sectors of the government yet. They will, and I predict the fraud and waste will be shocking. How much social security is going to dead people, to disability fraudsters, to illegal immigrants, etc...? My guess is a lot. The fraud and waste at USAID was just sitting there for anyone to see, but no one did. Why should other segments of the government be any different?
It's going to get crazy.
At least until some judge reverses it all.
There is a genuine "they have made their ruling, now let them enforce it" aspect here.
Okay so a judge says you can't fire them without process. Doesn't stop you from disposing of their work equipment, repurposing their buildings, and basically proceeding along as if they've already been fired.
Okay so the judge doesn't let you freeze their funds. But you can slow walk the distributions, or turn them over to friendly elements within the departments, or earmark them for long term spending goals so they're still sitting there.
For better or worse, Judges have a limited toolbox to impose their will on other branches, and it is thus sort of easy to guess which ones they'll use and route around those.
IF the legislature decides to play along (big IF) then they can also start defunding courts or reshuffling them and making Judges themselves decide its a good time to retire.
The judge right now is saying they can't even put them on paid administrative leave. I'm not sure exactly what that means; if they don't put them on leave but also don't assign them any work nor give them access to any government systems, how is that any different? But if it isn't different, can they hold the administration in contempt?
Sounds like the Japanese method of pressuring workers to quit: stick them in a room with nothing to do, wait for them to quit out of boredom.
That kind of power hara(ssment) is illegal in Japan as of two years ago.
Which is nice in many ways but will cause problems. Japanese employee protection is very strong so power hara was often the only way to get dead weight to quit.
That may be why the penalties are relatively light: small fines and public shaming by being put on a public list.
https://www.kojimalaw.jp/en/articles/0003
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20220329/p2a/00m/0op/013000c
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I am fairly sure this would not work with the modal federal government worker. But I'm pretty sure a lot of these people have been "working" from home since COVID anyway.
See NYC schools' 'rubber rooms'- it's easier to reassign teachers accused of sexual misconduct to sit in a room and do nothing all day than to adjudicate the case, so they... sit in a room and do nothing all day.
Here's a cracked interview with someone who was in one- https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2564-what-if-your-job-paid-you-to-do-absolutely-nothing.html
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Can't you just assign people to work in Alaska or somewhere they don't want to work instead of firing them.
SDNY judge would say no to reassigning them to Alaska.
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From what I heard, they don't let you just sit on your phone or otherwise occupy yourself. You have to stare at the screen where nothing is going on. Otherwise, I doubt it would work on the Japanese either.
What are they going to do if you ignore that and bring a book in your pocket? Fire you?
One thing I've noticed since I entered the workforce is that you can get away with simply ignoring your boss's stupidest orders surprisingly often as long as you don't confront them about it and pretend you made a mistake if you get caught. They don't notice, or they forget, or they give up on enforcement.
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