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Noah Smith thinks DOGE's purpose is to drive liberals out of the civil service, to make room for conservative hires. Three paragraphs from below the paywall of today's post:
This seems to fit the available evidence, but what would prove or disprove it? I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.
Do they actually need to hire conservatives? Just kicking our a lot of liberals would achieve the objectives. DOGE's prime objective is to deplatform leftists and they are doing so at an incredible rate. If the left lost its armies of professional activists they would be heavily undermined. Killing USAID doesn't just hit wokeness in America, it hits wokeness globally. The issue with building a right wing bureaucracy is that bureaucracies naturally tend toward the left.
DOGE just needs to turn thousands of full time activists away from their activist career and give them new careers selling real estate, managing paperwork at a hospital or SEO-blogging.
For those on the fringe right, imaging what the right could achieve with tens of thousands of full time activists with billions in funding and top tier connections. Now imagine losing that.
My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.
Yeah. This is the luxury beliefs hypothesis.
One startling stat I saw recently from Rob Henderson: Among Yale graduates in their forties, 90% of men are employed but only 50% of women are.
The true elite still live the 1950s lifestyle. They've merely denied this luxury to everyone else by imposing a degenerate belief system on those who don't have the resources to overcome it.
I think there are a lot of the true believers in government posts, because the person most likely to take a job in government is the one with the least realistic outlook on most issues mostly for lack of experience. They’ve never been to a ghetto at all with or without police, they don’t know anything about people who live there.
Second, excluding the very top tiers of government, the job is one that you take as a middle class job of last resort. Thus those in the government are likely to be uncritical of anything popular that they’ve been told. They went from their communications degree at some middling university to answering emails on behalf of the government because the6 honestly cannot get a middle class position in the private sector.
Put those together, and you end up with isolated mandarins who believe exactly what the cathedral has told them about the world and who know that not toeing the line is dangerous anyway.
Just by numbers most people in government posts are people who deal with the public and just want a job. Your description really only applies at management layers and above. Remember only a third of federal employees even have a degree let alone one in communications or similar, and many of those are in the Medical field as part of the VA and the like. Entertainingly USAID is the best counter-example with two thirds of its workforce having an advanced degree or higher! But that is not the norm across the Federal bureaucracy.
Your social security local office people are dealing with being yelled at by people losing their welfare and the like, they are VERY familiar with the lower/underclass and all their foibles and are probably not true believers in ideology as much as they are average workers worrying about making ends meet. Their direct managers will be as well. The local DMV is staffed by people from or close to the ghetto in fact here, so that wouldn't apply even for a lot of local government jobs. Remember most government jobs just by numbers are front facing. It wasn't until I moved to the higher echelons in the Civil Service I found all the politics and classics degree types.
From the point of view of the Federal government that would probably be the Senior Executive Service, of which there are about 9,000. If I were wanting to re-organize the Federal bureaucracy I would start with those 9,000 because they manage large projects and departments (basically the steps below political appointees) But of the sheer scale of the government in the US the vast majority do not appear to match your description.
In other words, the person most likely to take a government post is a non-degree having, neo-customer service worker, who (if you have never worked a customer facing job like that) will be very clear about how the rubber meets the road. Your Ivory Tower idea really only applies to a small minority in the upper ends of the government (but they are of course much more influential.)
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