"Just hire them back" is not actually a cost efficient option.
Take TB medication delivery, one of the many programs halted by the USAID cuts. If you stop a TB treatment midway through you make the development of drug-resistant TB more likely and you make it more likely that this strain spreads to others. Even if Musk decides that actually it really is unconscionable to not tackle the deadliest disease on the planet (which happens to be treatable), the delays cause deaths. This isn't like turning some web server back on.
Rehiring people is also a fucking joke when they've been fired in this manner. People have been forced to rapidly leave the countries that they are deployed in with minimal support from leadership. Those relationships are burned.
That's the bigger point. This is the destruction of the United States as a viable partner, today and for the future. It's the most anti-American thing you could do, which makes you think how much of this is incompetence and ideology and how much of it is compromise.
Also, everyone knows that they're more likely to get messed around as a government employee now, so the market rate has gone up. It is now more expensive to hire people for the same roles.
Government jobs don't work like that, do they? There's a pay schedule for the job title and that's what you get paid. The codes start with G and go from 1-16 and beyond. Idk look it up. You don't really get to negotiate wages as a federal employee. The only thing you can get paid more on hire is if the schedule for the title is like GS4-GS5 DOE
The flip is they get paid time off, a lot, retirement, health coverage, and maybe early retirement.
> You don't really get to negotiate wages as a federal employee.
Not on an individual basis, no. But the rates get set according to the market just like everything else, to the lowest that results in sufficient supply. The market is always moving. Recent changes will result in positive price pressure. Rates will inevitably lag, but they do not exist in a vacuum relative to the market.
Benefits of government employment exist, but other changing factors still move the market.
>It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back. Performance metrics are unreliable, but firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t. It shows you who is really critical.
I might believe this if there was actually any time between the firing and rehiring. This isn't the administration firing people, observing the result, and then restaffing the programs that did actually become less efficient. There have been multiple times in recent weeks in which this administration fired people and then immediately moved to rehire them because they didn't have any idea of who they actually fired in the first place.
I just don't understand how anyone could think all the confusion and uncertainty we have seen over the last month is part of a well constructed and good faith plan for a more efficient government.
Its picking up rocks to see what makes threats or scatters.
A large portion of the effect you seem to be experiencing is trump and elon troll, and the media just mangles the trolls until I do not believe any story, comment, etc about Trump, doge, musk, Zelensky, Putin, whatever unless I literally see their words or hear their words.
Ex: the executive branch policy executive order today or yesterday. MSM and people on the internet "he's bypassing the checks and balances!"
OK no that's not what the EO says; but just for fun check what EO Biden signed about this many days into his presidency.
Hint: Reformation of the US Supreme Court.
It's just what they do. Presidents.
Also for the record Trump has signed 68 and in the same timespan Biden signed 34. Most of both were rescinding the others EO.
The example I gave was people being fired and immediately rehired[1][2] and you're blaming that on the fake news not understanding Trump's "trolling"? That is your defense that this is all "part of a well constructed and good faith plan for a more efficient government"? The President of the United States is trolling federal workers by firing and then immediately rehiring them?
as my wife pointed out earlier today, they weren't fired. she said the best term she could come up with at that exact moment was something like furloughed. They're getting paid for months without having to show up and clock in.
that is not fired.
thank you for proving my point though. Probationary employees won't have their employment renewed, and everyone else you're calling "fired" was furloughed. Since she's a government employee, i tend to listen to her, rather than some other government mouthpiece over in Britain.
Your wife seems to be confused and is probably lumping together the previous round of voluntary deferred resignations with the more recent round of firings and layoffs.
The exact word used by both the USDA spokesperson and NNSA email was "termination" with the latter specifically saying "effective today"[1]. These are the words directly from the people whose job it is to communicate on behalf of this administration.
This matches the pattern of what has been happening to other federal workers who have generally had their termination letters cite "performance", regardless of their past reviews, as the reason for the termination[2], presumably so they can be let go without any notice or severance pay.
the first article you linked uses the phrases "terminated, fired, laid off, mass firings, termination notifications, ending contracts"
Do you see how you're not actually getting any information from that?
the second article isn't any better "fired", "laid off", "sent letters that were lying", “The U.S. Department of Transportation finds, that based on your performance you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Department of Transportation would be in the public interest,” the letter to fired staffers read. “For this reason, the Department of Transportation is removing you from your position with the Department of Transportation and the federal civil service effective today.”
That letter was to probationary employees. maybe. I've never seen a nat-pop in a news article like that before. It is in reference to something near the top, maybe?
What you're reading and linking to me is fuel. It isn't useful information.
people who get fired for being poor at their jobs - do they usually own up to it? or do they squawk about how unfair everything is. "i'm not poor at my job and my supervisor said so" yeah does your supervisor still work there or? There's poor management; just like employees, C levels, and politicians.
>Do you see how you're not actually getting any information from that?
I don't know what to tell you. There is information in these articles and you don't even need to trust the journalists who are reporting them. All these articles have included quotes directly from the relevant government officials and emails.
Here is another article[1] with a direct quote from the following:
-White House deputy press secretary saying "Any key positions that were eliminated are being identified and reinstated rapidly"
-Trump's Secretary of Energy saying "When we made mistakes on layoffs at NNSA, we reversed them immediately, less than 24 hours."
- Even Elon Musk saying "We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we'll also fix the mistakes very quickly."
And yet you are still refusing to admit what the people directly involved are telling you is true? You still think I'm just being misled by bad journalism?
so the secretary called them "layoffs"? Alright, so they weren't fired? Thanks again. I said they weren't fired. The comment you replied to originally was about the threat of auditing agencies is kicking up a lot of ruckus.
It is fine if you think these layoffs, firings, or whatever are not necessary, even if the only reason you think that is msm reporting and a dislike of elon and donald. I don't really care.
The journalists you assure me are doing just fine used 5 different words that have different meanings to convey that the people were no longer "employed".
If you can get real information from that, great. I'd argue that you don't, since i've spent 3 comments arguing that.
This is the problem with your argument and all others like it.
Like the parent comment states in this thread, there is a truly mind boggling level of nuance and complexity that goes on in almost every single discrete field. The nuances that make you succeed in one field may not (are probably not!) the same as another field.
We can even see this within a field: Being a good engineering manager does not make you a good engineer, or vice versa. So why should we think either of these disciplines can be extended into geopolitics, finance, or anything else?
Some of the people you fire will not come back, even if you try to rehire them immediately. Some of the firings will not result in problems in the near term, but will cause problems later on. Some of the firings will cause problems that only occur under certain conditions, like catastrophic events and natural disasters.
Furthermore, you cause real harm to people who depend on these services in the interim period where you’re figuring things out. In some cases that harm cannot be undone.
The stated policy objectives to reduce waste could be achieved with much less disruption and cruelty simply by doing them more slowly and thoughtfully. There is no need to rush everything through in six weeks.
<< The stated policy objectives to reduce waste could be achieved with much less disruption and cruelty simply by doing them more slowly and thoughtfully. There is no need to rush everything through in six weeks.
If there is one thing that Trump has clearly learned from his first term, it is your window to effect actual change is surprisingly small and for that reason alone, historically speaking, presidents tended to open with their priorities ( whatever they were ).
I am mildly on the fence, but it has been my affliction most of my life. FWIW, I do hear you, but I do see a need for a drastic reduction. I recognize it is a gordian knot and it will be painful across the board. Doing it slowly may be just taking a bandaid off one hair at a time.
"Efficiency" is such a dumb thing to optimize for singlemindedly. Overly efficient systems are brittle and can't adapt to shocks. Look what happened to the efficient global supply chain when that ship blocked the Suez Canal.
Imagine if we demanded "efficiency" from fire departments; they'd only hire as many firefighters as they need to respond to the average number of emergencies per day, then totally flop when there's a mass casualty event.
Having a fast moving and inefficient government is what attracts people to the US! To live and invest there. Fast moving governments can destroy things, make them unpredictable and unstable based on the whims of a few. In this case an unelected billionaire with conflicts of interest and a pardon for all his crimes waiting for him in Dec of 2028.
"move fast and break things" means iterating on a product but that's on a whole different scale when you are talking about space rockets and the USA government
You give a compelling argument. If the same strategy was being executed by someone else, I'd even consider giving it a thought. Heck, if the president was executing this independently, I'd still give him the benefit of doubt. But I don't trust Elon with what you're suggesting. He has nefarious motives.
>It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back.
Except that we're talking about human beings.
>Progressives will hate all of this simply out of a hatred of Musk
Consider that truly believing this instead of considering that some people have well-reasoned concerns, might make you closed to divergent ideas. And that is, of course, what you're accusing progressives of being here.
> a brilliant strategy to quickly and comprehensively remove waste
A better strategy would have been to :
- spend 2016-2020 while Trump was in power auditing the NSAID / federal spending.
- spend 2020-2024 while they were hand-vetting thousands of loyalists and having Musk donate $240,000,000 towards their funds, plus other donations from other mi/billionaires, planning spending cuts.
- spend the pre-election time telling people what cuts they were planning and why.
- move to make those planned cuts quickly and comprehensively.
- release a tidy report of fraud and corruption found after 2, 3, 6 months.
This keeps confidence in the government high for national and international investors and governments, it would win over some Dems and undecided voters, it would reduce worry and stress from Republicans. They didn't do that, and you can't say it isn't a priority or they didn't have money or time or access to do it, so the possible remaining reasons don't look good:
1. they are just winging it. They don't know what the agencies do, what can be cut or what they want to spend.
1. The plans are so objectionable that if they told everyone their plans in advance, people would not have voted for them. (They don't care what the agencies do).
1. the chaos and hurt is part of the plan.
1. They want to be able to make stuff up, and have nobody able to call them on it. (see also: DOGE's actions are sealed by Executive Order, Musk has said some untruths about what they've found, Musk told interviewers that the things he says will be incorrect).
It's been overrun by Nazis and is worth a fraction of it's purchase price. Having a website be technically online is not the measure of if it's "doing well".
>Operationally, Twitter is doing well, even with 80% of the workforce gone.
>It’s pretty clearly a success story on any objective measure.
Your comment actually underscores the problem. That is, even if Twitter really is more efficient operationally, the overall business is greatly diminished.
You point to the advertiser feud as the reason for revenue drop-off, as if it's a tangential thing. But, in fact, part of the reason for that is the chaos, as well as other, let's say..."human dynamics". And, now we're seeing a mass exodus from Twitter, the impact of which remains to be seen. It's all related. Having humans in the mix makes things far messier.
So, business success is not merely about operational efficiency and, when it comes to government, it's orders of magnitude more complex.
The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter. They care about bad press. If Twitter was a lesser known company or Elon Musk wasn't a political enemy of liberal journalists, there would have been minimal revenue loss. This had nothing to do with the layoffs. Twitter would have the exact same problem even if they kept all the employees.
>The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter
I wasn't referring to operational chaos or layoffs. I was referring to social chaos—you know, all of the controversial "free speech" stuff.
You could certainly characterize it all as merely political. But many would say (do say) that the kind of speech, disinformation, etc. that now occurs regularly there is much more than that.
Obviously, you're free to disagree, but then that leads to a somewhat tedious and unresolvable discussion wherein we debate what other people actually think or how much hate speech occurs; or we disagree over semantics of the "who decides what's hate speech?" variety.
Overall, I think most would agree that things changed under Musk. Some call it free speech. Some call it hate speech. But, whatever side you choose, it's controversial by definition. Advertisers, especially those serving a "general audience", tend to not like controversy.
Everyone has the right to choose and, among those with that right, are advertisers.
objectively, the ad business used to bring in around $5 billion. It now brings in closer to 1. Sure, costs got cut, and now it's cashflow positive, but if the goal was really to reform the business from a strictly monetary point of view, it's impossible not to bring up the fact that there could have been an extra $4 billion in profit, if someone had just been less polarizing of a character.
so objectively, looking strictly at the numbers, it's not a winner. if I were a PE firm and my hired CEO's personality caused revenue to drop that hard, I'd find another CEO who could just as easily have cut costs without all the insanity. insanity brings risk and has cultural and political costs, and who wants that? Just make me money and don't get me in the newspapers.
so the only reasonable conclusion is that it's not about money or the stated goals but about power. Ever get annoyed with a waitress at a restaurant over something small? A normal person would just brush it off, but if you're a billionaire, you can buy the restaurant, cut her wages (because firing her is less humiliating), and have her boss treat her like shit, because it's fun for a billionaire to flex on the peasants like that.
It stopped being about the money a couple hundred million dollars ago.
