Isn’t their job to perform the orders of their bosses (the administration), within the law? Being disloyal sounds a lot like a rebrand of not doing the job they’re being asked to do. I don’t know the specifics of this situation - I just mean that federal workers generally are the employees of the administration in a way.
Federal workers fall into two categories. Political appointees are the ones who are directly linked to the current administration and they can be hired or fired at will, but they’re generally senior level focused on strategy. An appointee would be figuring out how to implement the administration’s plan within the legal framework and perhaps negotiating with Congress for new laws or funding.
The bulk of the civil service are career hires who are not beholden to the administration. They’re hired on merit, not political loyalty, and they have specific duties to perform. They swear an oath to protect the Constitution, not the President, and there are laws governing their behavior: for example, despite the massive propaganda about wasteful or fraudulent spending, it’s actually a go-to-jail serious crime to spend money for things other than what Congress directed that money to pay for. That’s why it was such a scandal when Trump directed federal spending to his businesses during his first term and that Musk has so many conflicts of interest now because those rules are normally followed carefully. Similarly, when you hear pushback to DOGE demands for access to sensitive materials or systems it’s because the people who operate SCIFs or run those systems have spent their careers being trained on only allowing authorized access and in all previous administrations that followed the statutes and regulations for requesting and approving access based on need, not someone threatening to call an unappointed “advisor” so he can rally a mob on X against you.
- they are tax-paying citizens. You mean "private-sector"
- a better analogy would be your organization is taken over every 4/8 years by a direct competitor, and the new executives order you to sideline/mothball your previous product/website, and possibly cut off the existing customers (for healthcare websites, or IT systems, which is what USDS existing activity was). Or chainsaw reengineering of the orgchart. So, "loyalty" to which person/goal/contract/Act of Congress, exactly? Where these conflict, you could always allege something. (For example, killing IRS Direct Free-File over at IRS seems to violate many things, and raises many questions.)
- reportedly ~50 of the sidelined 200 legacy employees at DOGE (formerly USDS) were fired Friday
- DOGE picked USDS to parachute into to bootstrap themselves, reinterviewed the legacy employees then sidelined them. Also part of the reason is USDS was created under the Office of the President, hence it's shielded from Presidential Records Act, which effectively buys them years and immunity from any court challenges.
- really your analogy is not to anything often seen in the private-sector world, even in hostile takeovers of large orgs
- going forward, what would be a less chainsaw way to reengineer govt IT operations? Hire govt IT employees on a fixed-term non-renewable contract? Would they expect to be laid off every 2/4/8 years? That will reduce the pool of people prepared to live in the DC area and take those jobs.
You’re off on several points: not just that they’re tax-paying citizens but also that what makes it illegal is that civil service positions are merit-based and have protections against arbitrary dismissal. The whole point is to have a professional workforce rather than every 4-8 years having a lot of disruption when people are replaced with supporters of the new president. We had so many problems with that during the age of the spoils system that federal laws were enacted to prevent it. The key one here is that you can’t fire someone without cause and poor performance has to be documented as a consistent, fair standard and low performers given a period of time to improve (i.e. Biden couldn’t have simply said to cross reference the staff list with registered Republicans and then said he didn’t think they were as productive, he’d have had to show that the same standard was applied to everyone).
Now, it’s true that non-unionized private sector workers don’t have those protections, especially in right-to-work states. That’s not because they’re bad but because there’s been a campaign by businesses since approximately the New Deal era to convince workers that they shouldn’t ask for contracts or negotiate collectively. I note that the executive class funding that position that do have contracts and look out for other members of their own class, so perhaps that’s not the model we should embrace. Tech workers gave up trillions of dollars and job security by not unionizing so it’s certainly paid off well for their bosses.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 35.1 ms ] threadIf us tax paying citizens posted crap like that after we got laid off we would be labeled a "bitter employee."
Gotta love these .gov workers getting a dose of the real world.
Their job is to perform their functions according to the law.
A) some are being fired because they did what their bosses asked them to (legally) in the previously administration.
B) some of them are being fired because refusing to do illegal things is considered "disloyal" by the current administration.
The bulk of the civil service are career hires who are not beholden to the administration. They’re hired on merit, not political loyalty, and they have specific duties to perform. They swear an oath to protect the Constitution, not the President, and there are laws governing their behavior: for example, despite the massive propaganda about wasteful or fraudulent spending, it’s actually a go-to-jail serious crime to spend money for things other than what Congress directed that money to pay for. That’s why it was such a scandal when Trump directed federal spending to his businesses during his first term and that Musk has so many conflicts of interest now because those rules are normally followed carefully. Similarly, when you hear pushback to DOGE demands for access to sensitive materials or systems it’s because the people who operate SCIFs or run those systems have spent their careers being trained on only allowing authorized access and in all previous administrations that followed the statutes and regulations for requesting and approving access based on need, not someone threatening to call an unappointed “advisor” so he can rally a mob on X against you.
- a better analogy would be your organization is taken over every 4/8 years by a direct competitor, and the new executives order you to sideline/mothball your previous product/website, and possibly cut off the existing customers (for healthcare websites, or IT systems, which is what USDS existing activity was). Or chainsaw reengineering of the orgchart. So, "loyalty" to which person/goal/contract/Act of Congress, exactly? Where these conflict, you could always allege something. (For example, killing IRS Direct Free-File over at IRS seems to violate many things, and raises many questions.)
- reportedly ~50 of the sidelined 200 legacy employees at DOGE (formerly USDS) were fired Friday
- DOGE picked USDS to parachute into to bootstrap themselves, reinterviewed the legacy employees then sidelined them. Also part of the reason is USDS was created under the Office of the President, hence it's shielded from Presidential Records Act, which effectively buys them years and immunity from any court challenges.
- really your analogy is not to anything often seen in the private-sector world, even in hostile takeovers of large orgs
- going forward, what would be a less chainsaw way to reengineer govt IT operations? Hire govt IT employees on a fixed-term non-renewable contract? Would they expect to be laid off every 2/4/8 years? That will reduce the pool of people prepared to live in the DC area and take those jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service
Now, it’s true that non-unionized private sector workers don’t have those protections, especially in right-to-work states. That’s not because they’re bad but because there’s been a campaign by businesses since approximately the New Deal era to convince workers that they shouldn’t ask for contracts or negotiate collectively. I note that the executive class funding that position that do have contracts and look out for other members of their own class, so perhaps that’s not the model we should embrace. Tech workers gave up trillions of dollars and job security by not unionizing so it’s certainly paid off well for their bosses.