It’s a terrifying experiment in hollowing out the civil service. At some point a critical mass of Federal workers may be lost which brings the entire machinery of the Federal Government to a standstill.
It’s also not clear how to recover from something like this.
Resignation? Doesn't that imply that they are choosing to leave?
> The resignations—which come as part of a program drawn up by President Donald Trump at the start of his second administration—will happen on Tuesday as Congress is facing a deadline on the same day to authorize more funding or risk a government shutdown.
> If there is no deal, the White House has ordered federal agencies to make plans for the large-scale redundancies.
These people mostly already and effectively stopped working... The people I know that took this offer were told to stop showing up for work back in March-ish time frame. I see nothing in the article to suggest a sudden wave of new people taking up this offer -- as far as I can tell, the only thing that's about to change from what this article says is that our unemployment numbers will start to reflect it if those federal workers did not find new employment.
All of these resignations were submitted before February 12. The resigning employees have been collecting payroll until today, but they resigned long ago
Flagged as misleading/inflammatory. Most of the comments here are probably bots.
Salient point: this is not a resignation, these are the people who took the buyout, and the buyout period is ending. There's not going to be this mass resignation today of people walking out of their jobs. They've already left the position.
The deferred retirement scheme is an incredibly ill-conceived way of shrinking the government. The way the incentive is structured it encourages the workers who are most able to find another job to leave. These are your best workers. The ones that will disproportionately stay are the least competitive in the job market. The other group of workers that will take it are those that were going to leave or retire anyway. So, for them its a waste of money and the transfer of their knowledge is cut short.
The same goes for the other DOGE employment initiative of firing probationary employees. These are mostly either people you have just hired or those that have been promoted. Of course, these are the employees you would most want to keep.
There are two elements of this situation that I'm consistently trying to open-mindedly hold in balance.
One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB, FCC, FTC. The Supreme Court and Congress are very happy to work on rolling them back, and they were constructed on pretty awful jurisprudence to begin with. That can work-- we should engage in creative destruction, the administrative state did restrict economic growth, and it did create carve-outs out of the Constitution. If it made us a more reliable partner, that did come at the cost of flexibility.
But at the same time, this executive isn't defederalizing to defer power to the states-- it's doing it to grant more immediate power to the president, who is in effect weaponizing the armed forces and police forces against non-compliant localities and personal enemies. News like this happening the same week as the president sends the Army to a passive American city in order to plainly provoke a conflict, and directing his DoJ to enact a case on paper thin justification, is troubling, to say the least.
Lots of arguments back and forth about the politics of government workers. But perhaps the biggest argument against the “creative destruction is good” might be that it favors hiring workers who like to leave a lot of the details up to someone else. But the “someone else” people (who like stable, rule/process oriented organizations) will be missing in the asymptomatic solution? (Contrast with an org with stable, rule/process development, where an asymptomatic solution exists?)
The real shame in all of this is the fact that buried deep within the 100k are workers who actually know a thing or two about how things actually work, have the experience and knowledge to get things done, have a pretty good idea how to improve the processes and policies, have chosen to do their assigned duties correctly, but have probably had limited success trying to change things.
So they're getting out because "it's time I guess. Not much else I can do."
> Speaking to Newsweek, Scott Lucas, who teaches international politics at University College Dublin
It perhaps says a lot about the current situation in academia in the US that they had to go _outside the US_ (albeit to an American working outside the US) for comment.
What i have seen is that those who resigned had 20+ years experience and younger folks stayed. So it was a bit of a brain drain, at least from my limited interaction with the three letter agencies.
17 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 33.3 ms ] threadIt’s also not clear how to recover from something like this.
> The resignations—which come as part of a program drawn up by President Donald Trump at the start of his second administration—will happen on Tuesday as Congress is facing a deadline on the same day to authorize more funding or risk a government shutdown.
> If there is no deal, the White House has ordered federal agencies to make plans for the large-scale redundancies.
Flagged as misleading/inflammatory. Most of the comments here are probably bots.
The same goes for the other DOGE employment initiative of firing probationary employees. These are mostly either people you have just hired or those that have been promoted. Of course, these are the employees you would most want to keep.
One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB, FCC, FTC. The Supreme Court and Congress are very happy to work on rolling them back, and they were constructed on pretty awful jurisprudence to begin with. That can work-- we should engage in creative destruction, the administrative state did restrict economic growth, and it did create carve-outs out of the Constitution. If it made us a more reliable partner, that did come at the cost of flexibility.
But at the same time, this executive isn't defederalizing to defer power to the states-- it's doing it to grant more immediate power to the president, who is in effect weaponizing the armed forces and police forces against non-compliant localities and personal enemies. News like this happening the same week as the president sends the Army to a passive American city in order to plainly provoke a conflict, and directing his DoJ to enact a case on paper thin justification, is troubling, to say the least.
So they're getting out because "it's time I guess. Not much else I can do."
It perhaps says a lot about the current situation in academia in the US that they had to go _outside the US_ (albeit to an American working outside the US) for comment.