Musk, Ramaswamy vow 'mass head-count reductions' in U.S. government | Hacker News Reader

Musk, Ramaswamy vow 'mass head-count reductions' in U.S. government

washingtonpost.com

6 pointsrbanffy18 comments

Biting my tongue. I wanted to say worse. All I can say is be prepared for disruptions in government services. And there will be some surprises.

Think about how Twitter was falling apart in the first couple of days under Musk, only much worse.

We've all been there when there was a massive re-org when a new CEO comes in. The CEO wants to shake things up with no knowledge of how things work.

Services like soldiers and coast guarding, VA services? That's where most of the headcount is.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59729

Discretionary spending is $1.7T and includes the DoD and Justice. The only way I can see cutting $2T is to disband the US military, effectively shutting down most of the Federal government, and reneging on federal interests payments.

There's what they say and then there's what they do.

I'm not convinced that it's going to be as easy as they think to reduce headcount in the government. But we'll see...

effectively the only tool at their disposal is RTO and that ain’t gonna work. some folk with low mileage might leave but not in numbers to make any kind of “tangible dent.” people won’t be leaving gov jobs just because they have to go back to the office… where they were most days before C19

RTO and moving the agency across the country is probably a fairly effective way to axe a lot of employees.

might be effective for some percentage of govies with 5-ish years in. GS in double-digits won’t be deterred by this move few years away from retirement. of a small sample size of about dozen in this group I am friends with not a single person said “shit, I am out.” gov jobs are too good to abandon. unlike twitter/x where folks that left were likely back to work wherever they wanted to be with same-ish (or better) pay/benefits

DOGE is so efficient that it needs two leaders to run it. Their first great idea is to make things so awful that many Gov workers will quit.

I'm sure just simple digitization, moving processes online, and then offering packages to promote early retirement would be enough to save billions. But that wouldn't satisfy their contempt for the working class.

Good but both parties need to commit to this. The federal government will spend around 4 trillion beyond its budget this year. It has to stop or it will absolutely sink this country in the coming decades.

This will not make life better for people.

Glad I work for a state agency.

In other news, Americans are going to finally learn what the federal government actually does.

They say wars are God's way of teaching geography to americans; could it be that DoGE is His way of teaching civics?

Apparently a lot of Trump voters searched "how to change my vote" online right after the election, so yeah. And I wonder how all of the Democrats who sat the vote out because Harris wasn't anti-zionist enough are going to feel when Trump sends troops in to help defend Israel from the few Palestinians still alive.

I saw a meme before the election that said something to the effect that an election is public transportation, not a marriage proposal. You're not trying to find "the one" with whom you intend to spend the rest of your life. You're just trying to find the bus that goes closest to where you want to go. You don't not take the journey because the bus may make you walk a couple of blocks to get where you're going at the end.

I wouldn’t want to go where this bus is going.

> "how to change my vote"

I found this difficult to believe, but it does show up in Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2024-11-05%202...

Apparently Trump voters were unaware of basic facts like "Obamacare" and the ACA being the same thing. Immigrant voters are just now becoming aware of plans for mass deportation and removing birthright citizenship. Parents are realizing that closing the Department of Education would actually affect their children.

They just thought "Biden made the prices go up, Trump will make them come back down."

He won't, though. Those tariffs they voted for will only make things worse, because companies will just pass the cost on to consumers, and start laying off employees.

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