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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Many don't believe that the money is forthcoming. They're aware that this is coming from two individuals both famous for backing out of obligations.

But if you were in a company whose management said, explicitly, that they hate you, then getting out early would surely be better than waiting. Maybe you'll get something extra, but just getting out might be enough.

Unfortunately, getting your next job won't be easy. A lot of government workers are in Maryland and Northern Virginia. You'll be competing for new jobs with tens of thousands of other job seekers. And it's not just them; government contracts and service companies will also dry up.

So you leave. Which is, of course, giving them what they want, which must be even more galling. But the American people literally voted that they hate you, and you have to live with that.

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I think that, on the contrary, government contracts will increase. There will be increased privatization of government services. These services cannot cease, but they will cease to be performed by the government. I imagine government contractors like Palantir will actually do quite well. A smaller government is good for business due to privatization, but perhaps more often bad for people subject to those businesses with less government oversight.

Some of those people who accepted were told they could not accept it, this is really shabbily done.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5296910/trump-federal-w...

> But the American people literally voted that they hate you, and you have to live with that.

No, the American people voted for 156 million+ individual reasons, to include inflation, the economy, and all the other kitchen-table reasons one votes. To be sure, some subset of them are hateful people. But come on.

They stood on the ruble of burned children at Waco to pose in glamour photos, sniped an innocent woman at Ruby Ridge, and drone striked a US citizen overseas.

Hate is not unreasonable .

Who is "they"? It seems a little extreme to blame 75k plus federal employees for government actions of decades past.

They as in a number of federal employees responsible, often hated.

I don't blame all of them, but the feds themselves set the standard of blaming the whole organization for violence eg rico act. It is hard to blame haters when they apply the principles used by government to prosecute them.

Uhh . . . what? The entire point of RICO is to prosecute organizations that are literally arranged for criminal purposes. It was designed to go after the mafia dons who gave the orders to kill people and do gangland stuff, but then had a bunch of henchmen to do the dirty work.

There's not just RICO, conspiracy and stuff like felony murder all put the whole organization who make violence happen on the chopping block.

Of course this organizational blame is enough to put citizens in a cage but by God the citizens ought not hate government employees for their organizations use of a little extrajudicial violence.

Based

> But if you were in a company whose management said, explicitly, that they hate you, then getting out early would surely be better than waiting.

The government is not a company and its current “custodians” are not its owners.

>But the American people literally voted that they hate you, and you have to live with that.

Why does it have to be hate/personal? I can lay off a employee without hating them.

Let's use the word "disdain". I don't think the majority of voters have disdain for federal workers, but the people engaging in these actions certainly seem to.

The disdain I can personally speak to is with the system that creates job programs funded by my taxpayer dollars instead of using said dollars for effective governance. I have lived experience, lots of it, with people who are living stereotypes of government employees, whose entire work product serves to sustain a self-perpetuating bureaucracy and who contribute very little to the statutory mission of their employer. So do many other people.

I don't blame those employees for thriving in the environment that was created for them. I don't wish them any ill. But I don't think I need to fund that kind of systemic dysfunction anymore.

Do you really have faith in Elon "print out your source code so I can personally read it" Musk to accurately weed out the bad eggs while maintaining effective governance? What evidence do you have that Trump is at all interested in effective governance? All I see is him creating systemic dysfunction, not ending any.

> American people literally voted that they hate you

I didn't vote for this, speak for yourself.

Technically Americans collectively (as a nation with specific values and culture) made this happened.

Democrats are run by Corporates.

Americans love capitalism and would brand anything else (even by a slight mentioned of certain aspect) as socialists and or communism and get cancelled.

Cutting tax is an example. Thinking tax is too high is another example.

I assume most of tgese are early retirements

> American people literally voted

This is so commonly repeated now it’s an effective means of damping down any notion that Americans can actively dissent and blunt the excesses of this administration.

I get that Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do, but he also simultaneously said he wasn’t going to do the same things. The margin of victory was narrow enough that what comes next is a test of Americans’ ability to resist and defend.

It’s not about “what Americans voted for”. It’s about which Americans made it through the gates, and who last moved those gates.

Also, if Americans voted for Trump to do a fascism, because Trump said he would do a fascism, and then Trump did a fascism... it's still legitimate to oppose fascism. "This is what (about half of the people who bothered to vote) voted for" doesn't mean everyone else just has to go home and sit on their hands.

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