Apparently the boss of the team was told to make layoffs, she did some but not enough to please Musk, so Musk in a face to face meeting demanded she make more. She said they couldn't without affecting delivery.
Musk fired her. Then fired the team. Then hired the team back because she was correct.
But not before lots of ongoing projects got stalled because contacts just disappeared and stopped answering phones.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...
> The meeting could not have gone worse. Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, saying deeper cuts would undermine charging-business fundamentals, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team.
and
> The contractor said he had expected Supercharger projects to provide about 20% of his 2024 revenue but now plans to diversify to avoid relying on Tesla.
Say if you're China and Russia...
> then putting a foolish unelected billionaire
With ties to both...
I think the situation is much simpler. Trump wants to be king. What happens to America in the future is immaterial. And a king needs a kingmaker, who in this case also wants to be MOTU.
(Not sure if any help was needed this time though.)
That's not really the claim these days. The Stelle Dossier accusations haven't really been substantiated.
He's more likely to be just a useful idiot. Far more easy to manipulate than politically educated stable people, and with less connection to the institutions of State.
Something wrong with society as a whole. People being cruel to each other for no reason, people can’t think/plan beyond the current quarter etc. Everywhere I look, people seem stressed, and they lash out in whatever way they can. Seems like a much bigger problem than Trump/Musk, though they are a big contributor to society’s stress for sure
Nice walks help, even so. Absolutely doesn't solve everything, but does help nonetheless.
Power trip has its pitfalls. It convinces nobodies that they are special. Its one of the big reasons many times the middle managers end behind their reportees.
Once you taste power its easy to convince yourself that you are coasting along the path of a guaranteed victory, and winning is a given.
There was once this interview of a man I watched who would be around the head of a army, his staff pretty much treated him like a god. And he even got used to that sort of stuff over time. You can't expect good things to happen from there.
Even then, a power trip that actually fired hundreds of people on the spot is just ficticious levels of stupidity. It's the exaggerated evil businessman that everyone would laugh at. And musk fits it to a T.
What is he thinking how this will turn out?
As others have already pointed out, the real damage is silent, has already been done, and will be suffered by generations to come while being able to blame others.
I think in federal government the risks are much higher, and Musk is being an idiot by exposing the America public to those risks, but the feedback loop for him on these previous experiments has been positive, not negative.
edit: OK, so parent edited to match what I wrote and now I'm being downvoted because I look like I copied parent?
Not necessarily. It's generally understood that federal employees accept a lower salary in exchange for career stability. If a career as a federal employee now has higher risk then at least some people will be expecting a higher salary.
In this particular case, the government positions were maintaining the US's nuclear arsenal. Not sure how "wasteful" having a nuclear deterrent is.
This is some serious 1984 war is peace shit.
From what it sounds like (w.r.t. Agenda 47 / Project 2025) DOGE is fund seeking for massive planned programs, not returning money to the citizenry or restructuring for efficiency.
It sounds like they are illegally looting agencies and programs that congress already funded, so they can fund the admin's proposed plans (virtual social cleansing, mass deportations, homeless relocation, freedom cities, etc).
Or it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy. Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gop-panel-ap...
> Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said she has expressed “concerns” to leaders about the prospect of steep spending cuts and told reporters that, before she agrees to vote for the budget resolution, she wants “better clarity” about the next stage — especially when it comes to cuts. “$4.5 trillion doesn’t leave a lot of room for the president’s priorities,” Malliotakis said
---
Also, why else would you directly reclaim funds as the executive? As a party, if you wanted to correct spending, you would do it in a budget. As the executive, if you wanted to get money without congressional approval, you would reclaim money that has already been appropriated. There are other ways (emergency orders), but they might not be popular with the party or a target voting base (in this case, more net spending).
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is much more likely to be using rhetoric than predicting how the situation will develop. If the Republicans as a party actually cared about the debt or intended to make meaningful improvements to the situation we'd have seen evidence of it in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s or 10s.
I'd love to be wrong, but there is pretty strong evidence here that they're going to tut-tut; maybe wag a finger or even in extreme situations someone will write a strongly worded letter. Then the government will borrow whatever they need to to pay for whatever hare-brained scheme is flavour of the month.
Trump has therefore caused gilt rates to rise, borrowing costs to rise, and a potential currency devaluation.
If you want to see how that works out when people finally lose their confidence, see what happened to the Truss government in the UK: it's not pretty. The UK is still paying for that on multiple fronts, but we were able to end the experiment in 49 days - that's not possible in the US.
I don't think what has worked for the last 50 years - waving budget appropriations through, shrugging at the national debt - is going to hold up for too much longer, for multiple reasons. And when it falls, it's going to fall fast, and very hard.
However, it still seems plausible (in my limited understanding) that this strategy could still be the goal, if the goal is to first push appropriations impoundment to SCOTUS.
Here is the best cited and approachable article I found on the subject within the context of these events:
https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/the-overlooked-conundrums-of-imp...
The first part of this plan - destruction - is easier than the second half - creation. If they're successful with the second half, people will be worse off because it's a big step towards neofeudalism /strengthening oligarchy. If they fail, people will be a lot worse off because the structures they're destroying are actually doing important work.
this. the optics are important for the Trump base
They want to fund corporate tax cuts. the cut from 22 to 15 percent is estsimated to be worth 100-200b dollars of income for the government per year. That's about the yearly funding of the DoED.
So we aren't saving money nor paying off debt. we are just funding corporate profits.
>The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.
blame the incentive structure, not the players. Government being efficient and saving money results in less budget next time. They are punished for their improvement. If Musk wanted governent efficiency, that's the angle to approach. Protecting against lower budgets after a high performance review would do wonders.
They're not just trying to get rid of the US middleman, but the middleman altogether.
I guess we'll be seeing Mastodon/Bluesky/Threads phenomenon across worlds, both horizontally and vertically in the coming decades, this time in real life with (more)real consequences.
Why didn't they?
I think key personnel came back because they wanted to. It's the simplest explanation.
With a Visa, I would not take such a risk. Given the job market, they either need to extend the period, or somehow mandate companies decide on a full time candidate within 30 days of first conact. It's gotten beyond out of hand.
I mean can you even claim to make the assumption that the actual key staff were rehired? Can you make the assumption that they are working safely with the resources they need? Can you make an assumption that they have covered the entire scope of the organisation?
Probably not.
Chess is played one piece at a time, not smashing all the pieces off the board.
A strategy that seems to be hot in the US, but is an utter ethical abomination and shameful.
I don't think I was overoptimistic. It was literally the best decision I ever made, in every aspect I can think of.
A lot of folks mention the lower salaries in Europe (generally, and especially for tech): has mattered much in your (personal) experience for quality of life and happiness?
However, this is not for everyone: While you can be more sure of keeping your job in rough times, you can also be sure that the lazy idiot 2 desks over will keep his job. And you can be sure that any change will be resisted because change is seen as inherently bad and threatening, and reasons will be found to shoot down your new-fangled fancy ideas. YMMV, to each his own, etc.
My quality of life is insanely better. I live in a walkable small city in the south. I walk to the grocery store a few times a week. I bike to the library or to the train station. My job turns off at 5pm and I don’t work on the weekends unless I want to. Even then, that weekend work time can be substituted for work during the week.
The biggest downside for us has been the cost of traveling back to the US to see family. It’s very expensive for us to fly home since we also need to rent a car usually. Even saving 1k per month, that’s a significant part of the yearly savings just going to buy plane tickets for one big trip per year. After we have kids, I suspect grandma and grandpa will be coming here to visit more often because we can’t afford to fly with a family of 4 or 5 more than once every other year. Not to mention the tax implications of spending too much time abroad.
If you can afford to try it out, take a 90 day visa and just chill and see if the lifestyle works for you (including remote work). Worst case scenario, you go back to the US after a year if you hate it.
I just wanted enough to buy a house and raise a family, and I could earn enough for this. A comfortable middle class life in a nice neighborhood.
I also appreciate the safety nets and worker protections here in Europe. I recently went through a serious medical condition that in the US would have me bankrupt. Here I had no issues.
Had I moved to the US I would by now be either dead or broke.
The cruelty is the point.
They're going up against a world-class bureaucracy; a human powered machine that is excellent at dragging out changes beyond the term of any politician. Something like "Yes, Minister" is a comedy show except a lot of it is fairly true - they aren't going to get anything done without doing something drastic like cutting a lot of functions and seeing what happens. Otherwise it'll keep growing.
Yeah. The technical term for that is "arbitrary". It isn't ideologically motivated; it is based on some dude's opinions based on who-knows-what internal dialogue. Although this financial features on Twitter sounds like a pretty good idea and I'd like to see it in the wild.
I'm very curious how anyone could think this is a good idea (for consumers, obviously it's a good idea for Musk)
> Although this financial features on Twitter sounds like a pretty good idea and I'd like to see it in the wild.
Kind of a jaw-dropping reaction to the fact that he’s dismantling the very agency that would be in charge of regulating those features. Honestly, I really struggle to understand the mindset that’s not merely okay with but excited by this sort of egregious corruption.
Seems like it should be easy to do. We're looking at this big corrupt blob thing of questionable competence that is the US political class, and then one polyp of the mass does something that probably makes the world a little better. Yay. Well done blob thing.
It'd be better if people committed to a high-integrity political class but it is a monumental task (probably multi-generational) and the people trying to progress it haven't made much progress. Suggestions welcome.
Like, are we not commenting on an article about how we recklessly fired dozens to hundreds of people who were overseeing our nuclear weapons stockpile? And it turned out they're actually really important, but we're having trouble contacting them to hire them back? And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?
I don't really know what to say, man. It's pretty clear this isn't going to go anywhere productive. Have a nice night.
The last president was forced to issue multiple preemptive pardons for his own family after being dogged for years by serious corruption allegations. That probably counts as worse and it isn't even particularly outrageous by the standards of the US Congress, it seemed to be pretty routine stuff. I'd expect most members of the US congress to struggle if real scrutiny was bought to bear since their financial circumstances often don't appear to make sense.
Then beyond the personal corruption there is the lobbying network that constantly tries and succeeds in writing law for various unsavoury interest groups. Realistically if Musk is doing something corrupt - TBD in my opinion - his major mistake is being directly associated with the changes, he should have learned from the experts and done it discretely like everyone else does.
> And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?
You seem to have tapped into the mindset with this one. Say it again seriously and you've made it there.
That series was based on conversations between the writers and senior civil servants in UK Government. It was Margaret Thatcher's favourite show (she even wrote a scene to perform with the actors at some event or other), because in 1970s and 1980s Britain, it was incredibly on the money.
However, the more apt political comedy to reflect what modern politics looks like isn't "Yes, Minister" or "Yes, Prime Minister" (the sequel), but "The Thick of It", which shows well-meaning but put-upon civil servants dealing with the tyranny and abuse of special advisors and external consultants bullying and demeaning them at every turn. It, too, is based on conversations with real insiders in UK government.
I'll leave it to you to decide which is most apt for modern Washington, but there was a film of the latter mostly set in Washington, which tries to capture the tensions on that side of the Atlantic quite well, with the main joke being the UK's necessary subservience to a larger World power. It's worth a watch.
For my money, Musk looks a lot more like Malcolm Tucker than he does Jim Hacker.
Seems like a stretch to compare executions and layoffs, no one else is immune to layoffs
They will be able to collect unemployment, do we know if they are getting severance?
Firing is not an issue. The issue is fire to rehire.
It is not only indicative of poor leadership, but also does it break down institutions - one of the key values government provides.
to contextualize: Do you think you can get people to go to war for the US if you can not make up your mind on whether or not to keep them on payroll?
But we will see how the US will fare with broken down institutions.
I don't think we should go to war at all.
I don't think you understand why Trump was elected or middle America culture. The popular vote was a vote against deterring and corrupt institutions that already exist
Sounds like the kind of thing that could end up increasing costs rather than reducing them.
Going in crazy like they are doing now, may serve the administration if they start having department do their own layoffs in a hurry, because they know otherwise it will be done for then.
There's more of a surge on wall street, but similar to tesla a lot of this is upheld by an undeserved hype. If Elon Musk died, I suspect these valuations would plummet harder than '29. TSLA is informally called a meme stock for a reason.
(Though recently, even in tech changing jobs is much more precarious than it ever was.)
>Especially if you have nothing else lined up.
Sadly, yes. I do find the irony here that the FEDS said the economy was recovering and Trump promised to fix inflation and make jobs. Then he's taking advantsge of the bad market to force people he abused back.
Degrade the service of a website, and maybe it loads a little funny; degrade the services of a government and people die.
This doesn't make sense to me. The federal government isn't a company making Widget X, where you can gut, tweak, and repair it until you minimize the cost per widget and maximize the number of widgets sold. The government does a lot of things, often in the hopes of results in one or more decades, and there's rarely an easy and immediate way to measure success.
For example, the Surgeon General announced tobacco's link with cancer in 1964. It wasn't until the 1990s that smoking rates really started to fall in any significant way. The federal and state governments have spent decades and billions of dollars to reduce smoking rates, and they've been wildly successful. The tax revenue generated by any person-years alive which were won through that effort will never make up for the billions spent. But those people will contribute more to the economic and social life of the US, and the tobacco settlement deterred other companies from causing so much harm.
It's also still weird because a lot of the firings focused on probationary workers.Very few would prove themselves in a year, so they did have to defer to key personell in he end to figure out "hey, he needed those people". Except he may not get those worers back.
> but the feedback loop for him on these previous experiments has been positive, not negative.
Sure, positve for his ego. He didn't care about recovering the supercharger conractors, he didn't care about repairing his adverts' relationships on Twitter and even threatened to sue as if they are obligated to advertise on his plaform. Call me treachorous but I don't think he really cares about making an efficient government. He's just funding his tax cuts.
Because good governance is not the goal.
This is basically 0 based budgeting, where you get rid of everything and then only add back what you deem to be absolutely necessary. I expect good results.
more guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I agree. Federal credential management and safekeeping is not particularly well crafted.
It's not about achieving results primarily, it's a public perception game. Trump and Musk are going for the perception of "they do what they say from day 1" - it doesn't matter if what they plan succeeds at all (and if it's struck down by judges, it's just additional fodder for "un-American judges!!!" propaganda), or if what they do actually has the outcome they promised.
The GQP voter base no longer cares about anything but the appearance of "winning", and it's aided by completely off-the-rockers media and influencers.
> [Step 2] Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.
He thinks this is a feature, not a bug. Is he wrong? I don't think so.
1) Delete a system
2) 404 error
3) add the system back with a simple git command
Nuclear world
1) Delete a system
2) Nuclear meltdown causes the abandonment of the Atlantic coast
3) Add the system back over the next 20 years
Didn't facebook end up changing that?
There's some things you can't undo once they break.
Twitter lost 84% of its revenue.
Do you want the USA GDP to shrink that much over the next few years?
"Bloat" presumes. "Tax dollars saved" would only be relevant — still incorrect, but relevant — if you were matching tax cuts with spending cuts, rather than trying to balance budgets.
If the USA balances its budget in a way that *somehow* has no side-effects, the GDP shrinks 7% just from that cut alone — but these cuts do have side effects so it is worse than that.
And doing using layoffs as a discovery mechanism is going to have Chesterton-fence type mistakes, where you only find what's wrong when the stuff you stop paying for is maintenance whose absence takes a while to become visible to non-domain experts. Dams will fail and flood valleys, bridges will fall into rivers, that kind of thing has gotten into the news in other countries when maintenance was forgotten.
The infrastructure that your government is responsible for is the backbone upon which the wealth of the rest of your country is built. You can eliminate the entire Federal Highway Administration and Joe Average won't notice anything for nearly a year… but if and when you do hire them back, you may have to hire back a lot more than you fired just to catch up with the damage done.
And so it goes for many other aspects of your country. CDC's also in the news now. OK, until you get your next pandemic… oh, wait, you're already having one. Nukes? You won't notice the problem until other governments no longer fear your nuclear deterrent. Armed forces in general? British didn't see any problem with shrinking their forces until the Russian invasion of Ukraine and realising how close they were to not being able to defend themselves if invaded. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration? Getting rid of that means a lot of companies can get away with skipping safety processes, so it might even seem like the economy goes up… until you get some equivalent of the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal.
> As for Twitter/X - the goal isn't revenue but profit, and Twitter was not in a good shape before Elon.
They made a profit in two of the years before he took over; an 84% revenue decline means that the company cannot even service the debt he saddled the company with during the purchase, even if he fired all remaining staff and reduced server, utility, real estate, and insurance, and all other costs to zero.
> Musk recently noted they are barely breaking even now, and the recent sale of X debt was just above original pricing.
Do you trust him?
According to this link, they sold more of their debt than they were expecting to, for more than expected to, but it was still less than they paid for it.
Going from $1b to $5.5b and from 90¢/$ to 97¢/$ is less bad rather than good.
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/morgan-stanley-...
Tax savings too a $40k a year person immediately find their way into the economy. Tax savings to multi-millionaires and billionaires tend to result in ever higher asset prices. They have too much spend effectively, so they hoard it.
1. Buy Twitter.
2. Fire most of the staff.
3. Piss everyone off so all the advertisers shun you.
4. Barely get the company breaking even, mainly due to all the cuts, even though the platform itself is barely limping along.
5. Cozy up to a wannabe dictator that dupes (slightly less than) half the country to elect him as president again.
6. Make the advertisers realize that their continued prosperity depends on bending the knee to you, due to your political connections. Not to mention your platform is now a way for people to buy favors from the government.
7. Profit.
(No need for a "???" step before "Profit", well done...)
We truly live in the darkest timeline.
When Putin realised that, his body language changed: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-war-putin-neumann-int...
(Oh how hyperbolic headlines are…)
How much of that is because of politics? Already at the point of takeover, Musk was so hated by half the US for various reasons that it became profitable for major publishing platforms to abandon Twitter/X "on principle". When you're in that situation, nothing on the object-level can help you - neither good management nor technical competence. Revenue depends indirectly on the public opinion, and half of it wants nothing to do with you.
US nuclear arsenal is not in this situation.
If I owned a bill board space, and set everything around it on fire, wouldn't you think it was my fault that advertisers didn't want to pay to use it any more?
I mean, why do people who hate what Twitter is now care about it's lost revenue? Especially given what it was, and where the revenue came from, this isn't exactly an argument that generalizes well.
Reason being, look at Tesla stock price: Musk's gaffes have a short term impact, but overall the price is way up since buying Twitter.
Musk used to dabble much more in Tesla directly than he's now, I wonder whether the ups and downs of the company correlate with his involvement, especially before he started going off the rails so badly? That would be informative and help separate object-level impact from political hysteria.
Tesla is absolutely in the advertisement business.
Their marketing and image is the only thing holding the company up (for now).
We can argue the first part all day. The point was Coca Cola and co. did not want to assossiate anymore and that had an objective dollar amount.
I know less about this situation, but Twitter in 2024 apparently made some controversial blocking changes and that started the bluesky migration. I don't know the dollar amount there, but they apparently lost some big influencers.
I can easily imagine this to alone be responsible for wiping 84% revenue.
Real world has a different political distribution than the Internet. "Politically toxic" on-line in particular is a knee-jerk reaction that is great at generating consistent revenue streams for publishers and social media on-line, but doesn't translate well to how the entire population of a country actually thinks or votes in the real world.
5% different, almost everyone is online.
But, thinking about your oft-quoted blog post about advertising bring a cancer, I guess if the top ad spenders cut themselves out entirely, then the bidding system could result in the runner-up bidder finding their ads are now almost arbitrarily cheaper.
We at best get 70% participation in voter representation. Online wise, I'd wager we get at best 20% "public" participation in terms of who bothers to participate online as opposed to lurking. And that 20% is spread amongst hundreds of subjects.
And we know these aren't created equal. The internet is disproportionately on the younger side, is very slightly biased by "middle class", educated workers, and the gender demographics vary site to site, despite being overall even (e.g. disproportionately male on Reddit, female on Pintrest). There will definitely be a different resuts online compared to making physical surveys.
No, Musk became hated by half the US __because__ of the way he took over Twitter. That lost him a great deal of good will.
The US government is a lot more affected by politics than twitter will ever be.
I'm sure this is a completely above board sale that definitely does not represent a legal-if-you-don't-look-at-it way to bribe the de facto head of the US government / the expectation of massive corruption (ala: Tesla's stock price rising on the news Elon Musk was running DOGE - weird right? The CEO is apparently going to be too busy to run the company because he's now running the government so the stock price goes up...to be fair, technically that's not a bad bet)
Because we know the new administration definitely wouldn't take bribes in the form of financial instruments[2]. Definitely no history of it[3].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-mor...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/08/02/tru...
Are the citations sufficient? Dunno. Just saying this isn't what you call it.
How does the sale of the debt help Elon Musk or Trump? They don't own that debt, they don't make money off that debt. Do you expect the fund managers to forgive the debt as a bribe? That would clearly be a bribe, but until that happens, it isn't and I don't think it is terribly likely.
There are plenty of real things to be upset over, you don't need to make up imaginary ones. All that does is dilute the real concerns and make your opposition less effective.
[3] is an unnecessarily verbose story with practically no substance. In 2017 a $10m cash withdrawal was made to a Research and Studies Center said to have a “relationship with the Egyptian General Intelligence Agency.”
Using those facts, and the fact Trump was friendly with Sisi at a UN event, an entire investigation was launched to see if Trump was the final recipient.
If you look at it with the counter assumption of Trump being innocent, there still seems to be a reasonable motive for all this.
The FBI wanted information about an Egyptian cash withdrawal from one of Egypt’s own banks, subpoenaed them by bringing up presidential relevancy, and punished them $50k a day until the bank sent the documents.
> [Step 1] Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
Pretty messed up way for that to work out, though.
This is just absolutely silly. What other reasonable ways are there to create requirements?
Doesn’t work in with people though. You will be deemed as unreliable.
Alliances will form without you as no one needs a partner that can leave you standing at any moment.
Running the company is the very opposite of running a country.
The feedback loop is weeks vs years/decades.
This has nothing to do with trimming waste and everything to do with replacing the government with loyalists from top to bottom. What comes after that isn't going to be pretty.
The effects are going to be felt for a good couple of decades to follow.
The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category. The remainder of the budget, including military, is considered discretionary. That discretionary spending is the thousands of pages that Congress creates (and fails to read) each year. And it's in that budget that most of the things we associate with government came from - everything from education, to roads, to infrastructure, and also the military.
So by the numbers in 2024 the discretionary budget was "only" $1.7 trillion and after military spending "only" $900 billion was left. "Only" obviously needs to be in quotes but that's indeed only about 13% of the e.g. $6.7 trillion total budget in 2024. And so each time you cut something the amount of money left for the things we generally associate with government skyrockets. So for instance USAID was "only" $50 billion, but that was more than 5% of the entire discretionary budget!
US Federal Workers cost $293 billion [1], and contractors amounted to $760 billion. This is excluding secondary costs/benefits, which are extremely high for government workers, and only direct payments. It also excludes budgeted expenditures that would have been performed by those employees. So that's already $1.05 trillion and we're clearly substantially lowballing the figure. Yet that's already more than the entire discretionary budget excluding military, and certainly far more than 4% of the entire budget (as would be required for cutting 25% to only result in a 1% cost saving, as proposed).
[1] - https://www.afge.org/article/afge-continues-to-debunk-miscon...
Probationary employees means not just the new hires, but any federal employee who changed jobs internally in the last year. Who's going to want to work for the Federal government after this bloodbath? No one with any talent, which I'm sure is either the goal or a happy by-product.
This is about Trump and Co. destroying govt institutions they don't like, and weaponizing other institutions with loyalists. Just look at what's happening in the DoJ.
Nah, we'll cut those too: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...
Checks and balances are very important and I'm very happy to see the GOP making 0 effort to end the filibuster in spite of it currently being rather liberally used by the DNC.
I mean if debt was an issue why vote for the guy who has increased the national debt by the most in history and whose spending plans were going to increase the debt by almost twice of his opponent?
https://www.investopedia.com/democrats-vs-republicans-who-ha...
- The US parties almost entirely ideologically swapped sometime in the 19th century. Some claim it happened with FDR in the 30s, others claim it didn't "really" happen until LBJ in the 60s. Everybody acknowledges it happened. What a "Democrat" did in 1913 is irrelevant.
- Congress dictates budgets, not the President. The President has veto power (which can be overruled by Congress), but nothing more.
- The modern US economic system enabling us to go arbitrarily far into debt only began in 1971, when we defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods.
- The total deficit under Trump was $5.6 trillion, under Biden it was ~7.6 trillion [1]. I assume the author was looking at delta debt and then 'inflation adjusting' it... ugh.
---
That's just the basic historic/factual backing. The "stats" are even worse, but enough is enough. In any case, the issue is not what happened in 1913 or even Trump's first term, but what is happening now. Trump's first term he promised to do what he's doing now but instead just mostly carried on the military machine (at least without starting any news wars, which was nice - though he was trying his hardest with Iran) and filled his entire cabinet with political establishment types who did their thing.
Trump 2.0 seems to have genuinely gained some sort of messianic delusions, probably from the attempted assassinations, and is actually doing what he said he would do before. And those current actions are what is really changing the game like nothing that's happened in decades.
congress makes budget, but the president has always been a means to apply pressure and influence the budget. After all, if a president declares an emergency or crisis, and congress doesn't fund for that, then they may risk re-election. That's always been the "legal" means of the president settting the budget.
But despite being a minority, such a budget will be highly unpopular and democratic congress can still use that to push back against it. It's faster for Trump to just force it through, if he's going undeterred.
Don't worry, they want to cut that too:
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...
March is going to be a bloodbath. For who, I can only wait and see.
But it's impossible to cut mandatory programs' spending directly without a law passed which would require a super-majority in the Senate due to filibusters. On that note, consider now how critical the filibuster is. It wasn't long ago that Democrats wanted to end the filibuster to try to roughshod some voting law changes. Had that succeeded then now the Republican party on a super-narrow majority in the Senate would similarly be able to pass literally any law they want. Checks and balances are important because tomorrow will not be like today - a truth that will remain forever.
So in any case, they're going to need to carry out cuts not related to mandatory spending, or indirectly cut mandatory spending which can be done by things like reducing administrative costs, not spending millions of dollars on Politico subscriptions, and so on. But healthcare (or any other mandatory spending) cuts themselves will be impossible unless the DNC is also on board with it.
their failure to see wider context, their failures to understand that massive chaotic fractal tier contexts interplay will forever be these people’s downfalls.
sisyphean masochists.
And then we can stop and check - if he is still fine after it, then maybe we didn't trim enough.
It's easy to trim other people when you are completely insulated from the consequences.
However this is people's livelihoods, mortgages, kids etc. being on the receiving end of it through no fault of your own must be awful.
Or maybe not.
When it comes to government, yes.
He's assuming everyone will grovel back to him and that this can be undone. That's the wrong part.
Layoffs will often cost you your best employees. Either because you laid them off, because they saw the signs and jumped before the layoffs, or because you end up overworking the post layoffs and they leave over the bad balance. You're never paying 10xer 10x the salary, so the attritiion is usually a matter of when, not if.
people aren't machines. They have their own interests and very few want to feel like they are one step away from being let go.
"Move fast and break things." /s
Then try to move fast to fix the things you just broke.
(Perhaps government tend to moves slowly for a reason: when a company breaks things customers can go to a competitor, when government breaks where can you go?)
I'm also not a fan of the fire and rehire method, either.
It does feel like more time should have been spent, from an outside agency, watching and deciding.
What they're doing now is an old trick, and I'm surprised more people don't tell them to screw off.
Given the lack of respect for process its plausible that in 10 or 20 years or whenever we'll find out this government was the most corrupt out of any in the past century.
Which is why Congress employs an army of auditors, who audit and report their findings to them.
The difference is, they are largely non-partisan appointments, who are expected to actually do their job, instead of rubber-stamping propaganda pieces. Their work can be verified, and there are consequences to them engaging in fraud, and there's a chain of custody for the evidence they find.
Which is more than can be said for giving a bunch of politically-appointed teenagers read/write access to every single system in the government... Paired with a blanket immunity from prosecution.