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- Even in the best of cases, if this is your approach, you need a plan for how to add back the stuff that you learn is critical. DOGE haven't demonstrated that minimal level of competence. Firing National Nuclear Security Administration staff and cutting them off from their work emails meant that when those staff were quickly discovered to be critical, it wasn't possible to quickly bring them back. This is amateurish.
- But further, this principle works with designing rockets because you expect to build multiple rockets during the development process, and failing on one rocket doesn't destroy your ability to iterate. You don't do this with a rocket if you're in the rocket. If we crash the US economy or start a war, we impair our ability to just pick up the pieces and carry on as before.
- And this works with something like rockets b/c no one is actively trying to blow up your rocket, or take advantage of its weaknesses. The US has adversaries, and the current administration is destabilizing agencies in a pretty public way which those adversaries may take advantage of. A crappy way to discover that the NNSA is critical would be if, e.g. some reduction in global monitoring meant that we didn't notice some movement of fissile material to countries we aren't friends with, etc.
Maybe the tactics that work at Tesla and SpaceX aren't universally applicable and governing requires at least a somewhat different approach?
In other words, not only is the strategy wildly likely to result in you learning things are critical years past the point of no return when talking about functions like nuclear weapons, it was completely pointless in this particular case. They didn't learn anything they couldn't have learned beforehand, but did manage to piss off a ton of people with critical skills who are likely looking for the exit now if they even came back at all.
We are indeed in the rocket so maybe the minimum effectiveness for safety isn’t how we should evaluate the situation.
Once you fire me, I'm not coming back.
Being hired into a known-unstable situation needs to involve a lot more cash than a stable-for-decades one. Is the assumption you're making that there will be no other market to absorb the employees? The ones who remain available will be the ones unable to find work elsewhere.
I am, my salary is now higher. Much higher. And I no longer give a f' about the TPS report.
Actually maybe less work for more money because the employee now knows how vital they are but at the same time knows you don't give a shit about them so why should they care more than they have to about you.
No, it's not. They're not running a test to see who is missed, they are realizing they've made a huge mistake and fired the people who look after the nukes and the people looking into bird flu. Knowing whose job is important doesn't require leaving nukes unattended or bird flu to run rampant.
Maybe for companies (although I'd argue it's extremely bad there as well), but for Governments this is a terrible idea!
But the government employs people. And in most of the civilized world, employing people comes with responsibilities over those people. For starters, the responsibility of not firing or changing terms that effects them on whim just for the sake of efficiency.
They fired FAA staff (that was already understaffed) and plane crashes are increasing. I have several friends that have stopped flying due to distrust of the safety.
They fired the Department of Energy staff than monitors and prevents the international trade of nuclear materials and weapons. Do we really have the luxury of getting that wrong by running an experiment to see “what’s the minimum staff necessary”? Seems like a dumb cost benefit calculation.
"Unplug it and see who screams" is not effective systems management.
People aren't rockets.
"We wrote the memo that we don't have enough peope to check drinking water toxidity, guess leadership is okay with not testing for that anymore"
An aggressive anti-waste campaign would be more believable if it wasn't coming from an administration vowing to destroy the federal government and openly subverting the Constitution, led by a man who gets his political views from neo-Nazis that tweet at him.