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Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M

18F are the bureaucrats they want to traumatize.

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They don't actually know who the bureaucrats are that they want to traumatize. Anyone calling a product manager, UX designer, or software developer at 18F a "bureaucrat" simply has no idea what they actually do. They are just demonizing the scapegoat du jour.

Also among these so call "bureaucrats" are psychologists at the VA helping veterans with PTSD; search and rescue professionals working for forest service, park service, fema, etc; undercover FBI agents trying to stop organized crime; NOAA scientists predicting hurricanes, the list goes on.

The demonization of the civil servants of this country is a story that people who want power are telling the country in order to gain said power. It's a story as old as time.

100%, when I hear it, I hear "small enough to drown in a bathtub" for a new era.

A lot of people got away with saying a lot of BS for a while Vague thought-terminating cliches, and we are observing one of these formless things decay, in real time, to the point they're outré.

The based to cringe pipeline, if you will

> They don't actually know who the bureaucrats are that they want to traumatize. Anyone calling a product manager, UX designer, or software developer at 18F a "bureaucrat" simply has no idea what they actually do.

"Bureaucrat" is always a pejorative for a professional person who works in a bureaucracy. It doesn't mean anything.

> "bureaucrat" is a pejorative

> "bureaucrat" doesn't mean anything

These two sentences appear to be contradictory.

It does not mean anything, it has the only purpose of demeaning one's work.

Thanks, that is what I was driving at.

>It doesn't mean anything.

It certainly means something in context, seeing as virtually everyone in the civil service has been painted with this same brush regardless of whether the term's use is correct or not.

> It doesn't mean anything.

Language is everything. Are they a government workers or are they a bureaucrats? Deep state operatives or public servants? All of these words could describe someone who works for 18F.

18F workers are public servants, some of the best in the government, but by calling them bureaucrats, it makes their work seem inefficient and their removal seem logical.

Accepting the word chosen for the conversation determines what actions are acceptable. Protestors or rioters? Freedom fighter or terrorist? Peacekeeper or occupying force? Security or surveillance? Whistleblower or leaker? Regulation or Red Tape? Tax or Theft? Patriot or nationalist? Socialism, Marxism, or communism?

Peace (justice) or peace (submission)? Woke (generational injustice) or woke (any leftist idea I don’t like)?

It's precisely because these words have exact meanings, that they are so insidious. Many end up becoming shibboleths, dividing us vs them.

There are companies, PR firms, private intelligence, and think tanks that A/B test words and ideas in order to create the right metaphorical context to get people to submit to a certain framing.

A good read on the general topic of control via metaphorical framing:

https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-from-do...

Many of Gary's videos on the economy shed light on what's happening in the US right now. A lot of sleight of hand to convince the general population that the villains are immigrants, government employees, anyone on welfare, etc. I found this one to be most poignant on the topic.

https://youtu.be/wPoXOwiEfrQ?si=K58Pa-JQhdIvQzrw

Gary Stevenson is one of the strongest rising voices on what the wealthy have been doing to the working and middle classes over the last decades (under parties of both sides in both the UK and the US), a trend being rapidly accelerated under the current US administration.

The civil servants should have stayed in their lane: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-with...

I grew up in the DC area 30 years ago. Civil servants declaring “Resistance” to the agenda of the duly elected president would have been unthinkable then. That destroys the premise of a civil service that is a machine that processes paperwork and doesn’t think for itself.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/3331 The agenda of the president does not matter

The resistance at Trump’s inauguration has to do with Trump’s immigration and environmental policies. Which undoubtedly are within his lawful executive powers.

This is just insane. Totally destructive. Checks and balances are gone.

Explain what you think “checks and balances” are, please.

Well, Checks come from the Check Republic. A region and culture that has had its own trials and tribulations in the past century, getting over taken and reformed a few times.

Balances, on the other hand, were from old lost Balancing Empire. This was really just a stubborn remnant of the Roman Empire that didn't want to admit the party was over.

Together, the refrain "Checks and Balances" is normally to remind us of our ambiguous and ephemeral place in history. Are we hardy folk like the Checks who will remain even as the political landscape changes? Or are we Balances left twisting in the wind?

Then, I think the earlier poster was expressing his own sense of loss in proclaiming there aren't even Checks anymore. It's no longer ambiguous, we are un-Checked and out of Balance.

Folks, don't fall for rayiner's in-bad-faith comments. Best not to respond, they are trying to goad you into an argument.

I’m not making a “bad faith argument.” I’m trying to fight the widespread misinformation that there are “checks and balances” within the executive branch. Where is Community Notes when you need it?

You weren't even making an argument, just a comment. Standard tactic (you have been called out on this before) to write a short, goading comment with no content.

If you want, you can attempt to clarify why you're asking the person you're replying to if they know what checks and balances are. We can all ready social study books and read wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers_under_the...) and it seems unlikely the response to your question is going to differ much from the philosophy and practice described there.

Not sure where you got the "widespread misinformation about checks and balances in the executive branch", the C&B are across branches, nobody implied otherwise.

This is an article about laying off a group (18F), that was never established by Congress in the first place. So I think if someone invokes checks and balances here, it’s fair to enquire what they think checks and balances are.

Saying “hey, don’t you know what checks and balances are” seems ruder.

Says the uber-bureaucrat, Musk.

Yes, I firmly believe that Trump was elected to punish the current political class in the US for failing to serve the interests of his voter base (largely working class men). The whole election and his sad little mandate is about tearing down the permanent bureaucracy in the executive branch, not about fixing anything or really even changing any systems.

Don’t forget us minorities! Net 20 point swing among both asians and hispanics. Little Bangladesh—note that bangladesh is literally a socialist country—in Queens, NYC swung a net 55 points to the right.

Digressing a bit: is there any correlation between Bangaldeshi-Americans preferences in US politics (Democrats vs GOP) and their preferences in Bangladeshi politics (Awami League vs BNP vs Yunus)? Or are those largely orthogonal dimensions?

I think as between AL and BNP it’s idiosyncratic to the person. Our oldest family friends (BNP) became big Trump supporters during his first term, but that’s just a couple of data points. I think Yunus supporters are almost always Harris supporters, though. Either too young to know how this story will play out, or boomerlib who thinks this time will be different.

And those working class men will suffer the most for the consequences of their actions. cutting off a nose to spite their face.

The silver lining is that it's not too late for those people to get some upcoming elections to swing and push to a congress that will kick out Trump before it's too late.

“The cruelty is the point”

Incorrect. Their goal is to dissolve these agencies, to reduce regulation that burden certain industries.

How is that incorrect? They're deliberately being cruel to government employees so they quit and the agencies are de facto dissolved.

But 18f? They've been one of the most visible streamliners of government bureaucracy we've seen.

They want to make government bureaucracy less streamline, so they can point out how inefficient it is and therefore should be abolished (ignoring the fact that they sabotaged it).

Like they do with USPS. Yes, I agree.

Cruelty and profit or it isn’t capitalism

Yes, that is the goal, but not quite how they sell it.

The sell is to individuals to get their votes, not corporations (who of course are on board, but cannot vote), and more amorphous for not being above board. About how people's hardship are being caused by "enemies" who must be punished. Thus the "cruelty is the point" observation.

Simply stating their goal, "the hyper rich feel too fettered, with respect to the rights/safety/wellbeing of individuals", would fail for being overly direct and honest.

(I have no doubt there is governmental waste. But their behavior is not consistent with doing the work of identifying and eliminating waste. Waste elmination here is a side effect (that can be pointed to) of mass elmination independent of waste.)

They are either deceptive or incredibly incompentent. There is no burden to any industry in giving the American taxpayer a free and authoritative easy way to file. Similarly, firing so many FDIC inspectors saves nothing, they are paid by the banks not the government.

I'm going with deceptive.

There is a burden, and a huge one at that, to the rent-seeking industry.

If there's a free and authoritative easy way to file taxes, then there's no reason for people to pay for unnecessary third party services who earn ALL their money by imposing themselves between the taxpayer and IRS. They will fight like bastards to preserve their privileged position.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russe...

The cruelty is the point.

at some point the oil will run out it is a finite resource let them go crazy in the last 75 years

EVs and all that stuff were nothing more than a toy to play the charged up games the barons / slavers play

The Limits to Growth predicted (in 1972) a collapse of industrialization caused by exponential growth well before 2100. Since then we've only accelerated our rate of growth. I think we have far less than 75 years left before things go very badly.

the barons will commit global genocide before they let their toy humans die it'll be fine

oil > nuclear > some miraculous thing

And I though professor Snyder was dramatic about decapitation strike. Trump will for be remembered as Gorbachov of US

Wouldn't he be Lenin, the guy who turned the country into a cynical police state? Rather than Gorbachev, the guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize and started to end totalitarianism in Russia and the Soviet empire?

This is a very one-sided take, you should ask people on the street of any Russian city what they think of Gorbachev and his policies. I agree with GP with one exception: Gorbachev probably thought he was doing good things for his nation and the actual consequences were unintentional. Probably less so in this case, but I have no desire to tell Americans how to operate their country, so pay no attention to me.

IMO you have to take that with a grain of salt. Stalin is increasingly popular in Russia and more popular than Gorbachev. And Stalin is one of the world's most prolific mass murderers.

Russia currently is run by an ex-KGB dude. The KGB opposed Gorbachev's reforms. Putin is actively trying to rehabilitate the Stalin personality cult and revive a longing for Soviet era colonialism to legitimize his war of expansion.

The Russian people are amazing, but there's only so far you can go if you don't have a free press, if expressing certain facts about history is illegal and if people are murdered for being too open about their opinions.

I don't doubt there are people who are still unhappy that Russia lost its status from the imperial days, just as there are British people frustrated that they're no longer an important empire. But that was happening anyway and it was only a matter of time.

It's not really surprising that the average opinion in an authoritarian country aligns with the position actively promoted by the government of that country. Just like it's not surprising that the party wins by a landslide in a one party state.

This is a very one-sided take, you should ask people on the street of any Russian city

LOL. I'll get right on that, after I ask the North Koreans for their opinion.

Okay, here is the thing -- they love Stalin because he made ussr great (again?) and hate Gorbachov for unmaking it. Going by this logic he is in superposition of two depending who you ask.

Snyder has a great talk at a conference where he talks about how the liberalization of Russia was a move towards the west, but they did it without a fundamental ingredient -- Rule of Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law).

So Russia was effectively cargo culting the idea of capitalism and democracy. They did things that looked right, but because they didn't understand a core principle, Rule of Law, they did not get democracy or capitalism. Instead opportunists attained all of the once governmentally owned assets, and then used their levels of wealth gained to consolidate their own power, leaving Russia in the current mafia state/oligarchy it is in.

I wish I could find it for you, but it's kind of painful to search for videos based on semantic information.

Snyder's US centric video on rule of law, was not only prescient, but it builds some of the scaffolding needed to understand just how bad everything is right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6fpu_9S31c

I'm not sure why you got downvoted. But I'm not very familiar with Snyder's work so maybe I'm missing something controversial here.

But as you describe it that's fairly plausible to me. Russia under communism had no rule of law and was basically a mafia state. So it's not surprising that remnants of those institutions, the paranoia, the corruption, opportunism, etc carried over through the transition.

My point wasn't that Gorbachev was some sort of miracle worker, just that he helped end totalitarianism and is recognized for his efforts. And Trump will definitely not be remembered as that kind of figure. Putin is trying to bring back the state religion, and Trump is trying to do something similar in the US so if we're going to compare him to someone in Russia historically, it will be someone who tried to tear things down and impose a dictatorship for the supposed "betterment" of the people.

Far worse. They've crossed the rubicon. We'll have a nasty period of civil unrest and conflict. I'd put 50/50 odds on a military junta within the decade.

Fuck that Vought guy.

Russell Vought, sociopath

Uhhh is there a full clip because 18 seconds of what looks like a speech seems like cherry picking.

What kind of context do you think would excuse that sentiment? Given his extensive public record, would you argue that this is somehow out of character for him? It seems rather consistent based on the rest of his career:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/03/russ-voug...

Why? Because I've seen Propublica cherry pick quotes before and taken them entirely out of context?

The media has been lying to us for decades and no, I don't take them at their word, especially when they share a clip that removes all context.

> I've seen Propublica cherry pick quotes

Wait until you see Twitter Files or whatever Elon is going to drop from DOGE.

Are you expecting a creationist style trimmed quote where he said something like “Only a sociopath would say something like…” before the portion in that clip? It’s clear from the length and his cadence that this wasn’t a slip of the tongue or a tight clip.

https://youtu.be/oBH9TmeJN_M

If so, I would note that it’s curious that he’s declined to comment rather than clearing his record and the Trump campaign similarly reacted by pretending they wouldn’t have him setting policy again rather than by saying that’s not what he meant.

I like to make my own decision on how to interpret what someone says, not "trust" someone else to do that.

> https://youtu.be/oBH9TmeJN_M

This clip starts at the same point.

Yes, I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I thought it was a different clip. I am just having trouble coming up with an interpretation which would meaningfully change its impact short of, say, it turning out to be an acting class reading lines for the villain’s role, and in any scenario like that he wouldn’t have hesitated to respond and provide that context.

in some extents you may have to. because unlike the Zelensky talk, these kinds of people operate the best in the shadows. They don't want the public to see "the full clip". That's where you have to trust some kind of journalist and check their report.

There's not a full clip, probably because it was taken from private speeches. But the article does a good job of putting it into context, and discussing how his private rhetoric is just a scarier, more insulting version of stuff he says in public all the time: https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...

California here - completely agree that one-sided media clips are a universal occurrence in the modern US media; secondly, completely agree that full speeches, primary sources and thinking for yourself are first-order ingredients in forming real insights and opinions.

It's an unfortunate attempt to appeal to a generational shift. The youth are consuming more shortform content, and even older social media loves to dismiss proper longform content with TL;DR. Especially videos that set their own pace.

It may, again sadly, be the best of both worlds. The motivated ones will see a link in the description and start their research, the non-motivated ones (the majority) will accept or reject it right here.

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