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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> cutting these jobs cuts spending by .3891%

A billion here, a billion there, soon it adds up to real money.

But how much extra waste will be generated by losing the experts in these bureaucracies? Of course some of them are redundant, but some of them have the proverbial bathroom codes and are irreplaceable. These cuts are incredibly irresponsible; cutting _programs_, along with the staff associated with those programs, is IMO wrong but at least workable as a long term cost reduction strategy. Just slashing staff left and right is malpractice.

Citation required that we are losing "experts" or that people can't learn any government job in weeks/months with higher efficiency.

What do you think government workers (as if this was an actual job title) do?

I worked in government. I know exactly what it looks like and how 33% of workers could be cut with no effect besides the rest being scared of losing their cushy jobs.

NOAA just fired hundreds of weather forecasters. World class ones, literally some of the best meteorologists in the world. And they knew how to interact with NOAA's systems to gather data and publish forecasts, issue realtime watches and warnings, and a thousand other things. Realtime forecasts are _vital_ to hundreds of different industries and save thousands of lives a year, and part of that is because they are able to quickly issue new forecasts when the situation changes. We get tornado warnings, fire forecasts, tsunami warnings, and a whole bunch else with enough time to get to safety because of these extremely talented folks.

These people are irreplaceable. And I know one of these forecasters very well, he's an old friend of mine. He is done with the federal government; even if they offer him his job back he's not going back, because his trust that his job as a meteorologist was safe is smashed to pieces. That's irreparable harm.

NOAA has over 10,000 employees and they laid of 800 of them. The idea that NOAA laid off their top 800 employees out of 11,000 is laughable.

> Just slashing staff left and right is malpractice

All businesses above a certain size do that, because there's no other practical way.

Sure there is. _Cut initiatives_, and exit the related staff. Don't cut staff without a corresponding cut to programs.

I bet you know who the deadwood are in your organization. Every organization I've worked in had deadwood and everyone knew who they were.

Government isn't a business.

It's a very large organization, much much larger than a business. If business can't cut with a scalpel, it would be even less possible with government.

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