anzomcik
War, for clarification could you help me out on the following.
Your recent posts point out your upset of the wasting of tax payer money to fund the buyout till October.
Would you be equally upset if a buyout wasn't an option, and those jobs were terminated overnight?
I guess a third option would have been to leave everything as it was...then one could argue a point that those jobs were a waste of tax payer money.
I do not feel I'm qualified to offer any solid opinion on this topic but I do enjoy reading the back and forth. I have only worked private sector, but when my work involves working close to the public workers, there is a "cant fire me" and "I got my paycheck until I retire" undertone. Whether that is true or not, I do not know.
War do you feel that once a person lands a Fed. job, that person should never have the threat of being removed from that job? I am trying to get a read on what your saying but cant help but feel that it wouldn't make a difference of the three options there would be an angle you would be upset with.
First let me say I do appreciate the thoughtful, non confrontational question.
I think the offer to pay millions of federal employees for almost 8 months to do nothing is a colossal waste of taxpayer money. And the logic of that assertion is self evident. With all the talk from republicans (on this board and elsewhere) of “wasting taxpayer money” and creating efficiency with DOGE, this whole idea of a buyout is completely hollow and hypocritical.
And no I don’t think that simply firing the federal workers is any better because Elon musk and DOGE have no idea what many these workers even do. Many of them have important jobs like these people did:
https://apnews.com/articl...4f04f44c345b7dde4904d5my problem with DOGE specifically is that it’s not a serious undertaking or at least it’s not aimed at saving money or actually creating efficiency. It’s just a vehicle for trump and musk to dismantle parts of the federal government that they don’t like, whether they are legally able to do it or not.
And of course a person with a federal job shouldn’t simply have the job forever. But they should have reasonable protections under the law (which federal workers do have) and they shouldn’t be fired on a whim.
Even if this was a good faith attempt to eliminate waste fraud and abuse (which I do not believe it is), the strategy of “move fast and break things” is a tremendously stupid way to manage the federal government. This isn’t Twitter. If you accidentally fire some people that do something important at Twitter the consequences are not the same as firing a bunch of people that manage the country’s nuclear arsenal.
I don’t doubt that many federal workers have a “you can’t fire me” attitude. I also don’t doubt that many federal workers do important things. So the correct way for an initiative like DOGE to function would be to identify the “you can’t fire me” workers and address that problem while retaining those that have critical functions.