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Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

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Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#151

Post by ethbr1 »

rayiner wrote: post #112
ethbr1 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also important to highlight the origins of modern US civil service (read: the Wilson+ era you're referencing) in the anti-Conkling/spoils Congressional factions and presidents of the late 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Breeds_(politics)#Setback... As recently as 1880s the US was still assigning important civil service roles to whomever donated the most money to election campaigns. The 1880s - 1…

There is expertise, but there is also ideology. To use the plane analogy everyone likes: the pilot should use his expertise to fly the plane, but he doesn’t get to choose where the plane is going! When you “insulate” the civil service from politics, what you end up doing is privileging the ideology and political goals of civil servants over those of voters.

> When you “insulate” the civil service from politics, what you end up doing is privileging the ideology and political goals of civil servants over those of voters.

No.

You end up balancing the current political desires of voters with institutional expertise.

Or to put it another way, would you say that "competency" is a political ideology or an objective fact?

Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#152

Post by timr »

throw0101c wrote: post #146
timr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years. So what? Why does government have to grow proportionally with the size of the population? This is not a given in any other organization.

> Why does government have to grow proportionally with the size of the population? It does not, and did not: * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001

I'm responding to the parent's implicit assertion that the government should somehow naturally grow with the size of the population.

Arguing that it historically has not done so only makes my point. Nor is it an argument that government should not be smaller today.

Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#153

Post by rimunroe »

rayiner wrote: post #139
bigbadfeline wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3,000 samples is more than enough to have a statistically significant analysis of a population of 100,000. It's not a valid sample because it's not a random selection - statistical sampling isn't only about sample size. One reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the above numbers is that the Democrats in government are less stingy about donations, or that the Republicans there don't really like the GOP and ar…

I think that’s an odd theory.

Nationally, Democrats raise significantly more money than Republicans[0], especially from small donors[1]. It wouldn't be surprising to me if this skew was stronger for people working in government.

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/political-parties

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/donor-demogra...

Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#154

Post by timr »

ndiddy wrote: post #114
timr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not terrified. Just to put some perspective on this, per Pew [1], the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000. As of 2024, it was at 2.4M people. The federal workforce is dramatically bigger than it was even a few years ago [2]. Moreover, the vast majority of federal workers don't have anything to do with the k…

If you zoom out ( https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f... ), the size of the federal workforce has been at around 2.7-3 million people since the late 1960s, while the US population has gone from ~198 million in 1967 to ~343 million in 2025. We've gone from 14.39 federal employees per 1,000 people in 1967 to 8.78 federal employees per 1,000 people in 2024. Given that many of these employees do…

> the size of the federal workforce has been at around 2.7-3 million people since the late 1960s, while the US population has gone from ~198 million in 1967 to ~343 million in 2025. We've gone from 14.39 federal employees per 1,000 people in 1967 to 8.78 federal employees per 1,000 people in 2024.

Again, so what? The entire premise that government should scale with population is questionable. These comparisons with US population are facile.

Again, most of the employees are with Defense, VA and Homeland Security, none of which "should" scale with US population. I could go down the list and identify many other areas that likewise do not obviously scale with population (e.g. Agriculture, Interior, State, NASA, etc.) but this entire line of argument is pedantic. It's obvious to anyone who has dealt with the government that it is a bloated bureaucracy.

We completely agree that the budget problem is, at root, entitlements, but that doesn't mean that the government workforce is anywhere near an optimal level. I remain unterrified of a cut to 100,000 workers.

Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#155

Post by ckemere »

rayiner wrote: post #124
amalcon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military is similarly dominated by the other party. Somehow, we expect them to be professional. Professionalism here means to faithfully execute lawful orders even when a Democrat is in the white house. There were no personal loyalty tests for the military under Obama, or loyalty purges. That went fine (in that the military did in fact follow lawful orders under Democratic presidents, not in that those orders wer…

The military is uniquely disciplined and socialized to follow orders in a way the ordinary civil service isn’t. And in comparison to previous republicans, the difference is two-fold. First, the government has been affected by the same politicization of the workplace that’s happened in corporate America over the last decade. Second, previous republicans are aligned with neoliberal democrats on certain key cultural iss…

Both of my parents worked at times for the Federal, state, and local governments. From that small sample size (also including corworkers, neighbors, etc) I would suggest that it IS the case that government workers will be strongly biased towards process-oriented changes. So “ignore the rules” will not go over well for most of them.

I think the most charitable interpretation of your argument might be that people would be more inclined to ignore the rules for ideas they believe in, but my data suggests that government employees in general (and not just the military!!) tend to be rule followers. I would argue that most people’s complaints about the government historically could be summed up by this???

Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#156

Post by ckemere »

txru wrote: post #70

There are two elements of this situation that I'm consistently trying to open-mindedly hold in balance. One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB,…

Lots of arguments back and forth about the politics of government workers. But perhaps the biggest argument against the “creative destruction is good” might be that it favors hiring workers who like to leave a lot of the details up to someone else. But the “someone else” people (who like stable, rule/process oriented organizations) will be missing in the asymptomatic solution? (Contrast with an org with stable, rule/process development, where an asymptomatic solution exists?)

Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#157

Post by tzs »

rayiner wrote: post #90
txru wrote: post #70

There are two elements of this situation that I'm consistently trying to open-mindedly hold in balance. One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB,…

The first point requires an additional layer. The modern administrative state has its origins in Woodrow Wilson ideology of scientific governance. Wilson didn’t like democracy and wasn’t much of a fan of the constitution: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad... . A consequence of centralizing governance in a giant federal bureaucracy is that it’s become dominated by one party: https://www.gove…

Other Republican Presidents didn't have trouble getting their policies carried out despite similar civil service party membership and donation distributions.

Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#158

Post by keeda »

fabbari wrote: post #96
rayiner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ulterior motive for these cuts, but please be honest about what it is. The federal bureaucracy is completely dominated by one party: https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe... . No matter who wins the elections, most of the actual decisions are being made by adherents of the same party. Trump had four times the support in AOC’s district in the Bronx than among federal employee donors.…

Did you actually look at the numbers? You should give it a try. The best you can get from those numbers is that people are more likely to donate to the Democratic party than the Republican one. For example: true, 99.4% of the donations from the USDA employees went to the Democratic part. 99.4% of how many donations? Less than 3,000. - Source [0] - and that's an overestimate, since that filter will include donations f…

Also, from the very same govexec link:

> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.

Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#159

Post by ryandrake »

timr wrote: post #109
SR2Z wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally expect the size of an organization to scale with the scope of its activities, especially if its activities include "healthcare" and "building roads."

"Scope of activities", maybe , but there's no inherent reason that has to be equal the rate of growth in the population . You'd hope that government becomes more efficient over time. Private organizations have profit constraints, and they're constantly striving to become more efficient, cut what doesn't work, and so on. Government has no such constraint.

To compare, Walmart employs over 2M workers, and as efficient as they are, they still need to scale with the size of their business scope. Whether it's a linear scale or a log scale, they need more and more people as they do more and more.

The fact that the same order of magnitude number of people can administer an entire country as the number of people that it takes to administer a bunch of stores is actually remarkable.

Re: Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

#160

Post by tzs »

rayiner wrote: post #44
buran77 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the intention of this administration. Destroy any service that the government could provide until people can genuinely think the government is useless. Then the people currently in power and their cronies will come out of the woodwork "saving" the country with their private companies and interests. Competing with an empty shell of a government is the easiest way. As a side effect, if they're to lose the next e…

There is an ulterior motive for these cuts, but please be honest about what it is. The federal bureaucracy is completely dominated by one party: https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe... . No matter who wins the elections, most of the actual decisions are being made by adherents of the same party. Trump had four times the support in AOC’s district in the Bronx than among federal employee donors.…

That link is looking at money donated which is not a very good measure because the amount a person donates is not fixed.

When you instead match up personnel and voter registration records you get that about half of the federal workforce was Democrats. Republicans were around a third in the late 1990s, but fell to about a quarter by 2019.

Polls of federal workers for specific elections also suggest that it is not nearly as imbalanced as the money totals. For instance in the 2022 midterms 37% of federal workers said they were voting Democrat in Senate races and 33% said they were voting Republican. In House races it 46% voting Democrat, 35% voting Republican.

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