Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 579 posts

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#511

Post by andriesm »

tsimionescu wrote: post #485
csa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they were not paid because they were on "admin leave", does that look bad for Trump, or does that look bad for Congress? It would be Trump/Elon. Someone told me the details of how they could not pay people. It’s administrivia. It will go unnoticed by most just like how the twitter folks not getting paid went unnoticed by most. > And who in a Republican Congress will want to do that anyway? They give zero fucks a…

Unfortunately, a big part of the Republican playbook in the last decades has been to intentionally cripple government institutions so that they can then claim that the institutions are not working well and thus should be entirely dismantled. This is done either to remove institutions that are regulating business (currently happening with the CFPB) or to replace institutions which are helping people so that private co…

It's not widely accepted by people on the right that "Project 2025" is the official playbook for the Republican party though?

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#512

Post by rsynnott »

aurareturn wrote: post #11
kevmo314 wrote: post #4

> The buyout offer entitles federal employees to stop working more or less immediately and continue to be paid through Sept. 30. > The federal workforce's normal attrition rate is about 6% a year, meaning some of those who've taken the buyout may have been planning to leave government service anyway. Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving...

Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving... I'm guessing the vast majority who take the deal were already planning to leave? So we're wasting tax payer money giving them 8 months severance when it could have been 0.

This is one of the problems with voluntary redundancy, which is quite common in some countries. You do tend to lose the people who can easily find jobs elsewhere and get left with the people who can’t, so it selects for a less skilled workforce when all’s said and done.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#513

Post by rsynnott »

scarface_74 wrote: post #95
tombert wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also suspect that there really isn't nearly as much "waste" here as Musk is alleging, so we are going to be forced to re-hire people, while still paying a ton of workers for 8 months of no work. This doesn't seem "efficient" to me, but "efficient" is a word that doesn't actually mean anything without context, which they don't provide.

Re-hire people for what? They don’t want a functioning government

I mean, they won’t last forever. Sooner or later someone is going to have to clean up the mess.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#514

Post by [deleted] »

ModernMech wrote: post #396
encoderer wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it tells me is that I agree with you and yes congress would ratify it, so doing this is pointless and only going to slow you down. Why would it make sense for them to do this? Democrats would still howl in disapproval no matter what they did.

> so doing this is pointless and only going to slow you down. That's a feature. Going slow and giving Democrats a chance to howl is called "democracy". It's our system. Unilaterally moving fast and breaking things without even allowing a chance for debate or input from the minority party is a different system, called "autocracy".

[deleted]

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#515

Post by ben_w »

adastra22 wrote: post #509
emusan wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have copied the external look of the rockets (which is, for obvious reasons, not protected by ITAR), but to my knowledge no one, China or otherwise, has managed to match the internal engineering prowess nearly a decade later. To say that China is "very effective at copying all the stuff SpaceX is doing" is quite the stretch.

Blue Origin has finally turned it around and is getting close to matching SpaceX.

I sure hope so, but also caution (admittedly as an outsider, your posts suggest greater familiarity than I have) that there's not enough evidence yet to be confident of that — finally getting to launch is really impressive, but their first orbital capable rocket is still a sample size of 1.

(Counter point is that New Glenn's one orbital launch is more impressive than all of the Starship launches combined, as SpaceX is willing to burn hardware during tests and they have many more Starship tests to go).

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#516

Post by encoderer »

ModernMech wrote: post #396
encoderer wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it tells me is that I agree with you and yes congress would ratify it, so doing this is pointless and only going to slow you down. Why would it make sense for them to do this? Democrats would still howl in disapproval no matter what they did.

> so doing this is pointless and only going to slow you down. That's a feature. Going slow and giving Democrats a chance to howl is called "democracy". It's our system. Unilaterally moving fast and breaking things without even allowing a chance for debate or input from the minority party is a different system, called "autocracy".

Americans elected a republican majority in congress and the executive branch. RBG ensured they have a clear majority in the court.

Democrats marginalized themselves by catering to their most fringe elements.

As they say, elections have consequences.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#517

Post by rstuart4133 »

heylook wrote: post #427
vaccineai wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good, we want the competent and skilled people within government to go to private enterprise in big numbers, so they can amplify their skills and effect in private enterprise. Then we can reduce the number of government agencies, because they are always less effective than private enterprises. The problem is when we have the lazy and incompetent bureaucrats sticking around, and us the taxpayers are paying for their p…

> because they are always less effective than private enterprises. I think this is one of those ideas that has been spouted for so long that we don't really stop to think about whether it is true. Private and public entities (and employees) certainly have different incentives, but they also have different mandates, and I've certainly known plenty of inefficient private enterprises and efficient public ones. Do you ha…

> I think this is one of those ideas that has been spouted for so long that we don't really stop to think about whether it is true.

A lot of people with considerable expertise in the area have looked into whether it's true. They almost always come to the same conclusion: overall it's a wash.

If you look closer some industries (like say your corner coffee shop in a big city) are clearly better off private, and others like roads and fire fighting don't work when privately held.

In general a competitive market will out-do public owned, free markets that aren't competitive are worse than public owned.

But there are always exceptions. A fine example is the health system. I don't know why, but as the US demonstrates even with a competitive health market public ownership outperforms a purely private system by a fairly large margin.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#518

Post by nrclark »

int_19h wrote: post #499
nrclark wrote: post #450

So that's another 20k people who are now unemployed. Kind of hard to really count that as a victory.

To people who support all this, public jobs are basically welfare.

Could be. But people need a sense of purpose. I'd rather have 20k people with a make-work job than 20k people collecting unemployment. Running too lean is also bad for resiliency, which is a lesson that every manufacturing company learned during the pandemic.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#519

Post by ben_w »

Spooky23 wrote: post #417
ben_w wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While interesting, I don't see how it might make any difference to any federal workers' decisions? Musk doesn't pay "because he can get away with it" isn't better or worse than "because there's a money shortage"; and in any case, the federal government being delinquent is a very different kind of catastrophe, as is it making promises it refuses to keep.

Many things are based on the assumption of the impeccable credit of the US government. Elmo being a shitty business partner isn’t the same as the US.

We're on the same page, I think.

There's a possibility of contagion from Musk to the US government, but I very much agree they're different — and it's much worse if that contagion goes from potential to actual.

Re: 20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says

#520

Post by oh_my_goodness »

Supermancho wrote: post #409
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a simple dictionary difference between "legal" and "illegal." Using the actual meaning of a word is kinda the opposite of playing word games.

From the first instance: > That sounds illegal > There is a simple dictionary difference between "legal" and "illegal. This is kind of response is a repeat of exactly what I have described. Again, "illegal" was used in context to mean something else. ie The damage will be remedied...which it cannot fully be, nor is it likely to be. Sampling conversations going forward from that, is where the thread has been allowed t…

Yes, I see, the dictionary definition is brand new. It just dropped right out of the sky. Very good point.
Post reply on HN