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Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

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Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#71

Post by unsnap_biceps »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #25
unsnap_biceps wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest issue is that the current cuts are not being done with any sort of plan beyond "What can I get away with". Hiring at big organizations is complicated and people are not fungible no matter how much companies like Amazon push them to be. Wanting to slash 50k and hire 61k could make total sense if the overlap of skills is limited or non-existent. I'm pretty left leaning these days, and I'd be fine with cuts,…

I get this vibe, but I also wonder roughly how much intentionality and thought went into hiring these folks in the first place? Kinda seems like when it comes time to hire they're mostly focused on "what can I get away with".

Like any large company, this does happen and the fix is the same. You replace someone at the top with a mandate to change the culture and they take hard looks at things and replace at the next level down as needed, and rise and repeat until you've replaced enough folks that the ship has turned around. It takes time, but it's the healthy way to turn the ship. There's nothing special about government employment being any different than private sector.

Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#72

Post by blindriver »

nameless912 wrote: post #56
WalterBright wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#73

Post by marcusverus »

blindriver wrote: post #44
Raidion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the hiring people that's the problem. Assuming those people "cost" 300k a year all in (benefits/offices,etc) which is probably high, that's $24 billion. The government spent $6.8 trillion, cutting these jobs cuts spending by .3891%. Cutting the people without cutting the programs won't do much and is (IMO) a problem in that you should be able to access government services in a way that the writers of the law…

I really hate this attitude. "$24 billion a year is nothing compared to the deficit so we should just ignore it and keep spending." Spending cuts have to start SOMEWHERE. Saying $24 billion is ignorable is insane. We are in a critical debt situation and my children's future is at stake.

It's an intentionally deceptive framing, so you should hate it. $24 Billion is $183 per taxpayer per year. I sure as hell think $180/year is a lot of money, and if the government is going to forcibly take 1/4 of my friggin' salary every year, they really ought to be at least as careful with my money as I am!

Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#74

Post by bpt3 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #70
bpt3 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Math and history. One example explainer: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/80552/total-tax ... I honestly have no idea why you think information about aggregate tax revenue over time is relevant to your original claim. If you want to see the tax rate increased on the upper extremes (like the top 400 mentioned at that link), I would too but it's a drop in the bucket. > Citation urgently needed. That doesn…

Could we stop talking about top marginal income tax rates as if graduated income taxation wasn't a thing? You will pay less taxes in California than Mississippi or Alabama if you are poor. Even if you are a single person in California making $400k/year (which I would call pretty rich!), you are only paying 8.38% of your income in state tax (you don't even hit the 13.3% bracket until a million dollars or so?). In tota…

The OP of this thread wants to keep spending the same and says that taxing the rich is the solution to our budget woes, so that's why the top marginal rates are relevant, and most state income taxes aren't as progressive as the ones in CA.

Your example of a CA resident who is making $400k is paying a marginal rate of 35% at the federal level and 10.30% at the state level (not 8.38%), which is above the EU average.

Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#75

Post by bathtub365 »

blindriver wrote: post #72
nameless912 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#76

Post by buttercraft »

blindriver wrote: post #59
efnx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attitude comes from a point of analysis, and the argument that follows is that we can save by cutting spending in specific areas that we overspend in (military) and we could rake in lots more in taxes by making the rich _pay their fare share_. The current firing of government workers is about political alignment, not about cost. Cost is a pretext.

I believe we should gut military spending. That doesn't mean that hiring 82,000 employees in 5 years is justified. I'm happy to see spending cuts straight across the board.

What would be the appropriate number to hire, and how do arrive at the answer?

Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#77

Post by mindslight »

WalterBright wrote: post #67
mindslight wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days I just assume that anybody driving focus to the "debt" and specifically "paying interest on the debt" has no idea what they're talking about. Write it on the blackboard 50 times: the budget of a sovereign nation issuing a reserve currency is not analogous to household finances! As a follower of Austrian economics, monetary creation by the government most certainly does matter. But this myopic focus on "deb…

The problem with the debt is interest is paid on it. Keep adding to the debt, and the interest payments will cause a doom loop ending in fiscal catastrophe. If the government instead switched to simply printing more money, we'd have runaway inflation, and history tells us what happens next (Weimar Republic).

The elephant in the room is the continual creation of new money by the Fed by dumping it into the financial industry, while the legislative government itself has been hamstrung (and is now being killed) by this "debt" narrative (eg a good chunk of that debt is just to the Fed itself!). The consumer price inflation from the first Trump term caused the first spate of fiscal responsibility the Fed (and thus the government as a whole) has had for the past several decades. Going forward, the productive path is to tamp down on the monetary creation being done by the Fed, let the asset bubbles cool down, and be comfortable with the legislative government spending newly-created money for deliberate goals.

Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#78

Post by araes »

nameless912 wrote: post #52
Raidion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the hiring people that's the problem. Assuming those people "cost" 300k a year all in (benefits/offices,etc) which is probably high, that's $24 billion. The government spent $6.8 trillion, cutting these jobs cuts spending by .3891%. Cutting the people without cutting the programs won't do much and is (IMO) a problem in that you should be able to access government services in a way that the writers of the law…

This is the thing that keeps making me so angry when I hear so called "budget hawks" get mad about the number of federal employees. Payroll is _not the problem_!! All of the federal payroll is something like 10-15% of the government's expenditure. Firing _everyone_ would only cut costs by 10-15%. There are plenty of programs (read: bloated defense contracts and corporate subsidies) that we could cut to save costs ins…

Part of the personal issue also. Notably, not especially Democrat or Republican related. Both administration groups for years.

The Defense part especially seems crazy. Per USASpending.gov [1], last year the federal government spent $9,700,000,000,000. Despite all the talk that Covid budgets were short term event, they never actually went back down. Dropped to $9T in 2022, and then started rising again. Post-Covid surge was $6.6T in 2019, then jumped to $9.1T in 2020. $10.1 in 2021.

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

At the same time, post-Covid, the Defense Department budget has been rising at about $100,000,000,000 / yr for the last three years. 2021: $1.1T 2022: $1.2T 2023: $1.3T 2024: $1.4T

(To be fair in comparison though, the largest other single items, Medicare / Social Security, have also been rising fast. 2021: 1.4 / 1.2, 2022: 1.5 / 1.3, 2023: 1.6 / 1.4, 2024: 1.6 / 1.5 )

However, with the DoD, what have we got from that much spending? Incredibly depressing slides from The War on the Rocks like this one about the incomprehensible gap in shipbuilding capacity? A factor of 232x? The US only has 100,000 tons of shipbuilding? That's a single neo-Panamax cargo ship. [1]

[2] https://www.twz.com/alarming-navy-intel-slide-warns-of-china...

Or this one from Military.com, that the government does not know where $151 million of $225 million collected from soldiers for food supplies on garrisons was actually spent. [3] Fort Stewart, 87% of funds redirected. Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, 63% redirected. All but two bases left more than half of the money for food unspent. $225 million doesn't mean almost anything to the government, yet $460 of mandatory / month deduction in paycheck for a Basic Allowance for Subsistence that then goes "somewhere" matters quite a bit to individual soldiers. And the defense budget rose $100B every year for years.

[3] https://www.military.com/daily-news/investigations-and-featu...

Anyways, specific examples of the issues I have with current government spending and the way it's allocated.

Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#79

Post by WalterBright »

nameless912 wrote: post #56
WalterBright wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Just slashing staff left and right is malpractice

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

Re: Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

#80

Post by blindriver »

buttercraft wrote: post #76
blindriver wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe we should gut military spending. That doesn't mean that hiring 82,000 employees in 5 years is justified. I'm happy to see spending cuts straight across the board.

What would be the appropriate number to hire, and how do arrive at the answer?

No new headcount. Layoff the bottom 5% of the institution per year based on performance reviews and replace them with new hires. When someone leaves, replace every 3 people leaving with 1 new hire.
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