I’m one weird reader of Mr. Yglesias. I think he often makes wonderful, insightful comments. Then, respecting DOGE, he sneers at cuts of thousands of government employees and tens, or thousands of millions of dollars from the government’s spending because, it wasn’t enough or it was penny-ante compared to other spending. Me, I celebrate a cut of $5 of stupid, and don’t believe that the Biden employee inflation was rational.
It’s revealing that the progressive Guardian is focused on the minor travails of the bourgeoisie, with nothing about the much more serious problems of the proletariat. For that you need to go to the centrist Yglesias.
>But you have to contextualize the harms of DOGE against the lack of benefits. Aggregate federal spending has not fallen…
Matt Y, my brother in [deity of choice], what did you think the benefit of the DOGE cuts *was*? The benefit, from the perspective of Musk and his orange overlord, was 100% entirely to immiserate the woke lefty government employed do-gooder class, aka to Make The Libs Cry. If you can simultaneously ruin the economy of DC, aka The Swamp filled with nefarious Deep State agents who plot against our glorious God King, so much the better! You’re a highly intelligent and well-informed person, Matt Y, so please don’t tell me you’re so naive as to actually have believed that Trump and the DOGE team ever gave a rat’s hindquarters about fiscal responsibility or some such.
“Make My Enemies Cry” is one of Trump’s top two motivations in life, the other one being “MOAR MONEY.”
I don't read Matt as saying that DOGE was undertaken in good faith; part of the evidence that it was undertaken in bad faith is that it did not do the things that it was ostensibly intended to do. Proof that a policy didn't do what it claimed to be doing is a fairly standard brick in the wall when analyzing whether that policy was pretextual.
Lets appreciate the allure of the two ideas Trump sold to everyone, as you pointed out:
1. We should reduce the deficit
2. We should make federal spending more efficient
These were not achieved. Every single metric to measure these points to failure. Any reasonable person evaluating on these two items alone would be hard pressed to show any success.
Then why does this administration still have any support at all in these areas? Why aren't they seeking to correct these failures? And why are most Americans okay with other parts of the administration? I'm thoroughly confused about this phenomenon.
These are just numbers on paper, so people don’t understand what it would mean to actually improve or worsen on them. They assume that if Trump is making people mad by taking away their money, then there must be important amounts of money that aren’t being spent any more.
Not to rub salt in a wound, but the first paragraph that Matt wrote is one of the most compelling arguments written against DC being its own state. This quote in particular "For starters, while it’s sometimes tempting to compare DC to one or more of the fifty states, such comparisons invariably reveal that DC has the characteristics of a medium-sized American city rather than an American state."
I didn't say that. It makes perfect sense to rescission the rest of DC back to Maryland like they did with Virginia a century ago. It doesn't make sense to make a medium size city in the US into its own state.
The people actually living in these places actually don't want your preferred solution though. It's just something people not living in the area say to look savvy. DC is very much is its own thing culturally compared to Virginia and Maryland.
I think the reverse. People talk about there being this huge difference culturally to sound savvy, but take a step back and it seems bonkers. To put it bluntly, you think there is a greater *cultural* difference between DC and Alexandria than there is between Alexandria and Richlands?
"The people actually living in these places actually don't want your preferred solution though." People want low taxes and lots of government services, because people want to eat their cake and have it.
I'll ask you, if another mid size city in the US (Memphis, Columbus, etc.) wanted to become their own state, would you support that too?
How much cultural overlap is there between Alexandria and Anacostia?
Also, all of these alternative scenarios for Memphis, Columbus, etc. would come about if the past 200 years of those cities' histories and cultures would have been different. If Memphis had not been part of Tennessee for centuries, it would be a very different place. Memphis and Nashville have a shared history going back over a century of being part of Tennessee history and culture. There's no real overlap with Anacostia and Bethesda or Virginia Beach.
"How much cultural overlap is there between Alexandria and Anacostia?"
About the same as there between Broadway East and Potomac.
More to the point, there just aren't huge cultural difference when you move slightly between lines on a map in the US as opposed to real places on the ground. Its much more about transitioning between rich-poor regions and urban-suburban-rural areas where there is a meaningful cultural change. There are often differences, but its rarely at a state line. We're not Europe. Going from North Bend, OH to Greendale, IN to Bullittsville, KY is not the difference going from Mulhouse-France to Mullheim-Germany to Basel-Switzerland. Similarly, there are regions of DC that have much more in common with areas in Maryland than they do with other parts of DC and vice versa.
I take the quote to mean there are significant out of state dependencies integrated into the city's economy. Including things like where the workforce lives. The way the NY metropolitan area includes Long Island, NJ and CT. Now suppose NYC was not part of a state, and was a federal district instead. Then what? One could argue for including it in an existing state or for NYC statehood.
NYC has 8 million people, not 700k. It *might* make sense to make it a state if it wasn't part of one. DC has about 700k people.
But imagine Nashville was not part of Tennessee. Would it make more sense to make it its own state, or to simply add it to the state of Tennessee? Similarly, I think it makes more sense to add the bulk of DC population to Maryland (or Virginia if they prefer).
Exactly the same argument applies to the rural areas masquerading as full fledged states, like Wyoming, West Virginia, the Dakotas, and Mississippi. Any normal state has some cities, a lot of suburbs, and rural hinterlands. Some of the statistical entities we treat as states only have one of these. (And there are some like New Jersey that are just city and suburbs with no rural areas to speak of.)
Second - "Any normal state has some cities, a lot of suburbs, and rural hinterlands." DC does not / could not have those! It can ONLY be one mid size city because of its size limitations. To put this in perspective, RI is the smallest state at 1214 square miles. DC is 69 square miles, not even a 10th of the existing smallest state!
If Nashville (population and size larger than DC) wanted to be its own state, would you think its a good idea?
I’m not endorsing the claim that every state should have the same sort of distribution of urban, suburban, and rural areas, just saying that *if* one had that view, then a *bunch* of states are equally problematic to DC.
I think it’s fine if some states have different distributions of these things.
I agree that if we were starting over, we would not draw that the states the way we have them now. I don't see how that leads to us deciding to make a mid size city that is a company town into a state. If other similar sized cities want to become states, do you think we should accommodate them as well?
So Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, the Dakotaa are all federal districts, too? I guess we could add the Dakotas and Wyoming to Montana to become Greater Montana.
If we were doing it over again, we would/should not create separate states in most of those you list! Just because we made mistakes in the past doesn't mean we should make another one now.
But beyond that, they were made states with the expectation they would grow with the space they had. DC is 69 square miles. It can't grow that much!
Matt writes "I found the piece quite aggravating, because it was sloppy with statistics in several annoyingly common ways." but then he is also sloppy with statistics.
I am by no means pro-DOGE but I see people make two sloppy (or misleading) mistakes when discussing it.
First, while, the savings from DOGE pale in comparison to rising costs in debt service, entitlement spending, defense, wars, etc. or the OBBA, that doesn't mean the savings aren't real, just that they're small. And if we're complaining about the economic pain from these small cuts, then real cuts to bigger programs would mean more pain. If we cut social security, you'd have stories about the pain from seniors, or if we cut F-35 production, you'd have stories about aerospace engineers and technicians losing their jobs. And then Matt would write about all the working class people losing their jobs in Boca Raton or near Lockheed plants.
It's like someone cutting coupons for groceries when they're $10k in credit card debt. It's small relative to the real problem, but it's still savings. It frees up more money to pay down the debt, or at least to reduce the accumulation of debt.
Second, as far as I understand, a lot of the savings from DOGE would come this year, as employees received buyouts or severance last year. Even if DOGE worked perfectly, you wouldn't expect 2025 spending to go down much!
There were already tons of existing research and plans for how to cut federal spending. DOGE followed none of it, but got to steal a bunch of personal data in the process.
> if we're complaining about the economic pain from these small cuts, then real cuts to bigger programs would mean more pain.
This doesn’t follow at all! A cut of 1% to a thousand people’s retirement benefits could easily mean less pain than a cut of 100% to 5 people’s salary. Especially if those salaried people were doing something that is worth doing.
Maybe! Matt's talking about the second order economic impacts in this article, and, depending on which seniors' benefits are getting cut, those cuts may get directly translated to discretionary spending cuts, eg fewer early bird specials. Of those 5 people who lose their salary some get comparable jobs, some get lesser jobs, but at least some of that income is replaced. Seniors don't really have that option except to spend down savings faster.
>doing something that is worth doing
This is the most important part: the hundreds of thousands of people who will die because USAID projects were cancelled.
I don’t really understand this reasoning of, it was a small percentage of the federal budget, but a large percentage of DC jobs, therefore it was bad to cut it. Isn’t the real question whether these particular things are wasteful or not?
Calling what happened to USAID employees a "sob story" could only come from someone who has been lucky enough to never face any real financial struggle.
The point of DOGE was a purge. It was never intended to reduce costs—that’s why it didn’t do any of the things you’d do to decrease costs (eg examine inefficiencies, redundancies, understand employee performance) and instead laid off everyone who was not protected because they were hired recently or recently promoted (a type of layoff no business would ever do), destroyed highly effective programs like USAID, and laid off people in oversight positions. The fact that we are still giving lip service to the idea that DOGE was intended to increase efficiency is testament to how effective their cover story was: it has continued to be use as the frame for its failures, despite their clear intent to purge the government of dedicated civil servants and oversight mechanisms, install loyalists, and change government spending from a system designed to help the American people to one that rewards political allies and punishes political opponents.
That’s definitely the sort of firing a business would do, if it was heavily restricted by a unionized workforce. Obviously you’d prefer to fire the lowest performers, but sometimes that isn’t possible.
Yep. The whole thing was an utter lie and fraud from the jump. Whole agencies were demolished for no better reason than that some 22-year-old right-wing idiot saw their name on a list and decided they sounded stupid.
And, of course, the annihilation of oversight and the destruction of internal watchdog agencies was for a reason: so people would not publicly protest all of the wildly illegal shit the administration is doing.
It is of course useful to know that the pretext is indeed false, but even if it were technically true in some narrow sense, it would hardly matter.
Great article. An interesting followup item for Matt would be “how would you advise the next Democratic admin to rebuild the federal workforce / federal agencies. Hiring seems to be governed by a tangle of restrictions imposed at various levels (statute, administrative procedure that can only be changed through formal notice/comment process, and then just internal guidance). I recall Jen Pahlka pointing out that Trump I tried to do some streamlining of tech-related hiring just via OPM orders and it ran into the bureaucracy. So you need to be smart about how to tackle it, but you basically want to hire back competent people for the most important roles, ideally in FTE positions rather than contracts.
I think this is the kind of effort that needs to just be heads down, low publicity (as opposed to either a big signature Project or a bipartisan congressional effort). Would love Matt’s thoughts on how to rebuild in a way that minimizes blowback and maximizes state capacity. Optimistically I’d say the slash and burn approach of DOGE offers a chance to Build Back Better, as it were, but I know how many snags this kind of program could run into.
Good luck hiring back competent people who now know that the job security that led them to take below-market rates to work for the feds is a complete sham and fraud, and that they can expect to be summarily fired if they do something to offend the Republican-industrial complex.
Spoils systems produce garbage employees. Someone on the Supreme Court really ought to have thought of that before they signed off on the mindless wrecking.
It looks like DC’s unemployment rate peaked in 2020, declined for a couple of years and is now ticking up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCUR. It looks like the COVID response that closed the businesses that feed off federal employees’ business had a much bigger impact than the DOGE crackdown.
I think in regards to the Press coverage this is heavily symptomatic of a gross flaw that's only gotten worse in the past 20years of journalists having abandoned (understood partly for cost reasons) ground work and doing heavily anectdote - connection sourced via Twitter and similar, ends up being heavily distortive.
While I am not a particular fan so far of Jerusalem, I do think this article puts a finger on a certain set of blinders that also ends up generating the kinds of articles and coverage evoked in MY's piece here: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger
I have a coworker that is waiting for a work permit renewal. I'm not privy to the details of how exactly it works, but apparently under Biden a 3 month process turned into an 8 month process now. It may arrive after his current permit expires so he may need to leave the country and move back to Ukraine. Or it may arrive in time, he won't know until it happens. Can't imagine the stress he's under.
It'd be one thing if lots of people were fired but services remained the same, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
As a lawyer in middle America I’ve occasionally hired for some high-paying jobs and still not been able to find anyone due to a lack of local talent and limited relocation interest, but recently there have been some good government and government-adjacent people from DC who have been willing to relocate, usually with families so they can appreciate the benefits of “cheap but boring”. I imagine most government workers, if they were willing to relocate, would not have much trouble finding jobs because they have a lot of unique experiences that middle-America companies have a hard time finding. It would be interesting to see if this outmigration mentioned did end up having benefits for areas outside DC.
Because I’m a a nerd and love cross-tabs of how people actually cluster on stuff like this, I built an app to visualize how different communities stack up on a variety of takes and dimensions. Dedicated page for the Slow Boring fam here: https://votto.app/slowboring
Check it out if you like interesting cross-tabs and opinion comparisons between different audiences/groups. Slow Boring already has some interesting splits with other publications you can explore.
Meant to be more like a living vibe check than a traditional survey, so don't expect question statements to read like typical, dry polling mush.
I’m one weird reader of Mr. Yglesias. I think he often makes wonderful, insightful comments. Then, respecting DOGE, he sneers at cuts of thousands of government employees and tens, or thousands of millions of dollars from the government’s spending because, it wasn’t enough or it was penny-ante compared to other spending. Me, I celebrate a cut of $5 of stupid, and don’t believe that the Biden employee inflation was rational.
It’s revealing that the progressive Guardian is focused on the minor travails of the bourgeoisie, with nothing about the much more serious problems of the proletariat. For that you need to go to the centrist Yglesias.
>But you have to contextualize the harms of DOGE against the lack of benefits. Aggregate federal spending has not fallen…
Matt Y, my brother in [deity of choice], what did you think the benefit of the DOGE cuts *was*? The benefit, from the perspective of Musk and his orange overlord, was 100% entirely to immiserate the woke lefty government employed do-gooder class, aka to Make The Libs Cry. If you can simultaneously ruin the economy of DC, aka The Swamp filled with nefarious Deep State agents who plot against our glorious God King, so much the better! You’re a highly intelligent and well-informed person, Matt Y, so please don’t tell me you’re so naive as to actually have believed that Trump and the DOGE team ever gave a rat’s hindquarters about fiscal responsibility or some such.
“Make My Enemies Cry” is one of Trump’s top two motivations in life, the other one being “MOAR MONEY.”
I don't read Matt as saying that DOGE was undertaken in good faith; part of the evidence that it was undertaken in bad faith is that it did not do the things that it was ostensibly intended to do. Proof that a policy didn't do what it claimed to be doing is a fairly standard brick in the wall when analyzing whether that policy was pretextual.
Lets appreciate the allure of the two ideas Trump sold to everyone, as you pointed out:
1. We should reduce the deficit
2. We should make federal spending more efficient
These were not achieved. Every single metric to measure these points to failure. Any reasonable person evaluating on these two items alone would be hard pressed to show any success.
Then why does this administration still have any support at all in these areas? Why aren't they seeking to correct these failures? And why are most Americans okay with other parts of the administration? I'm thoroughly confused about this phenomenon.
These are just numbers on paper, so people don’t understand what it would mean to actually improve or worsen on them. They assume that if Trump is making people mad by taking away their money, then there must be important amounts of money that aren’t being spent any more.
Consider the alternative.
Not to rub salt in a wound, but the first paragraph that Matt wrote is one of the most compelling arguments written against DC being its own state. This quote in particular "For starters, while it’s sometimes tempting to compare DC to one or more of the fifty states, such comparisons invariably reveal that DC has the characteristics of a medium-sized American city rather than an American state."
I was thinking the exact same thing when I read that. I figured eventually someone else would post it.
"... and therefore the people living there should be legally and politically disenfranchised" is a conclusion that does not follow from your premise.
I didn't say that. It makes perfect sense to rescission the rest of DC back to Maryland like they did with Virginia a century ago. It doesn't make sense to make a medium size city in the US into its own state.
The people actually living in these places actually don't want your preferred solution though. It's just something people not living in the area say to look savvy. DC is very much is its own thing culturally compared to Virginia and Maryland.
I’m in DC and have spent almost my entire adult life here, full- or part-time. I would *love* it if we became part of Maryland.
I think the reverse. People talk about there being this huge difference culturally to sound savvy, but take a step back and it seems bonkers. To put it bluntly, you think there is a greater *cultural* difference between DC and Alexandria than there is between Alexandria and Richlands?
"The people actually living in these places actually don't want your preferred solution though." People want low taxes and lots of government services, because people want to eat their cake and have it.
I'll ask you, if another mid size city in the US (Memphis, Columbus, etc.) wanted to become their own state, would you support that too?
How much cultural overlap is there between Alexandria and Anacostia?
Also, all of these alternative scenarios for Memphis, Columbus, etc. would come about if the past 200 years of those cities' histories and cultures would have been different. If Memphis had not been part of Tennessee for centuries, it would be a very different place. Memphis and Nashville have a shared history going back over a century of being part of Tennessee history and culture. There's no real overlap with Anacostia and Bethesda or Virginia Beach.
"How much cultural overlap is there between Alexandria and Anacostia?"
About the same as there between Broadway East and Potomac.
More to the point, there just aren't huge cultural difference when you move slightly between lines on a map in the US as opposed to real places on the ground. Its much more about transitioning between rich-poor regions and urban-suburban-rural areas where there is a meaningful cultural change. There are often differences, but its rarely at a state line. We're not Europe. Going from North Bend, OH to Greendale, IN to Bullittsville, KY is not the difference going from Mulhouse-France to Mullheim-Germany to Basel-Switzerland. Similarly, there are regions of DC that have much more in common with areas in Maryland than they do with other parts of DC and vice versa.
Not sure if that argument necessarily follows.
I take the quote to mean there are significant out of state dependencies integrated into the city's economy. Including things like where the workforce lives. The way the NY metropolitan area includes Long Island, NJ and CT. Now suppose NYC was not part of a state, and was a federal district instead. Then what? One could argue for including it in an existing state or for NYC statehood.
NYC has 8 million people, not 700k. It *might* make sense to make it a state if it wasn't part of one. DC has about 700k people.
But imagine Nashville was not part of Tennessee. Would it make more sense to make it its own state, or to simply add it to the state of Tennessee? Similarly, I think it makes more sense to add the bulk of DC population to Maryland (or Virginia if they prefer).
Exactly the same argument applies to the rural areas masquerading as full fledged states, like Wyoming, West Virginia, the Dakotas, and Mississippi. Any normal state has some cities, a lot of suburbs, and rural hinterlands. Some of the statistical entities we treat as states only have one of these. (And there are some like New Jersey that are just city and suburbs with no rural areas to speak of.)
First - see my response to manual.
Second - "Any normal state has some cities, a lot of suburbs, and rural hinterlands." DC does not / could not have those! It can ONLY be one mid size city because of its size limitations. To put this in perspective, RI is the smallest state at 1214 square miles. DC is 69 square miles, not even a 10th of the existing smallest state!
If Nashville (population and size larger than DC) wanted to be its own state, would you think its a good idea?
I’m not endorsing the claim that every state should have the same sort of distribution of urban, suburban, and rural areas, just saying that *if* one had that view, then a *bunch* of states are equally problematic to DC.
I think it’s fine if some states have different distributions of these things.
I agree that if we were starting over, we would not draw that the states the way we have them now. I don't see how that leads to us deciding to make a mid size city that is a company town into a state. If other similar sized cities want to become states, do you think we should accommodate them as well?
So Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, the Dakotaa are all federal districts, too? I guess we could add the Dakotas and Wyoming to Montana to become Greater Montana.
If we were doing it over again, we would/should not create separate states in most of those you list! Just because we made mistakes in the past doesn't mean we should make another one now.
But beyond that, they were made states with the expectation they would grow with the space they had. DC is 69 square miles. It can't grow that much!
Matt writes "I found the piece quite aggravating, because it was sloppy with statistics in several annoyingly common ways." but then he is also sloppy with statistics.
I am by no means pro-DOGE but I see people make two sloppy (or misleading) mistakes when discussing it.
First, while, the savings from DOGE pale in comparison to rising costs in debt service, entitlement spending, defense, wars, etc. or the OBBA, that doesn't mean the savings aren't real, just that they're small. And if we're complaining about the economic pain from these small cuts, then real cuts to bigger programs would mean more pain. If we cut social security, you'd have stories about the pain from seniors, or if we cut F-35 production, you'd have stories about aerospace engineers and technicians losing their jobs. And then Matt would write about all the working class people losing their jobs in Boca Raton or near Lockheed plants.
It's like someone cutting coupons for groceries when they're $10k in credit card debt. It's small relative to the real problem, but it's still savings. It frees up more money to pay down the debt, or at least to reduce the accumulation of debt.
Second, as far as I understand, a lot of the savings from DOGE would come this year, as employees received buyouts or severance last year. Even if DOGE worked perfectly, you wouldn't expect 2025 spending to go down much!
There were already tons of existing research and plans for how to cut federal spending. DOGE followed none of it, but got to steal a bunch of personal data in the process.
> if we're complaining about the economic pain from these small cuts, then real cuts to bigger programs would mean more pain.
This doesn’t follow at all! A cut of 1% to a thousand people’s retirement benefits could easily mean less pain than a cut of 100% to 5 people’s salary. Especially if those salaried people were doing something that is worth doing.
Maybe! Matt's talking about the second order economic impacts in this article, and, depending on which seniors' benefits are getting cut, those cuts may get directly translated to discretionary spending cuts, eg fewer early bird specials. Of those 5 people who lose their salary some get comparable jobs, some get lesser jobs, but at least some of that income is replaced. Seniors don't really have that option except to spend down savings faster.
>doing something that is worth doing
This is the most important part: the hundreds of thousands of people who will die because USAID projects were cancelled.
I don’t really understand this reasoning of, it was a small percentage of the federal budget, but a large percentage of DC jobs, therefore it was bad to cut it. Isn’t the real question whether these particular things are wasteful or not?
Calling what happened to USAID employees a "sob story" could only come from someone who has been lucky enough to never face any real financial struggle.
The point of DOGE was a purge. It was never intended to reduce costs—that’s why it didn’t do any of the things you’d do to decrease costs (eg examine inefficiencies, redundancies, understand employee performance) and instead laid off everyone who was not protected because they were hired recently or recently promoted (a type of layoff no business would ever do), destroyed highly effective programs like USAID, and laid off people in oversight positions. The fact that we are still giving lip service to the idea that DOGE was intended to increase efficiency is testament to how effective their cover story was: it has continued to be use as the frame for its failures, despite their clear intent to purge the government of dedicated civil servants and oversight mechanisms, install loyalists, and change government spending from a system designed to help the American people to one that rewards political allies and punishes political opponents.
That’s definitely the sort of firing a business would do, if it was heavily restricted by a unionized workforce. Obviously you’d prefer to fire the lowest performers, but sometimes that isn’t possible.
Yep. The whole thing was an utter lie and fraud from the jump. Whole agencies were demolished for no better reason than that some 22-year-old right-wing idiot saw their name on a list and decided they sounded stupid.
And, of course, the annihilation of oversight and the destruction of internal watchdog agencies was for a reason: so people would not publicly protest all of the wildly illegal shit the administration is doing.
It is of course useful to know that the pretext is indeed false, but even if it were technically true in some narrow sense, it would hardly matter.
Or do a control+F for "trans" or "equity" in all research grant documents and cancel any with a positive hit.
No they really actually had a problem with transgenic mice research. They're animal-lovers, see.
Great article. An interesting followup item for Matt would be “how would you advise the next Democratic admin to rebuild the federal workforce / federal agencies. Hiring seems to be governed by a tangle of restrictions imposed at various levels (statute, administrative procedure that can only be changed through formal notice/comment process, and then just internal guidance). I recall Jen Pahlka pointing out that Trump I tried to do some streamlining of tech-related hiring just via OPM orders and it ran into the bureaucracy. So you need to be smart about how to tackle it, but you basically want to hire back competent people for the most important roles, ideally in FTE positions rather than contracts.
I think this is the kind of effort that needs to just be heads down, low publicity (as opposed to either a big signature Project or a bipartisan congressional effort). Would love Matt’s thoughts on how to rebuild in a way that minimizes blowback and maximizes state capacity. Optimistically I’d say the slash and burn approach of DOGE offers a chance to Build Back Better, as it were, but I know how many snags this kind of program could run into.
She just put out a new article
https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/a-three-horizons-framework-for-government?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Good luck hiring back competent people who now know that the job security that led them to take below-market rates to work for the feds is a complete sham and fraud, and that they can expect to be summarily fired if they do something to offend the Republican-industrial complex.
Spoils systems produce garbage employees. Someone on the Supreme Court really ought to have thought of that before they signed off on the mindless wrecking.
It looks like DC’s unemployment rate peaked in 2020, declined for a couple of years and is now ticking up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCUR. It looks like the COVID response that closed the businesses that feed off federal employees’ business had a much bigger impact than the DOGE crackdown.
You may recall that *everyone* was kind of unemployed during COVID.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
I think in regards to the Press coverage this is heavily symptomatic of a gross flaw that's only gotten worse in the past 20years of journalists having abandoned (understood partly for cost reasons) ground work and doing heavily anectdote - connection sourced via Twitter and similar, ends up being heavily distortive.
While I am not a particular fan so far of Jerusalem, I do think this article puts a finger on a certain set of blinders that also ends up generating the kinds of articles and coverage evoked in MY's piece here: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger
and Musa al Gharbi I think has very similar observations / lessons from his lens of "Symbolic Capitalists" which while not precisely synomous seem to be to have significant overlap: as in https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people-are-especially-prone
I notice Boston is getting hammered, too. Seems like my fair hometown is in MAGA's crosshairs (pharma, academia, scientific research) in a major way.
Thankfully, at least ICE has stayed away from here
I have a coworker that is waiting for a work permit renewal. I'm not privy to the details of how exactly it works, but apparently under Biden a 3 month process turned into an 8 month process now. It may arrive after his current permit expires so he may need to leave the country and move back to Ukraine. Or it may arrive in time, he won't know until it happens. Can't imagine the stress he's under.
It'd be one thing if lots of people were fired but services remained the same, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
My brother has two daughters born abroad (same country) - he and his wife are both US citizens.
Getting a Consular Certificate of Birth Abroad took 2 weeks in 2016, 11 months in 2022.
As a lawyer in middle America I’ve occasionally hired for some high-paying jobs and still not been able to find anyone due to a lack of local talent and limited relocation interest, but recently there have been some good government and government-adjacent people from DC who have been willing to relocate, usually with families so they can appreciate the benefits of “cheap but boring”. I imagine most government workers, if they were willing to relocate, would not have much trouble finding jobs because they have a lot of unique experiences that middle-America companies have a hard time finding. It would be interesting to see if this outmigration mentioned did end up having benefits for areas outside DC.
Because I’m a a nerd and love cross-tabs of how people actually cluster on stuff like this, I built an app to visualize how different communities stack up on a variety of takes and dimensions. Dedicated page for the Slow Boring fam here: https://votto.app/slowboring
Check it out if you like interesting cross-tabs and opinion comparisons between different audiences/groups. Slow Boring already has some interesting splits with other publications you can explore.
Meant to be more like a living vibe check than a traditional survey, so don't expect question statements to read like typical, dry polling mush.