As is typical for most Trump Administration efforts, DOGE approached a real problem with haphazard and ineffective tactics. There still exists a need to address Government spending funneled through opaque, interconnected, crony-filled, wasteful and potentially fraudulent NGOs.
Much hay has been made of the woman highlighted in the NYTimes article making $272,000 at a USAID-funded NGO now reduced to applying for a $19/hour online job. Which, yes, seems perfectly designed as a story to induce anger rather than understanding. But it does highlight the need for effective oversight of spending, even if said spending doesn't rise to the level of Social Security, Medicare or Department of Defense (I refuse to use Department of War).
Those two are basically the same issue. If you can't pay market rate for some kinds of skill/talent, then you won't get much of it. The traditional thing that federal employment offered was a lower pay + better job stability and often a better life/work balance via lots of vacation time and such. But DOGE did its level best to wreck that, and now the federal government's ability to hire people who ought to be making $300 K/year at $150 K/year will be much-diminished.
I agree...but then you'll get angry stories about individuals making a lot of money directly from the government.
Like, Jerome Powell makes $190K a year. We have low-level managers and like, random ass consulting companies making more a year than the most powerful economic actor on Planet Earth.
What I feel like we really need is for government workers to get a piece of the upside (e.g. you complete this infrastruture project on time and under budget, you get X% of the revenue for Y years, etc.).
One reason moral is so low in government is that wages and benefits are continuously cut (FERS benefits, COLA freezes while healthcare premiums increase.)
Congress doesn’t let agencies hire competitively for civil service positions nor pay competitively.
The main benefits were flexibility and stability. Republicans have destroyed that notion.
That is true! And I personally accepted a lower-paying, more predictable/stable job after I had my second kid. I'm also probably less effective as a worker given that my priorities -- e.g. being home for dinner and making sure I have time to play with my kids -- have changed.
And yet, the people I worked with in the federal government were mostly hardworking and brilliant, and the people I've worked with in the private sector have been... not. Like they were fine or whatever, I'm not dissing them, but the quality difference was extremely obvious.
I think this really depends on what the job is. DOJ seems to have a lot of success recruiting big law refugees, and I've never really seen much to suggest the people who work at DOJ are lazy or incompetent.
People tend to underestimate the hiring process for public employment, especially at the federal level. And for a lot of those jobs, there really is no private sector equivalent.
I can't believe my peers and I make more than Jerome Powell as high level middle managers (still a middle managers) at a large corporation. That's absolutely insane. Public Sector workers, especially those who have such load bearing roles in our daily life, need to be compensated better.
Powell makes less than quite a few people from the FRB, and the salary there is really quite good and a great option for an economist.
This is true at the SEC and other financial regulators- they have their own pay scale and it’s very competitive with financial services (outside of PE, I banking, and a few other exceptions).
Good lord. Coat this idea in thermite, douse it in liquid oxygen, light it on fire with every flamethrower you possess and launch the remnants of it into the sun.
The amount of fraud that would be enabled by this is... I'm not sure how to describe it. "World-historic"?
Especially tech jobs. Jennifer Pahlka has written a lot about how some of the mind numbing tech systems that are outdated and don’t work well for constituents are in part due to a lack of state capacity and over reliance on vendors
There is no budget for a lot of things. DOGE cut grant to states to update their disease notification systems for example, it didn’t matter if they were red or blue states.
FEDERAL Government tech runs amazingly well most of the time (like compared to anything Atlassian or SAP puts out the IRS website is fucking amazing). States though hooo boy that is a snake pit of scams and grifters. And even if you get a good product- DC has many of them actually- there’s no incentive to update or maintain
>>As is typical for most Trump Administration efforts, DOGE approached a real problem with haphazard and ineffective tactics.<<
I think as usual your laudable desire to be reasonable is giving the Trump administration too much credit here. You make it sound as if that project were undertaken in good faith.
DOGE was a scam from the word go.
The overwhelming bulk of federal spending goes to healthcare, pensions, interest on the debt, and national defense. The remainder is about a quarter of the budget, and plenty of that goes to things (transportation, veterans' benefits, NASA, FBI, federal courts, IRS, scientific research) where it's not obvious there's lots of fat.
Sure, ANY wasted taxpayer money in some sense is a "problem"—we're borrowing too much, and we probably need something on the order of a trillion dollars' worth of austerity to stabilize the country's finances.
But the scam comes both in gaslighting the American people as to what actually needs to be done (entitlement cuts and/or tax increases), and in very purposefully hyping up a bullshit new government bureau that was *never* designed to do any meaningful work in this sphere (you can't *meaningfully* trim red ink while ignoring three quarters of the budget AND while simultaneously slashing taxes left and right).
It was a dog and pony show from the beginning.
For the record I'm perfectly open to the possibility that Donald Trump *thought* Musk was going to magically solve our fiscal problems. Trump really is that stupid on public policy. But rank ignorance doesn't excuse him, and it definitely doesn't excuse the many policy-smart people who were advising him. Those assholes were in on the con.
Yes, I definitely wish there was more public education on this. The number of people I interact with who think that DOGE was pretty good, despite admitted flaws, because it "saved the government money," flabbergasts me. And I live in a blue city in a blue state. I can only imagine the beliefs about this in other parts of the country.
This was such a fucking disaster for my agency's budgeting too! We're project funded, you shove 8% of our staff onto the full time leave budget for 8 months and a lot of shit breaks even before you get to there not being enough staff to do the job!
I think DOGE was done as part of the Project 2025 "Schedule F" initiative, in part to start the replacement of the civil service bureaucracy with appointees and loyalists. Federal workers have long been a target of right wing contempt, for ideological reasons around the size of government, but also because of the generous retirement and benefits packages that cause angst with private sector work in comparison to same benefits. The right wing response is to lower the bar rather than raise it, of course.
Also specific to the Trump Administration is a particular hostility towards the civil service bureaucracy because this proved to be a roadblock in much of Trump 1.0 schemes to go around the legislative process, let alone the whistleblowers that got Trump in trouble (Vindman) on his first Impeachment.
Then there's the hostility towards DC and its residents, again a long time right wing thing, but amped up under the Trump Administration because DC courts and judges have been where trumped up Trump cases and rulings go to die, quite often. There's also the underlying racial aspect of DC's residents and federal workforce, which has a larger share of African American employment, particularly of Black women, that I suspect undergirds a lot of this hostility and contempt.
And there's also the high suspicion that the federal workforce is mostly a Democratic/liberal apparatus in the first place, hostile to Republican Executives - and that may be somewhat true at least by voter registration. Most federal workers come and od their jobs of measurable quality between Administrations regardless of the rhetoric coming out of the Executive and its political party, but Trump in particular is so sensitive to disloyalty - that is as identifable has having a "D" voter registration.
At the end of the day, I think Trump did in part let Elon run DOGE with the rhetorical mission of this being in part a "revenge" and "anti-woke" mission, as well as a "weed out" of non-Trump loyalists. I think Trump, in the way he supposedly does with a lot of his "orders", makes clear what his intent is with the way he talks about it. If his discussions about DOGE with Elon were focused on these issues and much less about the ostensible "efficiency and spending" parts, it may have been abundantly clear to Elon how to conduct the mission, and *why* it was done in such a dickish way, with maximum humiliation and disrespect of firing of workers by his barely adult age DOGE-boys.
There's also the very possibility Elon had his own set of motives, that of accessing confidential records like those of the Social Security Admin, as we've already seen one of the ex-DOGE boys carrying around on a thumb drive and who knows how much has entered into Palantir's systems. Which is probably the bigger issue with all of this, that is getting a lot less attention than it deserves :/
Trump might not have known, but Elon Musk can do arithmetic and read budget numbers just fine, so it's hard to think he didn't know that DOGE would have no effect on the deficit.
I think even this is revisionist history. DOGE was not created to address government spending funneled through NGOs, it was created under the asinine belief they could eliminate a trillion dollars in spending by firing people and blocking spending altogether. I know the areas of the government I'm familiar with (the FAA, national labs, the DoD-now-DoW) are all pretty devoid of NGOs [1] but were still subject to mass firings and all the humiliations and absurdities that came with the DOGE folks moving in. And in the end, nothing productive came out of it.
[1] For-profit contracting firms are pretty prevalent, but they made out pretty well under DOGE; when you fire the government employees but still need the work done, guess who's paid to pick up the slack?
But since the arithmetic didn't work out and Musk et all are way the hell too smart not to have known that, you have to guess that there were other goals than deficit reduction.
Framing it like this is pretty frustrating because you are implying they were just bad at their good faith idea.
Instead of it being Elon stealing government data for his AI, breaking programs he personally didn't like, and killing any investigations against his companies
Yeah, there seems to be a lot of stuff going wrong at the agencies that were targeted, but a lot of federal government isn't* direct services provision to citizens. It's counting stuff, doing emergency preparedness/planning type work etc. Not the type of stuff people would notice. There's also been a fair amount of reporting about the Trump admin pulling people off high-value work (auditors looking for fraud) to do stuff like answer IRS/SSA phone calls. Kind of a potemkin approach to government really.
I have a friend that owns a bunch of farmland in Arkansas that large farm operations rent the use of, and he’s saying that a bunch of farmland is lying fallow this year because of all the uncertainty
But, yes, contracting out services seems like an efficiency to people with a simplistic ideological understanding of things, but overseeing contractors takes capacity and correctly aligned incentives.
In NGO's the waste will come out in bloated salaries and payrolls since they can't funnel the money to the owner or shareholders, in for profit contractors it will be just that. In some ways the first is more legible than the latter.
In either case the goal of efficient and effective services and DOGE didn't do that because that wasn't the goal. Instead it was ideological purging and an innumerate budget cutting.
We have had to train more people to oversee contractors since the DRP, attrition policies, and mass retirements with zero backfilling mean we could wind up in a situation where no one is interacting with contractors.
Having managed such things in past one would want to have a non-ideological view on what is "permanent need" and what is episodic variable need.
It would be rational to have a good base staff of experts (notably in non-market areas in paticular, like especially the health and sciences fields) to ensure that variable contracts are both administratively but also substantively overseen. And probably for very long-term programs, own-staffing is best (the HIV and similar, like the big HIV and other diseases combatting programs, no reason to think such things are really better executed in private sub-contracting). In constast if one has something focused in say infrastructure investment that has a very time limited focus, probalby a mix - Federal expertise but for say like the support programs to develop Infra in AFrica, it's not likely you need permanent staff (as in Federal bureaucrats hard to seperate) for a time-limited program. Rahter similar to private investment - I have permanent needs but then for specific projects one hires specific contracting as it's not rational to keep entire expertise set on-budget - this however is market focused, and as noted in areas that are not really market based - health, sciences and disaster responses, that it's really not rational to have monster outsourcing on de-facto permanent basis, not economically rational, but ideological.
On the latter type of expertise, there's also the issue that if someone moves from working from the private sector to the government, they can struggle to keep up with technological advancement in the sector, which means the benefit of bringing them in-house degrades over time.
And there is also still the question of what kind of workforce various federal agencies should have -- the kind more typical of private companies that is accustomed to constant change, roles emerging and being eliminated as needed; or one more suited to a slower pace with more predictability and less adaptable to change.
I'm not sure that's asking the right question either, because the needs of the workforce aren't the primary focus of either private companies or the government - each one is about serving customers and, ultimately, shareholders.
Private companies do the things they do (including, sometimes, degrading the experience of the workforce or their customer) to maximize profits for their shareholders. Government's customers are the people who use government services, and their shareholders are the taxpayers, who express their preferences through Congress. It is a system purposely designed to be slower, more predictable, and not geared towards dramatic change without a dramatic expression of the need for change through Congress. Government should be much less inclined to jerk customers around than private companies, and more focused on delivering predictable services.
From my own very private investment world lens but from interaction with the I-NGOs I don't think I would go for "fraud" as a driving explanation overall.
Rather my own experience is a bad combination of (1) Do-Gooderism with airy ideas poorly rooted in good economics (2) poor cost-discipline, (3) gross inefficiencies baked into USGov rules and regs as Koltai highlights where even if one knows better the "cruft" of accumulated rule sets and bureaucracy tendencies to risk-aversion ends up with grossly inefficient rule sets (of the nature spending $10 to justify/oversee $1) - and over past 10 years emergence of really idiotic wokey-woke-Everything-Bagelism (my own experience in an investment case where we sought [nothing ever happened] $ for energy-efficiency infra in utterly devoid area, and the USG agency wanted to address everything from handicapped access [to a solar plant??] to impact on marginalised (trans, gays and... other) to other items. none of which did we personally have problems w per se, but the paperwork and boggying down, we just said "fuck it, not worth it"
BTW as it aligns perfectly with the general precepts of Abundance and rationalising government to work well rather than get bogged down in paralysing procedure on procedure let me quote from Koltai of which the pull quote "When auditing a course at a major DC law school on Federal Contracting and Procurement, our professor began by telling the class,..., “the key to success in this course and this subject is to forget everything you ever knew about how contracting, procurement and purchasing work in the private sector.”
Full Paragraph.
"After my government work, I wanted to understand what was going so wrong. What I learned is that a big part of the explanation (as with most things) was in the details. The vast majority of the actual work of government, whether domestic or foreign, is carried out by contractors, not by government employees themselves. These contracts, totaling trillions of dollars each year, are awarded according to a truly medieval set of regulations known as the Federal Acquisition Regulations or FAR. The FAR runs to over 50 volumes, each written on tissue-paper thin pages, with each volume often running over a thousand pages. There is a different volume for each major Federal agency, except for the Defense Department which merits two volumes. Every other volume says if anything is not spelled out here, “consult the DOD volume” for guidance. When auditing a course at a major DC law school on Federal Contracting and Procurement, our professor began by telling the class, about half of whom were experienced, mid-career procurement practitioners, “the key to success in this course and this subject is to forget everything you ever knew about how contracting, procurement and purchasing work in the private sector.” I quickly realized this was the most important lesson in government contracting. The Government doesn’t work according to the same rules as the private sector.
No one wants to have the conversation about how much waste comes from requirements about interviewing small contractors and small business carve outs, and how BAD those contractors are at providing services.
No, it approached a fake problem with tactics that were highly effective at doing the thing the proponents actually wanted to do (fire politically left-leaning bureaucrats), but of course could not solve the fake problem because the fake problem didn't exist.
Agree, across the board cuts to the military (the defense sector is ripe with waste, fraud, and abuse) would be a great way to start president AOC's "War On Fraud"
Why add wasteful and fraudulent as adjectives for NGOs? Do you automatically assume that for any and all government contractors, or is there something special about non profits that they would be more rather than less wasteful than a for profit organization?
It’s more of a reaction to this once unquestioned sentiment among those left of center that “non-profits are inherently good.”
Now there is much more skepticism, in part due to some of the trust destroying rhetoric and in part due to activists throwing so much animus at Biden/Harris.
Non-profits receiving public money to provide public services have resulted in large cost but little material provision of services. (LA county spending $25 billion on homeless funding, or that silly NGO consultancy designing a bad bus stop, or BOPA in Baltimore.) These examples of non-profits receiving tax dollars with little oversight undermines trust more broadly in non-profit.
I am not saying it’s right. I am just saying trust and credibility of these institutions have eroded for rational reasons.
The irony is that if you, like me, work at a non-profit, you have to document so much for audits that it takes away substantially from the time you are actually using to put people in houses and get them medical care. I spend 10+ hours a week on admin for our funders to ensure we aren't wasting money, and we have whole positions at our organization that are there to be responsive to audits and oversight - the demand for more, more, more oversight is part of the bloat and inefficiency!
Anyway, as someone who works at a non-profit, the sharp turn against us in the comment section this year has been beyond discouraging and also makes it very clear that most people outside NGO's don't understand much about how they operate and are basing their opinions on flashy but outlying news stories.
Activists protesting Biden over climate change, student loans, and the Omnicause led to a lot of negative sentiments against non-profits more broadly among many liberals.
And yet the largest NGOs are things like Goodwill, Feeding America, United Way and St. Jude's - not exactly the first places that come to mind when you think of Omnicause activists.
"Kill with fire the vendors, for-profit or non-profit does not matter, whose sole customers are governments and who are not in a space with a ton of competition. They will consistently underperform and run overbudget and you will be left with nothing to show for it. This explains a significant chunk of the defense space, for example, along with entities like Booz Allen Hamilton. It also explains the entire West Coast municipal non-profit outsourcing environment...
Note that there is, in all this, almost no room at all for municipally- or state-funded non-profits. They can do basically nothing at all that the state cannot, better, and their lobbying and influence inevitably results in scope creep that results in billions being applied to tasks which simply should not be done at all."
I'm confused about the idea of killing defense vendors that only supply the government. Who else are you expecting them to supply? Or do you think that the government should just run these and expect them to be more efficient then?
First, fix the reasons that government agencies have to hire so many consulting firms. Then you can kill the consulting firms, or let them evolve a new strategy or die off. But if you kill the consulting firms but leave the hiring and contracting rules that make them necessary, you won't get any good outcomes.
I think you could do this with a lot of consultants the government hires - if you redid the government pay scales and labor rules. (e.g. raise pay, but make it much easier to hire/fire them, etc.).
But there is a reason that many private firms also hire consultants - e.g. you only need them for a short term project and don't want to hire them for 9 months just to not need them anymore.
But to be clear, David wasn't just talking about consultants. He was talking about any vendor who only serves the government. This is a majority of
Right, an engineering consultant you hire for a few months to do a building renovation is very different from a consultant who you keep working for you for a decade on some major project, because you couldn't pay him enough as a government employee, or he's not a citizen so you couldn't even hire him, or he's retired and would lose retirement benefits by coming back to federal employment, or....
1) I don't think that rifle manufacturing is at issue here. The major issues are almost always much more complex systems
2) The US defense industry is already incredibly politicized by people wanting stuff built in their districts. Moving that all in house would exacerbate the issue dramatically adding even more vectors for inefficiency/corruption.
3) Federal employee regulations would cause the costs on these to skyrocket unless changed dramatically.
Is the real situation that she made that much in one year because of weird temporary still or that she wants to work at Penzey’s for fun (and the Penzey’s owner hates Republicans so that lines up…)
"Based on publicly available IRS Form 990 filings (aggregated by ProPublica) for Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA), the compensation for top executives and administrators typically accounts for about 1.7% to 2.1% of the organization's total expenses.
Recent tax filings reveal the following approximate annual compensation (including base salary, related compensation, and other benefits) for key administrators and executives:
* **Sylvain Roy (President & CEO):** Between $560,000 and $991,000 depending on the filing year.
* **Alan Pieper (Chief Operating Officer):** Between $429,000 and $467,000.
* **Paul Sippola (Sr. VP of Program):** Between $219,000 and $399,000.
* **Udayappan Ramasamy (Associate VP of Finance):** Approximately $340,000.
* **Sheryl Cowan (Sr. VP of Program):** Between $238,000 and $259,000.
* **Anthony L. Butler Sims (Sr. VP and Chief People Officer):** Approximately $256,000.
Additionally, top administrators leading specific international development programs, known as Chiefs of Party (for locations like Mali, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe), generally reported compensation ranging from **$250,000 to $322,000**.
General administrative and program support roles outside of the C-suite and senior executive levels tend to fall closer to the organization's average non-executive salary ranges, which hover around **$78,000 to $101,000** annually depending on the specific title, location, and responsibilities."
If you want well performing NGOs, you should be prepared to pay competitively. Now, I’m not sure that these NGOs are that well performing so clearly that’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition for performance.
Wow that’s kind of crazy that NGO heads are making that much. If I learned the head of a charity was making more than $300k or so I would not donate any money there.
NGO’s are often rent seeking entities that poorly pay staff and greatly pay leadership. It’s kind of like admin bloat in higher ed. Armies of precariously paid adjuncts but VPs of biodegradable cafeteria utensils making 2x tenured faculties’ salaries.
Yeah, I once was engaged to provide an investment mandate advice to OxFam (UK) - some decades ago. It wasn't a happy engagement to say the least, but their HQ, full of what I called "Poverty Porn" with just an outstanding subsidised cafeteria with every flavor of dietary niche and biodegradable whatsit.
I have had interactions also with NGOs that were fine - my own experience which is mere anectdote has been those with the most private discipline (as like one that is basically a non-profit VC for low-income countreis) were the best at least from my own lens.
The most proggy prog were to me the worst in bloat and hypocritical self-dealing.
Also, lots of hospitals are technically non-profits, even though they provide goods and services for payment, send people to collections for overdue bills, etc.
I'll never understand this focus on "this person makes more than some arbitrary cap I've decided upon so therefore their salary is outrageous!" rather than "does paying X give us access to a higher quality pool of candidates for the position, and does hiring from that pool mean that the outcomes and improvements over lower quality candidates will offset the cost of the higher salary with increased performance?" The analysis in this chat of that salary level (which is good, sure) seems restricted exclusively to "that's too high for this kind of job!" rather than any analysis of what they did and whether the best candidates could have easily obtained alternative employment elsewhere at that salary or higher if this employer didn't offer compensation at that level.
I genuinely couldn't care less about the actual number itself in these debates. If you want a well run organization you need to pay for it. I have no idea if this woman deserved that salary or not, but I do know the analysis about that should be more involved than just saying the number and then being outraged.
I see the point of that, but also, if you've got a hundred-million-dollar, several thousand person operation with projects going on in 50 countries around the world, I'm guessing that you will struggle to find someone capable of running that operation who isn't worth a very high salary. You may manage to get a retired CEO or someone who will do it for a dollar a year, but if no such person steps up, deciding that you are morally obliged not to pay more than a middle-manager salary for that job seems very likely to end up with someone in the position who simply is not able to do it.
$300,000 may not be sufficient to attract the talent necessary to do the job of managing an organization of thousands or tens of thousands of people. For someone in their late 50s at the height of their professional career, making 250K in a VHCOL is below their marginal wage. You aren't going to get very good candidates at 300K.
"Well, I will just find people dedicated to the mission." And there *can* be people who will do the jobs for substandard wages. Okay, say you hire a bunch of them. Well, now you are stuck. If they decide to quit, you have to shut down until you find another Samaritan. You aren't actually interviewing candidates to find the best. You're waiting for someone to come take pity on you by working for you.
And I think a lot of charities are just wastes of time and money! For lots we have no idea of their effectiveness -- not even if the effectiveness is positive. Lots of them are just patronage factories.
But you can't evaluate this through salary levels.
Though when it comes to Catholic Church run orgs - none of these guys beat the compensation of *their* chief executive in perks alone - he gets his own country!
I mean, if they’re living in Zimbabwe, sure, but not if they’re living in the US. I’d want a hefty premium to live in a shithole country.
Though to the extent that they engage in lobbying you need to pay DC area salaries. $250k a year or so is totally reasonable for a NGO executive in charge of tens or hundreds of millions in aid that’s dependent on federal appropriations and thus must live in the DC area. It’s what you need to buy a modest house there as a single person.
There are lots of other ways to not be set: 1) late bloomer, esp for women; 2) made little money while building up the org and was just starting to yield; 3) single mom w 2 kids in expensive city, scrimping to put them in private school. I know good people who are examples of each of these. Yes they each reflect choices made that didn’t work out, and that’s how a market economy works. But it’s not the choice you’re implying: that she spent profligately.
It is such a bizarre take. Sure, $272k is a lot. If ALL that someone who makes that much money is thinking about is "what can I do to maximize my ability to survive for the rest of my life" for the entire time they're making that much money, then sure, they should be able to eat and have a roof over their head into their 90s. But virtually nobody thinks like that. They think "I am making X amount of money, I have a good job, good job security, so therefore I'll plan out my expenses and my savings in such a way so that at 65 I'll be able to retire with the lifestyle I want to lead for my retirement years." Having that income stream interrupted is going to interrupt those plans pretty significantly. To turn around and be like "this isn't believable" betrays an utter lack of familiarity with the way tons of people actually live and work in this world.
Ya, most folks who make that in their 50's didn't make it in their 30's and most of those who did make great money early aren't FIRE folks who want to be out by 40 and are saving accordingly.
There are plenty of people who will be perfectly able to retire comfortably at 60-65 who aren't anywhere near it at 52.
It is entirely plausible. Why you would benchmark against a single cherry picked org rather than go to disclosures...
Lots of people for better or worse are poor at managing to retirement, stretching to try to conclude that it was one weird year is from preset presumptions
$272,000 is above the highest GS pay grade (SES might go higher.) A contractor can go above this (and generally does because they don’t get federal benefits.)
I think you'll find that people earning very good money suffer from the same weaknesses as lots of other humans precisely because they are, in fact, human beings themselves. This is not an under researched or unknown body of research either. Being a great manager or being a great lawyer or a highly competent physician doesn't mean that you're immune from short sighted thinking with your personal finances, or an overly optimistic view of your long-term job security and earning potential. Not to mention that sometimes shit just happens in life. Like having a good, highly stable job that you assume is going to provide income for another decade or more and therefore let you live the lifestyle you desire now while also allowing you to save enough so that you'll be ready to retire in 10 years, only to have the President assign a ketamine addicted maniac to run a government agency that destroys your industry completely.
I’m sorry but someone in their 50s making $272k a year should be set for retirement, especially with the relatively generous federal benefits. If she had maxed out their 401k equivalent that by itself would be enough. Either this is not a real sob story or if it is a real sob story I don’t really feel bad for her.
I understand that the salaries of federal employees engaged in rule making (rather than blue collar or military jobs) are small as a fraction of the American economy.
I concede that it would be worth paying a multiple of this sum to have really well optimized rules.
However, when I see how much less efficient our legal system is than those of Germany or France or even the UK, I just want to starve the beast.
Paying large teams of lawyers to fight one another is a poor alternative to parliamentary supremacy.
The latter, at least, is entirely ineffectual; all it results in is people spending lots of additional wasted time trying to justify the precise reasons why their case can't meet the arbitrary deadlines.
The Speedy Trial Act (which at least is meeting a constitutional mandate) is notorious for such wastage.
Sure, but I'm citing it for the ineffectuality of the whole genre of laws. Cases should be decided on their merits, not because the defendant managed to drag its feet long enough to run out the clock.
>not because the defendant managed to drag its feet long enough to run out the clock
That essentially never actually happens.
In a criminal case, speediness can be at odds with due process. The Speedy Trial Act's requirement of trial 70 days after indictment is silly, which is why time period is tolled for pretrial motions, etc.
What "large teams of lawyers" are being paid "to fight one another"? The total number of employees actually litigating federal-sector cases at FLRA, MSPB and OSC is like... a thousand? I guess you could extract a few more by defining all oversight/IG employees in that category, but for fairly obvious reasons no one is actually willing to go on record as saying they think waste, fraud and abuse should be legalized.
At least inmy corner of the Substack there are lots of people who feel that the discomfort of the high income federal employees who lost jobs WAS THE POINT of DOGE. The exercise was vengence for being Woke or Liberal or competent or insuffiently appreciative of crypto-IT MAGA-ism or something!
From the reporting I’ve read, the DOGE staffers genuinely did think they could make government more efficient and cut enough waste to meaningfully reduce the deficit. Trouble was they had zero experience in the task at hand and couldn’t be bothered to look at a chart detailing federal outlays.
But with even high school civics you know not to fire evaluators and inspector general, IRS, staff. You do that to permit waste fraud and abuse by your firends.
Part of the "drain the swamp" ethos is that the totality of the institutions is corrupt, so even organizations purporting to do oversight of corruption are themselves corrupt.
Anti-corruption institution exists -> there is still corruption -> anti-corruption org is complicit/corrupt/part of the swamp -> give 'em the hatchet.
It's all very simplistic to the point of caricature.
Nonsense. Anyone with more than a high schooler’s understanding of the federal government would know that DOGE wasn’t going to reduce the deficit meaningfully. Either the DOGE guys were ignorant and dumber than a box of bricks, or they were lying their asses off.
“You don’t gotta hand it to Trump and his minions, ever,” part eleventy.
I mean, in a lot of ways MAGA is the equal-and-opposite version of woke--smart people having their brains eaten by identity politics and ideology to the point where they enact or support obviously dumb and crazy policies.
Far more people in politics than anyone wants to admit make their decisions without reading the basic info in front of them. Lots of people are just really lazy even when high up.
One thing I am pissed about is how little Biden did to protect all the HR and Civil Rights employees they made do DEI-A stuff. Trump said he was going to harm these people and Biden put a huge target on their backs.
During the lame duck period they were handing out DEIA awards. I was like “no, you need to hide the fact these people were associated with this crap” at the time that happened.
Must be pretty sick to be a federal employee who does stuff the administration wants you to do, then gets fired by the next administration when they claim you ignore administration directives.
Don’t worry, the merit service board is toothless and federal workers don’t have real rights to litigate. We still have all the mandatory annual trainings on workplace and whistleblower protections though.
Yes. Look at who they fired, there are no plausible efficiency explanations for those choices. It was people with either 1) fewer legal protections, like recent hires, or 2) less political protection - i.e., working in agencies unpopular with Republicans.
In other words, they just wanted to fire people for the sake of firing people. And towards that end, chose the softest targets.
Trump can. Winning means getting a lot richer, getting revenge on his enemies, and staying several steps ahead of the law. Oh, and lots of monuments and gold paint.
That was not a normal private sector experience. Bosses are normally not out to hurt their employees for no reason. I’ve been in one mass layoff and the bosses were almost apologetic about it and we all got pretty generous severance to avoid hard feelings or lawsuits.
Right. This is the distinction. Private-sector companies are generally (pace a few PE gimmicks) not suddenly taken over by people who want to run them into the ground and destroy their ability to function.
His attacks on universities and science are also partly about vengence. Trump correctly perceives that these people are at the center of oppositiln to him.
While DOGE cuts are obviously a factor, I think it combined with the remote work phenomenon to paint a wider & more dismal picture here. Prior to 2025 RTO mandate something like 40% of the workforce utilized at least partial telework still, and 10%+ were fully remote. A lot of the job losses were due to RTO demands and folks that had already out-migrated taking the offer to leave and early retirement (DRP).
Further "only" something like 40-45% of the DOGE cuts were in DC proper where the rest were in MD/VA as noted, and if it were truly only DOGE cuts you'd expect to see rising unemployment rates in those areas as well for the same reasons, but you don't. PG county is at 5.3% and Montgomery county at 4.2%.
So there's the twin drags of DOGE and remote work that combined at the worst times for wards that don't really have their own economic nexus back on like the DC suburbs. But if a Dem administration comes back in and enables hiring but allows for remote work, I don't think these numbers recover much.
The combination of lingering disorder (eg, aggressive panhandling in front of the grocery store), destruction of the local built environment, and military police vibes featuring both crazy traffic stops by US marshals and roving clusters of bored reserve members is also unhelpful.
I think you are overstating how many left because of RTO. Feds were under heavy pressure to get to more than 50% time in office under Biden. True remote people were not that common in January 2025.
Also, retirement incentives are fine in a vacuum, but it was a pretty coercive offer. It was made clear at many agencies that if not enough people retired, there would just be deeper RIFs (read: more forced firings). They were targeting specific percentage headcount reductions that were leaked in spreadsheet form, so this was a credible threat. And the reality was that if you were 71 years old and you came into the office after a quarter of the agency's prime working age people were laid off, you weren't likely to see a lot of smiling faces around the water cooler.
Biden made a big hem and haw to appease Bowser and literally changed nothing after months of review. Biden should have just reenacted the pre-Covid office policies that Republicans in the house wanted. So many people living locally in DC went full remote near the end of the “Covid emergency” in June of 2023.
For us it went from two days a week if are in the office to two days a week if you are in the office and your boss has less flexibility. All the people who went full remote during the Covid emergency got grandfathered in. The only people adversely affected were those already showing up in the office.
It created a sense of unfairness and a bunch of unnecessary meetings.
We went from almost everyone teleworking 4 days a week (managers and new hires were more like 5 days a pay period), to in 2023/2024 everyone being in office 3 days a week. Only a small number of people got medical exceptions.
Now, obviously, everyone's in 5 days a week. But it was already not feasible to live far from the DC core coming in 3 days a week. And that shift was felt pretty harshly.
True remote people also extended well beyond the federal government. DC is still one of the highest % urban areas with a remote workforce. But I agree that the RTOs were often a bad bargain and led many to take DRP early. I think many agencies almost made TOO "good" of an offer and I've seen lists showing 1/3+ of agencies GS13+ roles left their respective agencies.
But it's also true that people didn't see the RTO coming and thought they would have some time; tons of people literally moved out during COVID going full remote and simply didn't return and their roles were not adequately backfilled during RIFs/DRP.
I guess I am reacting to the comment above because it minimizes the permanent damage done to civil service in this country, along with the upending of tens of thousands of lives, by waving it away as people voluntarily choosing to not come to the office.
The old offer was "we will underpay you but make it up in job stability, flexibility, time off, benefits, and opportunities to get started in your field." Then DOGE wrecked the job stability and flexibility and mass-fired people trying to get started in their field. So the new offer is just "we will underpay you." My guess is that this isn't attracting a great set of potential employees. Which is fine if you don't care whether the feds are competent at their jobs, but even most of the small-government types (not most of MAGA) actually do want the feds to be competent.
There is no backfilling. Some very senior people got golden parachutes where they could retire early and max out their FERS. Then there were proposal to cut fed benefits, pay, and increase FED’s FERs contribution to something like 15%.
DC was at ~50% remote work before the Trump admin v2 RTO and ward 7/8 were already putting up deep existential unemployment numbers. That's my point. The DOGE cuts just were running over a dead horse more than killing it in those wards. I'd argue that the DOGE cuts hurt the NW wards more than those across the river, but it certainly didnt help any.
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.
The Guardian and sloppy reporting - name a more iconic duo.
Tales of upper middle class woe are simultaneously more relatable for the Guardian's readership and less depressing than people at risk of actual poverty.
The framing of DOGE in your article is also very un-guardian; the idea that people having well paid jobs is Good actually, so they can spend money in the local economy. Many Guardian readers would regard that as heterodox thought on a par with believing in trickle down economics.
I’m in the biotech sector, which has had a global downturn in the last couple of years. People who spent a decade doing a PhD and postdocs, earning far less than government employees in DC, are struggling to find work in the sector. And those working face job instability as startups go under and large companies do layoffs. (And salaries in biotech R and D is not as high as some people may think).
Yet there are no sob stories in articles about the poor R and D researcher who was laid off and struggling to find work. Or for the downstream hardships of working class people in SF, Boston and San Diego that have to deal with downstream economic effects of a struggling biotech sector.
Honestly, the market for academic scientists is just brutal. Do a PhD and a couple postdocs and maybe we'll consider giving you a job that, if you work yourself into an early grave and play the politics just right, will become a permanent job in a few years.
I've read a couple sob stories, they're not uncommon in Boston area coverage.
It's not good that as the US cuts it's research budget China is investing far more heavily in this space and growing strongly. Everyone is focused on keeping an AI lead but we're letting China catch up to us on biotech.
Is the biotech slump really about govt investment? Or is it VC investment? Things were pretty bubbly for a while there, made bubblier by new vehicles like SPACs, and IPOs with negative cash flow. And then so much VC money fled to AI. I really don’t know, would love to hear from someone who does. FWIW, I track salaries in these areas as part of my job, and I confirm that engineering salaries are lower in biotech vs medical devices, and far lower than consumer electronics.
It's tough to pull apart the factors as a layman, but it seems that investment is not really slowing down in China where they have a genuine comparative advantage when it comes to the regulatory framework (see below). They are also dealing with AI crowding investment and high interest rates so I find the government impact somewhat plausible.
>>GluBio’s sickle-cell drug candidates trail rivals from Novartis and Bristol-Myers, but Lu said it could close the gap by doing early-stage research and testing in China. It takes about two to four months to get a clinical trial going in China after seeking regulatory clearance, compared with six to nine months in the U.S.
>>In China, there are more patients and healthy volunteers who are willing to participate in trials, Lu said, and they can be enrolled more quickly at a single large academic medical center rather than spread out among many different centers.
>>“Lower cost, high quality, high speed, for sure, that’s the trick of success,” he said.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think these bad consequences were intended by DOGE necessarily (they do seem to have believed, subjectively, that they would save money at least) but they are all things that people like Grover Norquist for decades would have described as good consequences. Starve the beast. All of these people down to the local barbers are bloodsuckers who deserve to be hurt, and there certainly isn't a lot of sympathy for the population of the poorest wards of DC.
MY should remark that one of his pet policies, moving federal agencies out of the DC metro areas, would also harm the DC metro area economically (though hopefully it would have more benefits than DOGE did outside of DC).
This is one of those ideas that seems like a good idea to a policy wonk, but probably won't work out very well in practice. Without telework/remote, they're basically going to kill the career of one person in dual working families.
Is the purpose of these agencies to support the lifestyle of particular families, or to provide government functions?
Workplaces change all the time. A company will move its headquarters. I as a PhD student had to move 3000 miles to finish my project when my professor decided to move our lab. Did they ask me if that was going to be good for my partner’s career before doing so?
I don’t think a private sector company would try to move an organization full of highly educated professionals from DC to Grand Junction, Colorado, the 271st largest metro area in the US. Obviously lots of people are going to quit, which was exactly what happened.
This is the obvious rejoinder. USDA already tried to move their economic research wing to Kansas City under Trump 1 and lost 90% of their staff. It's not about coddling random federal employees or whatever he thinks the argument people are making is; these types of moves are fundamentally different from some bank relocating from one major metro to another, and it's reflected in the attrition rate.
I know folks at the ERS. I know a guy who moved to the ERS for a remote position so he could be near his wife’s cancer specialist.
And you know why Trump did this arbitrary and malicious relocation on only the ERS? It’s because the Trump admin asked an agency that is legally required to provide empirical and politically neutral policy assessments to assess the distributional benefits of the 2018 Jobs Act.
ERS had the gall to show that most farmers didn’t benefit from the law.
Right this is the point. If the intention is to make the government agencies function less well, then it is bad. I suspect there was a lot of that. People with an ideology that government is inherently bad have an incentive to make government agencies perform badly.
But there’s so much focus on grievances of particular employees, that they are talking like the purpose of the agency is to provide them employment with terms that they like. But the purpose is to execute government functions. There should be more discussion with this framing.
...this is exactly my point? You think someone who spent years in academia would be familiar with two-body problems and be able to think through what it means for running an organization dependent on professionals.
It happens all the time in my industry - my former employer moved ~half it's high-skilled roles from the Hartford area to Boston, Charlotte, and NYC in 2015-2018.
When you are hired in for a position that has had remote/telework policies in place for two decades it is not reasonable to assume that everything will be changed with no planning or transitions in place.
Congress passed laws authorizing and implementing telework and remote work to save costs. There was no benefit-cost assessment for the inflexible RTO mandate. There were no resources allocated for relocation or ensuring popper facilities. I know someone who has to work in a condemned building because they didn’t have workspace available. I know another who still doesn’t have a permanent workstation with wired internet.
Your choice to pursue temporary training is not the same as employment or a career.
People’s jobs change, end, or switch configuration all the time, based on the needs of the employer. This idea that people have a right to have the current terms of their employment extend indefinitely just doesn’t exist.
Government workers are there to serve the needs of the people and the taxpayer. To do that, the agencies need to be able to recruit and retain talent, for sure. And of course to do that you want people to be able to build careers.
But the primary goal is efficient and capable operations, not accommodating the particular work arrangements for certain individuals and families.
You wrote “I volunteered for a PhD that required me to move, therefore government workers who accepted lower pay for increased job security, stability, and long standing work arrangement policies that are congressional supported, should receive none of those work conditions or protections.”
You think that government workers should have no employment protections, even if they are provided by statue. (Many of the benefits were in work contracts that the Trump admin annulled arbitrarily.)
You think that government workers should be arbitrarily and politically fired with no redress.
You think that government workers should have their long standing work arrangements rapidly altered with no resources allocated for relocation, facilities, or transition.
And telework and remote work are congressional authorized by statute for the stated purpose of “recruitment and retention.”
If you want government workers to accept DOGE style political and arbitrary firings, then government workers should receive benefits and pay comparable to the private sector.
In practice, the USDA move during Trump's first term just led to the loss of institutional knowledge. After DC-based employees accepted early retirement, they couldn't find qualified replacements willing to be based in the new locations and positions were left unfilled.
Just because these things happen occasionally doesn’t mean they aren’t massively disruptive! You can surely understand that moving causes problems, and people usually try to minimize it unless there is some very specific reason why it’ll eventually result in things being better!
It also makes it hard to recruit early career people. In my 20's, I was interviewing for a possible career at the FBI, but decided against it since your first rotation has to be at smaller field offices. I was a single man. Who was I going to date and hang out with in practice at 25 if I followed that route?
On unemployment in Hawaii: The state also has a significant number of homeless people, who presumably don’t show up in the denominator. There is a widespread belief there that state and local governments on the mainland will buy their homeless people one-way plane tickets to Hawaii, so they become someone else’s problem.
Edit: To be clear, I am not endorsing this claim about dastardly Mainlanders. As pointed out, it is not even close to the easiest or most cost-effective way for a different state to push their homeless people somewhere else. Presumably opposition parties in other states would love to slam their opponents about “wasting taxpayer dollars on Hawaiian vacations for bums and junkies,” if anything like that was happening. This is a surprisingly widely held belief there, though.
Seems much more plausible to me that homelessness is higher in Hawaii due to the aforementioned high cost of living ("everything is about housing supply" strikes again!) combined with mild weather. If a city in the Lower 48 wants to ship its homeless to another city, it could literally ship a dozen or more people via intercity bus to another state for the cost of a single plane ticket to Hawaii, and the bus has the advantage of not needing photo ID to board.
One important question is how well the government continues to function despite the DOGE cuts. I have a tax matter before Maryland - the comptroller's office apparently doesn't have capacity to answer phones meaningfully. They have not answered by email or mail in months. Is post DOGE Federal government really doing worse than Maryland's baseline bureaucracy? If not, DOGE may end up a decent experiment.
We have far too many on-paper governments (90,000 different jurisdictions) and far too few actual employees doing things for those jurisdictions. That's a longstanding DOGE-independent issue, caused by Americans thinking that if you just write sprawling, unenforceable laws and then hire a couple of people, you have actually done something to solve the underlying problems.
That's an entirely separate problem from DOGE, which took a highly capable jurisdiction within the areas that it operated and wrecked it for no reason.
DOGE didn’t cut too much in direct customer facing employment. It was much more in terms of lifesaving care for people in Africa, future oriented research, state department, and various things like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
As is typical for most Trump Administration efforts, DOGE approached a real problem with haphazard and ineffective tactics. There still exists a need to address Government spending funneled through opaque, interconnected, crony-filled, wasteful and potentially fraudulent NGOs.
Much hay has been made of the woman highlighted in the NYTimes article making $272,000 at a USAID-funded NGO now reduced to applying for a $19/hour online job. Which, yes, seems perfectly designed as a story to induce anger rather than understanding. But it does highlight the need for effective oversight of spending, even if said spending doesn't rise to the level of Social Security, Medicare or Department of Defense (I refuse to use Department of War).
We need more Direct Hire Feds and less contractors.
We also need to reform the federal pay scale to pay civil servants more to get better talent.
Those two are basically the same issue. If you can't pay market rate for some kinds of skill/talent, then you won't get much of it. The traditional thing that federal employment offered was a lower pay + better job stability and often a better life/work balance via lots of vacation time and such. But DOGE did its level best to wreck that, and now the federal government's ability to hire people who ought to be making $300 K/year at $150 K/year will be much-diminished.
Effective pay cuts and benefits cuts will continue until moral improves….
I fear that Democrats are going to forget about Feds next time the come to power and trip over themselves trying to repeat Build Back Better.
And make sure hiring departments are accountable and offer jobs based on talent.
The implication being the talent we have now is not very good?
I agree...but then you'll get angry stories about individuals making a lot of money directly from the government.
Like, Jerome Powell makes $190K a year. We have low-level managers and like, random ass consulting companies making more a year than the most powerful economic actor on Planet Earth.
What I feel like we really need is for government workers to get a piece of the upside (e.g. you complete this infrastruture project on time and under budget, you get X% of the revenue for Y years, etc.).
One reason moral is so low in government is that wages and benefits are continuously cut (FERS benefits, COLA freezes while healthcare premiums increase.)
Congress doesn’t let agencies hire competitively for civil service positions nor pay competitively.
The main benefits were flexibility and stability. Republicans have destroyed that notion.
Offering flexibility and stability as the main selling points introduces a serious adverse selection problem.
Let's say for the sake of argument, someone's considering two jobs:
Job A: pays a lot but you can get fired if you suck, but if you're talented and hardworking, you can advance quickly and make even more.
Job B: pays considerably less but you can't get fired even if you're lazy and incompetent.
The people who choose Job B are generally quite a bit less effective than those who choose Job A.
You also get a lot of parents selecting into Job B
That is true! And I personally accepted a lower-paying, more predictable/stable job after I had my second kid. I'm also probably less effective as a worker given that my priorities -- e.g. being home for dinner and making sure I have time to play with my kids -- have changed.
And yet, the people I worked with in the federal government were mostly hardworking and brilliant, and the people I've worked with in the private sector have been... not. Like they were fine or whatever, I'm not dissing them, but the quality difference was extremely obvious.
I think this really depends on what the job is. DOJ seems to have a lot of success recruiting big law refugees, and I've never really seen much to suggest the people who work at DOJ are lazy or incompetent.
Excellent Jeff Maurer piece on this:
https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/the-brutal-beauty-of-baseball
People tend to underestimate the hiring process for public employment, especially at the federal level. And for a lot of those jobs, there really is no private sector equivalent.
I suspect their morale is higher than their morals, but who knows.
I can't believe my peers and I make more than Jerome Powell as high level middle managers (still a middle managers) at a large corporation. That's absolutely insane. Public Sector workers, especially those who have such load bearing roles in our daily life, need to be compensated better.
Powell makes less than quite a few people from the FRB, and the salary there is really quite good and a great option for an economist.
This is true at the SEC and other financial regulators- they have their own pay scale and it’s very competitive with financial services (outside of PE, I banking, and a few other exceptions).
The Supreme Court is even worse - the Chief Justice makes less than a big-firm associate with 5 years of experience.
Good lord. Coat this idea in thermite, douse it in liquid oxygen, light it on fire with every flamethrower you possess and launch the remnants of it into the sun.
The amount of fraud that would be enabled by this is... I'm not sure how to describe it. "World-historic"?
Especially tech jobs. Jennifer Pahlka has written a lot about how some of the mind numbing tech systems that are outdated and don’t work well for constituents are in part due to a lack of state capacity and over reliance on vendors
There is no budget for a lot of things. DOGE cut grant to states to update their disease notification systems for example, it didn’t matter if they were red or blue states.
FEDERAL Government tech runs amazingly well most of the time (like compared to anything Atlassian or SAP puts out the IRS website is fucking amazing). States though hooo boy that is a snake pit of scams and grifters. And even if you get a good product- DC has many of them actually- there’s no incentive to update or maintain
>>As is typical for most Trump Administration efforts, DOGE approached a real problem with haphazard and ineffective tactics.<<
I think as usual your laudable desire to be reasonable is giving the Trump administration too much credit here. You make it sound as if that project were undertaken in good faith.
DOGE was a scam from the word go.
The overwhelming bulk of federal spending goes to healthcare, pensions, interest on the debt, and national defense. The remainder is about a quarter of the budget, and plenty of that goes to things (transportation, veterans' benefits, NASA, FBI, federal courts, IRS, scientific research) where it's not obvious there's lots of fat.
Sure, ANY wasted taxpayer money in some sense is a "problem"—we're borrowing too much, and we probably need something on the order of a trillion dollars' worth of austerity to stabilize the country's finances.
But the scam comes both in gaslighting the American people as to what actually needs to be done (entitlement cuts and/or tax increases), and in very purposefully hyping up a bullshit new government bureau that was *never* designed to do any meaningful work in this sphere (you can't *meaningfully* trim red ink while ignoring three quarters of the budget AND while simultaneously slashing taxes left and right).
It was a dog and pony show from the beginning.
For the record I'm perfectly open to the possibility that Donald Trump *thought* Musk was going to magically solve our fiscal problems. Trump really is that stupid on public policy. But rank ignorance doesn't excuse him, and it definitely doesn't excuse the many policy-smart people who were advising him. Those assholes were in on the con.
Yes, I definitely wish there was more public education on this. The number of people I interact with who think that DOGE was pretty good, despite admitted flaws, because it "saved the government money," flabbergasts me. And I live in a blue city in a blue state. I can only imagine the beliefs about this in other parts of the country.
DOGE effectively saved zero dollars. They paid 300,000 employees for the better part of the year to stay at home and then resign.
This was such a fucking disaster for my agency's budgeting too! We're project funded, you shove 8% of our staff onto the full time leave budget for 8 months and a lot of shit breaks even before you get to there not being enough staff to do the job!
Any observation that begins with "the Trump administration at least was confronting a real problem" goes immediately into my TL;DR file.
I think DOGE was done as part of the Project 2025 "Schedule F" initiative, in part to start the replacement of the civil service bureaucracy with appointees and loyalists. Federal workers have long been a target of right wing contempt, for ideological reasons around the size of government, but also because of the generous retirement and benefits packages that cause angst with private sector work in comparison to same benefits. The right wing response is to lower the bar rather than raise it, of course.
Also specific to the Trump Administration is a particular hostility towards the civil service bureaucracy because this proved to be a roadblock in much of Trump 1.0 schemes to go around the legislative process, let alone the whistleblowers that got Trump in trouble (Vindman) on his first Impeachment.
Then there's the hostility towards DC and its residents, again a long time right wing thing, but amped up under the Trump Administration because DC courts and judges have been where trumped up Trump cases and rulings go to die, quite often. There's also the underlying racial aspect of DC's residents and federal workforce, which has a larger share of African American employment, particularly of Black women, that I suspect undergirds a lot of this hostility and contempt.
And there's also the high suspicion that the federal workforce is mostly a Democratic/liberal apparatus in the first place, hostile to Republican Executives - and that may be somewhat true at least by voter registration. Most federal workers come and od their jobs of measurable quality between Administrations regardless of the rhetoric coming out of the Executive and its political party, but Trump in particular is so sensitive to disloyalty - that is as identifable has having a "D" voter registration.
At the end of the day, I think Trump did in part let Elon run DOGE with the rhetorical mission of this being in part a "revenge" and "anti-woke" mission, as well as a "weed out" of non-Trump loyalists. I think Trump, in the way he supposedly does with a lot of his "orders", makes clear what his intent is with the way he talks about it. If his discussions about DOGE with Elon were focused on these issues and much less about the ostensible "efficiency and spending" parts, it may have been abundantly clear to Elon how to conduct the mission, and *why* it was done in such a dickish way, with maximum humiliation and disrespect of firing of workers by his barely adult age DOGE-boys.
There's also the very possibility Elon had his own set of motives, that of accessing confidential records like those of the Social Security Admin, as we've already seen one of the ex-DOGE boys carrying around on a thumb drive and who knows how much has entered into Palantir's systems. Which is probably the bigger issue with all of this, that is getting a lot less attention than it deserves :/
Trump might not have known, but Elon Musk can do arithmetic and read budget numbers just fine, so it's hard to think he didn't know that DOGE would have no effect on the deficit.
I think even this is revisionist history. DOGE was not created to address government spending funneled through NGOs, it was created under the asinine belief they could eliminate a trillion dollars in spending by firing people and blocking spending altogether. I know the areas of the government I'm familiar with (the FAA, national labs, the DoD-now-DoW) are all pretty devoid of NGOs [1] but were still subject to mass firings and all the humiliations and absurdities that came with the DOGE folks moving in. And in the end, nothing productive came out of it.
[1] For-profit contracting firms are pretty prevalent, but they made out pretty well under DOGE; when you fire the government employees but still need the work done, guess who's paid to pick up the slack?
DOGEtroopers went to agencies and forced managers to take trainings on how to fire their teams and themselves.
But since the arithmetic didn't work out and Musk et all are way the hell too smart not to have known that, you have to guess that there were other goals than deficit reduction.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist
It's hard to make government small enough to drown it in a bathtub when your "cuts" make it ever bigger and more powerful.
Framing it like this is pretty frustrating because you are implying they were just bad at their good faith idea.
Instead of it being Elon stealing government data for his AI, breaking programs he personally didn't like, and killing any investigations against his companies
Did he genuinely break lots of programmes that the GOP didn't like?
Yeah, there seems to be a lot of stuff going wrong at the agencies that were targeted, but a lot of federal government isn't* direct services provision to citizens. It's counting stuff, doing emergency preparedness/planning type work etc. Not the type of stuff people would notice. There's also been a fair amount of reporting about the Trump admin pulling people off high-value work (auditors looking for fraud) to do stuff like answer IRS/SSA phone calls. Kind of a potemkin approach to government really.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-databases-not-updated-vaccines-study-rcna255467
Edit: fixed one my many typos that reversed the meaning of a sentence.
Don’t know how much of it was DOGE but FDA cuts have farmers SCREAMING.
I have a friend that owns a bunch of farmland in Arkansas that large farm operations rent the use of, and he’s saying that a bunch of farmland is lying fallow this year because of all the uncertainty
Good piece overall.
But, yes, contracting out services seems like an efficiency to people with a simplistic ideological understanding of things, but overseeing contractors takes capacity and correctly aligned incentives.
In NGO's the waste will come out in bloated salaries and payrolls since they can't funnel the money to the owner or shareholders, in for profit contractors it will be just that. In some ways the first is more legible than the latter.
In either case the goal of efficient and effective services and DOGE didn't do that because that wasn't the goal. Instead it was ideological purging and an innumerate budget cutting.
We have had to train more people to oversee contractors since the DRP, attrition policies, and mass retirements with zero backfilling mean we could wind up in a situation where no one is interacting with contractors.
Having managed such things in past one would want to have a non-ideological view on what is "permanent need" and what is episodic variable need.
It would be rational to have a good base staff of experts (notably in non-market areas in paticular, like especially the health and sciences fields) to ensure that variable contracts are both administratively but also substantively overseen. And probably for very long-term programs, own-staffing is best (the HIV and similar, like the big HIV and other diseases combatting programs, no reason to think such things are really better executed in private sub-contracting). In constast if one has something focused in say infrastructure investment that has a very time limited focus, probalby a mix - Federal expertise but for say like the support programs to develop Infra in AFrica, it's not likely you need permanent staff (as in Federal bureaucrats hard to seperate) for a time-limited program. Rahter similar to private investment - I have permanent needs but then for specific projects one hires specific contracting as it's not rational to keep entire expertise set on-budget - this however is market focused, and as noted in areas that are not really market based - health, sciences and disaster responses, that it's really not rational to have monster outsourcing on de-facto permanent basis, not economically rational, but ideological.
On the latter type of expertise, there's also the issue that if someone moves from working from the private sector to the government, they can struggle to keep up with technological advancement in the sector, which means the benefit of bringing them in-house degrades over time.
And there is also still the question of what kind of workforce various federal agencies should have -- the kind more typical of private companies that is accustomed to constant change, roles emerging and being eliminated as needed; or one more suited to a slower pace with more predictability and less adaptable to change.
I'm not sure that's asking the right question either, because the needs of the workforce aren't the primary focus of either private companies or the government - each one is about serving customers and, ultimately, shareholders.
Private companies do the things they do (including, sometimes, degrading the experience of the workforce or their customer) to maximize profits for their shareholders. Government's customers are the people who use government services, and their shareholders are the taxpayers, who express their preferences through Congress. It is a system purposely designed to be slower, more predictable, and not geared towards dramatic change without a dramatic expression of the need for change through Congress. Government should be much less inclined to jerk customers around than private companies, and more focused on delivering predictable services.
I think rationalisation.
Steven Koltai (who I knew personally at a certain point due ot overlap between my risk-capital venture financing world and what he was doing) has a very useful note from Feb 2025: https://stevenkoltai.substack.com/p/usaid-and-government-inefficiency
I highly recommend it.
From my own very private investment world lens but from interaction with the I-NGOs I don't think I would go for "fraud" as a driving explanation overall.
Rather my own experience is a bad combination of (1) Do-Gooderism with airy ideas poorly rooted in good economics (2) poor cost-discipline, (3) gross inefficiencies baked into USGov rules and regs as Koltai highlights where even if one knows better the "cruft" of accumulated rule sets and bureaucracy tendencies to risk-aversion ends up with grossly inefficient rule sets (of the nature spending $10 to justify/oversee $1) - and over past 10 years emergence of really idiotic wokey-woke-Everything-Bagelism (my own experience in an investment case where we sought [nothing ever happened] $ for energy-efficiency infra in utterly devoid area, and the USG agency wanted to address everything from handicapped access [to a solar plant??] to impact on marginalised (trans, gays and... other) to other items. none of which did we personally have problems w per se, but the paperwork and boggying down, we just said "fuck it, not worth it"
BTW as it aligns perfectly with the general precepts of Abundance and rationalising government to work well rather than get bogged down in paralysing procedure on procedure let me quote from Koltai of which the pull quote "When auditing a course at a major DC law school on Federal Contracting and Procurement, our professor began by telling the class,..., “the key to success in this course and this subject is to forget everything you ever knew about how contracting, procurement and purchasing work in the private sector.”
Full Paragraph.
"After my government work, I wanted to understand what was going so wrong. What I learned is that a big part of the explanation (as with most things) was in the details. The vast majority of the actual work of government, whether domestic or foreign, is carried out by contractors, not by government employees themselves. These contracts, totaling trillions of dollars each year, are awarded according to a truly medieval set of regulations known as the Federal Acquisition Regulations or FAR. The FAR runs to over 50 volumes, each written on tissue-paper thin pages, with each volume often running over a thousand pages. There is a different volume for each major Federal agency, except for the Defense Department which merits two volumes. Every other volume says if anything is not spelled out here, “consult the DOD volume” for guidance. When auditing a course at a major DC law school on Federal Contracting and Procurement, our professor began by telling the class, about half of whom were experienced, mid-career procurement practitioners, “the key to success in this course and this subject is to forget everything you ever knew about how contracting, procurement and purchasing work in the private sector.” I quickly realized this was the most important lesson in government contracting. The Government doesn’t work according to the same rules as the private sector.
No one wants to have the conversation about how much waste comes from requirements about interviewing small contractors and small business carve outs, and how BAD those contractors are at providing services.
No, it approached a fake problem with tactics that were highly effective at doing the thing the proponents actually wanted to do (fire politically left-leaning bureaucrats), but of course could not solve the fake problem because the fake problem didn't exist.
Agree, across the board cuts to the military (the defense sector is ripe with waste, fraud, and abuse) would be a great way to start president AOC's "War On Fraud"
"Agree" with what?
Seems a good place to boost this article
https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/a-three-horizons-framework-for-government?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Where they are actually concerned about making government work
Why add wasteful and fraudulent as adjectives for NGOs? Do you automatically assume that for any and all government contractors, or is there something special about non profits that they would be more rather than less wasteful than a for profit organization?
It's just right-wing spin. All government spending is by definition wasteful and fraudulent, therefore cutting it is always good.
It’s more of a reaction to this once unquestioned sentiment among those left of center that “non-profits are inherently good.”
Now there is much more skepticism, in part due to some of the trust destroying rhetoric and in part due to activists throwing so much animus at Biden/Harris.
Non-profits receiving public money to provide public services have resulted in large cost but little material provision of services. (LA county spending $25 billion on homeless funding, or that silly NGO consultancy designing a bad bus stop, or BOPA in Baltimore.) These examples of non-profits receiving tax dollars with little oversight undermines trust more broadly in non-profit.
I am not saying it’s right. I am just saying trust and credibility of these institutions have eroded for rational reasons.
You can pretty much the same for *all* institutions in the US. Everyone has become very good at determining reasons to not trust any institution.
To be fair, quite a few institutions have also become very good at providing those reasons....
The irony is that if you, like me, work at a non-profit, you have to document so much for audits that it takes away substantially from the time you are actually using to put people in houses and get them medical care. I spend 10+ hours a week on admin for our funders to ensure we aren't wasting money, and we have whole positions at our organization that are there to be responsive to audits and oversight - the demand for more, more, more oversight is part of the bloat and inefficiency!
Anyway, as someone who works at a non-profit, the sharp turn against us in the comment section this year has been beyond discouraging and also makes it very clear that most people outside NGO's don't understand much about how they operate and are basing their opinions on flashy but outlying news stories.
Activists protesting Biden over climate change, student loans, and the Omnicause led to a lot of negative sentiments against non-profits more broadly among many liberals.
And yet the largest NGOs are things like Goodwill, Feeding America, United Way and St. Jude's - not exactly the first places that come to mind when you think of Omnicause activists.
I didn’t say it was reasonable.
I drilled down on this above:
"Kill with fire the vendors, for-profit or non-profit does not matter, whose sole customers are governments and who are not in a space with a ton of competition. They will consistently underperform and run overbudget and you will be left with nothing to show for it. This explains a significant chunk of the defense space, for example, along with entities like Booz Allen Hamilton. It also explains the entire West Coast municipal non-profit outsourcing environment...
Note that there is, in all this, almost no room at all for municipally- or state-funded non-profits. They can do basically nothing at all that the state cannot, better, and their lobbying and influence inevitably results in scope creep that results in billions being applied to tasks which simply should not be done at all."
I'm confused about the idea of killing defense vendors that only supply the government. Who else are you expecting them to supply? Or do you think that the government should just run these and expect them to be more efficient then?
First, fix the reasons that government agencies have to hire so many consulting firms. Then you can kill the consulting firms, or let them evolve a new strategy or die off. But if you kill the consulting firms but leave the hiring and contracting rules that make them necessary, you won't get any good outcomes.
I think you could do this with a lot of consultants the government hires - if you redid the government pay scales and labor rules. (e.g. raise pay, but make it much easier to hire/fire them, etc.).
But there is a reason that many private firms also hire consultants - e.g. you only need them for a short term project and don't want to hire them for 9 months just to not need them anymore.
But to be clear, David wasn't just talking about consultants. He was talking about any vendor who only serves the government. This is a majority of
defense suppliers.
Right, an engineering consultant you hire for a few months to do a building renovation is very different from a consultant who you keep working for you for a decade on some major project, because you couldn't pay him enough as a government employee, or he's not a citizen so you couldn't even hire him, or he's retired and would lose retirement benefits by coming back to federal employment, or....
Until the 1960's, a good bit of defense manufacturing was done directly by the government - e.g. the Springfield Armory made most of the M1 rifles.
1) I don't think that rifle manufacturing is at issue here. The major issues are almost always much more complex systems
2) The US defense industry is already incredibly politicized by people wanting stuff built in their districts. Moving that all in house would exacerbate the issue dramatically adding even more vectors for inefficiency/corruption.
3) Federal employee regulations would cause the costs on these to skyrocket unless changed dramatically.
What’s wrong with 2, exactly?
Did anyone else find that story not very plausible? Was she really making that much? That’s more than the head of Doctors Without Borders: https://paddockpost.com/2024/07/28/executive-compensation-at-doctors-without-borders-2022/. If she was making that much consistently and is in her late 50s, how does she not have enough to just coast to retirement?
Is the real situation that she made that much in one year because of weird temporary still or that she wants to work at Penzey’s for fun (and the Penzey’s owner hates Republicans so that lines up…)
According to Gemini she made that much.
"Based on publicly available IRS Form 990 filings (aggregated by ProPublica) for Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA), the compensation for top executives and administrators typically accounts for about 1.7% to 2.1% of the organization's total expenses.
Recent tax filings reveal the following approximate annual compensation (including base salary, related compensation, and other benefits) for key administrators and executives:
* **Sylvain Roy (President & CEO):** Between $560,000 and $991,000 depending on the filing year.
* **Alan Pieper (Chief Operating Officer):** Between $429,000 and $467,000.
* **Paul Sippola (Sr. VP of Program):** Between $219,000 and $399,000.
* **Udayappan Ramasamy (Associate VP of Finance):** Approximately $340,000.
* **Sheryl Cowan (Sr. VP of Program):** Between $238,000 and $259,000.
* **Anthony L. Butler Sims (Sr. VP and Chief People Officer):** Approximately $256,000.
Additionally, top administrators leading specific international development programs, known as Chiefs of Party (for locations like Mali, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe), generally reported compensation ranging from **$250,000 to $322,000**.
General administrative and program support roles outside of the C-suite and senior executive levels tend to fall closer to the organization's average non-executive salary ranges, which hover around **$78,000 to $101,000** annually depending on the specific title, location, and responsibilities."
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521447902
Voila, the 990s provide the data.
If you want well performing NGOs, you should be prepared to pay competitively. Now, I’m not sure that these NGOs are that well performing so clearly that’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition for performance.
Wow that’s kind of crazy that NGO heads are making that much. If I learned the head of a charity was making more than $300k or so I would not donate any money there.
NGO’s are often rent seeking entities that poorly pay staff and greatly pay leadership. It’s kind of like admin bloat in higher ed. Armies of precariously paid adjuncts but VPs of biodegradable cafeteria utensils making 2x tenured faculties’ salaries.
Yeah, I once was engaged to provide an investment mandate advice to OxFam (UK) - some decades ago. It wasn't a happy engagement to say the least, but their HQ, full of what I called "Poverty Porn" with just an outstanding subsidised cafeteria with every flavor of dietary niche and biodegradable whatsit.
I have had interactions also with NGOs that were fine - my own experience which is mere anectdote has been those with the most private discipline (as like one that is basically a non-profit VC for low-income countreis) were the best at least from my own lens.
The most proggy prog were to me the worst in bloat and hypocritical self-dealing.
NGOs are not charities
Non-Government Organisations are just not-for-profit. That does not mean charity and many are not in any way getitng retail donations.
I have partnered with an NGO that is an investment firm in the end, they simply recycle all profits back into operations, but they are not a charity
The NFL: technically a non-profit!
Imagine telling them that Roger Goodell couldn't make more than $300K a year.
Also, lots of hospitals are technically non-profits, even though they provide goods and services for payment, send people to collections for overdue bills, etc.
Hence my description of "opaque, interconnected, crony-filled, wasteful and potentially fraudulent NGOs".
I'll never understand this focus on "this person makes more than some arbitrary cap I've decided upon so therefore their salary is outrageous!" rather than "does paying X give us access to a higher quality pool of candidates for the position, and does hiring from that pool mean that the outcomes and improvements over lower quality candidates will offset the cost of the higher salary with increased performance?" The analysis in this chat of that salary level (which is good, sure) seems restricted exclusively to "that's too high for this kind of job!" rather than any analysis of what they did and whether the best candidates could have easily obtained alternative employment elsewhere at that salary or higher if this employer didn't offer compensation at that level.
I genuinely couldn't care less about the actual number itself in these debates. If you want a well run organization you need to pay for it. I have no idea if this woman deserved that salary or not, but I do know the analysis about that should be more involved than just saying the number and then being outraged.
I agree -- this isn't Europe, $230K isn't *that* much money for someone doing an important job.
That said, the fact that the next position she landed is a low-level retail job tells me that she was overpaid.
I tend to think that anyone making more than I do is a moral outrage, especially if they don’t even work in healthcare
My working theory is "NGOs are all bad, period, without exception."
Agreed, the salary per se doesn't bother me one way or another.
Cabal for short.
I see the point of that, but also, if you've got a hundred-million-dollar, several thousand person operation with projects going on in 50 countries around the world, I'm guessing that you will struggle to find someone capable of running that operation who isn't worth a very high salary. You may manage to get a retired CEO or someone who will do it for a dollar a year, but if no such person steps up, deciding that you are morally obliged not to pay more than a middle-manager salary for that job seems very likely to end up with someone in the position who simply is not able to do it.
This isn't a good test for a charity.
$300,000 may not be sufficient to attract the talent necessary to do the job of managing an organization of thousands or tens of thousands of people. For someone in their late 50s at the height of their professional career, making 250K in a VHCOL is below their marginal wage. You aren't going to get very good candidates at 300K.
"Well, I will just find people dedicated to the mission." And there *can* be people who will do the jobs for substandard wages. Okay, say you hire a bunch of them. Well, now you are stuck. If they decide to quit, you have to shut down until you find another Samaritan. You aren't actually interviewing candidates to find the best. You're waiting for someone to come take pity on you by working for you.
And I think a lot of charities are just wastes of time and money! For lots we have no idea of their effectiveness -- not even if the effectiveness is positive. Lots of them are just patronage factories.
But you can't evaluate this through salary levels.
The CEO of the American Heart Association made $4.15 million last year.
https://paddockpost.com/2025/05/05/executive-compensation-at-the-american-heart-association-2023/#:~:text=Nancy%20Brown:%20Total%20Compensation%202018,Form%20990%20for%20more%20information.
You probably should not be donating to literally any charity other than local food banks and homeless shelters and Catholic Church-run orgs, then.
Though when it comes to Catholic Church run orgs - none of these guys beat the compensation of *their* chief executive in perks alone - he gets his own country!
I mean, that’s probably the way to go anyway.
Sure, agreed completely. Effective altruism is a religion, not a strategy.
I mean, if they’re living in Zimbabwe, sure, but not if they’re living in the US. I’d want a hefty premium to live in a shithole country.
Though to the extent that they engage in lobbying you need to pay DC area salaries. $250k a year or so is totally reasonable for a NGO executive in charge of tens or hundreds of millions in aid that’s dependent on federal appropriations and thus must live in the DC area. It’s what you need to buy a modest house there as a single person.
There are lots of other ways to not be set: 1) late bloomer, esp for women; 2) made little money while building up the org and was just starting to yield; 3) single mom w 2 kids in expensive city, scrimping to put them in private school. I know good people who are examples of each of these. Yes they each reflect choices made that didn’t work out, and that’s how a market economy works. But it’s not the choice you’re implying: that she spent profligately.
It is such a bizarre take. Sure, $272k is a lot. If ALL that someone who makes that much money is thinking about is "what can I do to maximize my ability to survive for the rest of my life" for the entire time they're making that much money, then sure, they should be able to eat and have a roof over their head into their 90s. But virtually nobody thinks like that. They think "I am making X amount of money, I have a good job, good job security, so therefore I'll plan out my expenses and my savings in such a way so that at 65 I'll be able to retire with the lifestyle I want to lead for my retirement years." Having that income stream interrupted is going to interrupt those plans pretty significantly. To turn around and be like "this isn't believable" betrays an utter lack of familiarity with the way tons of people actually live and work in this world.
Ya, most folks who make that in their 50's didn't make it in their 30's and most of those who did make great money early aren't FIRE folks who want to be out by 40 and are saving accordingly.
There are plenty of people who will be perfectly able to retire comfortably at 60-65 who aren't anywhere near it at 52.
It is entirely plausible. Why you would benchmark against a single cherry picked org rather than go to disclosures...
Lots of people for better or worse are poor at managing to retirement, stretching to try to conclude that it was one weird year is from preset presumptions
$272,000 is above the highest GS pay grade (SES might go higher.) A contractor can go above this (and generally does because they don’t get federal benefits.)
'Lots of people for better or worse are poor at managing to retirement'
Many people are, but not supposedly highly competent people earning very good money in a job that is meant to be important.
I think you'll find that people earning very good money suffer from the same weaknesses as lots of other humans precisely because they are, in fact, human beings themselves. This is not an under researched or unknown body of research either. Being a great manager or being a great lawyer or a highly competent physician doesn't mean that you're immune from short sighted thinking with your personal finances, or an overly optimistic view of your long-term job security and earning potential. Not to mention that sometimes shit just happens in life. Like having a good, highly stable job that you assume is going to provide income for another decade or more and therefore let you live the lifestyle you desire now while also allowing you to save enough so that you'll be ready to retire in 10 years, only to have the President assign a ketamine addicted maniac to run a government agency that destroys your industry completely.
I’m sorry but someone in their 50s making $272k a year should be set for retirement, especially with the relatively generous federal benefits. If she had maxed out their 401k equivalent that by itself would be enough. Either this is not a real sob story or if it is a real sob story I don’t really feel bad for her.
What you assert as should and what is broad reality are not the same thing.
Take whatever pious preachy position you want, statistics say this is not unusual.
Sob story aspect aside (I have no particular sympathy for her not antipathy either, in fact I don't really give a fuck about her one way or another).
She was not a fed, just at an entity contracted with the Federal government. No federal benefits.
yes that equally, federal benefits are not relevant to a person working at an NGO.
I thought that seemed very plausible. NGO's pay roughly like mid-tier companies, and a senior VP in my industry would make at least that much.
Just for perspective, Doug Muir's account of what his USAID-funded project tried to do was helpful context for me.
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/08/usaid-my-next-to-last-project/
I never read the story. But going to work at Penzey's is not the same as going to Wal Mart. Penzey's is HQ for #resistance.
Doctors Without Borders is a French organization, so not necessarily directly comparable. For an NGO that people here are probably familiar with, here is data re compensation at FIRE: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/43467254
$272K is a lot, especially outside NY or CA. I've worked with workaholic private sector executives that make less than that.
I understand that the salaries of federal employees engaged in rule making (rather than blue collar or military jobs) are small as a fraction of the American economy.
I concede that it would be worth paying a multiple of this sum to have really well optimized rules.
However, when I see how much less efficient our legal system is than those of Germany or France or even the UK, I just want to starve the beast.
Paying large teams of lawyers to fight one another is a poor alternative to parliamentary supremacy.
Perhaps funding more courts and judges and enacting rules limiting how long legal disputes can drag on would be a more effective solution?
The latter, at least, is entirely ineffectual; all it results in is people spending lots of additional wasted time trying to justify the precise reasons why their case can't meet the arbitrary deadlines.
The Speedy Trial Act (which at least is meeting a constitutional mandate) is notorious for such wastage.
Isn't the Speedy Trial Act only re criminal trials?
Sure, but I'm citing it for the ineffectuality of the whole genre of laws. Cases should be decided on their merits, not because the defendant managed to drag its feet long enough to run out the clock.
>not because the defendant managed to drag its feet long enough to run out the clock
That essentially never actually happens.
In a criminal case, speediness can be at odds with due process. The Speedy Trial Act's requirement of trial 70 days after indictment is silly, which is why time period is tolled for pretrial motions, etc.
the main thing is paying an adjudicator to spend a reasonable about of time without being too precious
Is the beast the government or the lawyers in your analogy?
I would be all for making it illegal to sue the government, especially when and where Democrats are in power.
It’s more like a hydra.
What "large teams of lawyers" are being paid "to fight one another"? The total number of employees actually litigating federal-sector cases at FLRA, MSPB and OSC is like... a thousand? I guess you could extract a few more by defining all oversight/IG employees in that category, but for fairly obvious reasons no one is actually willing to go on record as saying they think waste, fraud and abuse should be legalized.
At least inmy corner of the Substack there are lots of people who feel that the discomfort of the high income federal employees who lost jobs WAS THE POINT of DOGE. The exercise was vengence for being Woke or Liberal or competent or insuffiently appreciative of crypto-IT MAGA-ism or something!
From the reporting I’ve read, the DOGE staffers genuinely did think they could make government more efficient and cut enough waste to meaningfully reduce the deficit. Trouble was they had zero experience in the task at hand and couldn’t be bothered to look at a chart detailing federal outlays.
But with even high school civics you know not to fire evaluators and inspector general, IRS, staff. You do that to permit waste fraud and abuse by your firends.
Part of the "drain the swamp" ethos is that the totality of the institutions is corrupt, so even organizations purporting to do oversight of corruption are themselves corrupt.
Anti-corruption institution exists -> there is still corruption -> anti-corruption org is complicit/corrupt/part of the swamp -> give 'em the hatchet.
It's all very simplistic to the point of caricature.
I think MAGA selects more on affinity than ability.
Nonsense. Anyone with more than a high schooler’s understanding of the federal government would know that DOGE wasn’t going to reduce the deficit meaningfully. Either the DOGE guys were ignorant and dumber than a box of bricks, or they were lying their asses off.
“You don’t gotta hand it to Trump and his minions, ever,” part eleventy.
> high schooler’s understanding of the federal government
You're setting the bar unrealistically high.
Most of those guys could do math, so I have a hard time believing it.
I find that doubtful considering how many DOGE staffers were zoomers.
I wonder how many of them hadn’t taken a math class since college algebra on Zoom in spring 2020.
I am now sad for two reasons. 1) People should know algebra before entering college and 2) the abysmal quality of online education during Covid.
Weren't these guys mostly weird coders pulled from the Muskosphere?
The few I saw looked like they couldn’t yet grow facial hair.
Is "They were just idiots" a defense? Not that I think you're intending to defend DOGE, it just genuinely raises the question.
I think immature and ill disciplined rather than dumb.
I mean, in a lot of ways MAGA is the equal-and-opposite version of woke--smart people having their brains eaten by identity politics and ideology to the point where they enact or support obviously dumb and crazy policies.
Far more people in politics than anyone wants to admit make their decisions without reading the basic info in front of them. Lots of people are just really lazy even when high up.
One thing I am pissed about is how little Biden did to protect all the HR and Civil Rights employees they made do DEI-A stuff. Trump said he was going to harm these people and Biden put a huge target on their backs.
During the lame duck period they were handing out DEIA awards. I was like “no, you need to hide the fact these people were associated with this crap” at the time that happened.
Must be pretty sick to be a federal employee who does stuff the administration wants you to do, then gets fired by the next administration when they claim you ignore administration directives.
Wouldn’t it be nice if a concept like civil service protection existed?
Don’t worry, the merit service board is toothless and federal workers don’t have real rights to litigate. We still have all the mandatory annual trainings on workplace and whistleblower protections though.
Yes. Look at who they fired, there are no plausible efficiency explanations for those choices. It was people with either 1) fewer legal protections, like recent hires, or 2) less political protection - i.e., working in agencies unpopular with Republicans.
In other words, they just wanted to fire people for the sake of firing people. And towards that end, chose the softest targets.
right, it's possible Trump et al would view this argument as a policy win not a failure.
Trump and company cannot even coherently define what winning is in their minds.
Whatever the result they will define as "success" after the fact. See also, Iran War.
Trump can. Winning means getting a lot richer, getting revenge on his enemies, and staying several steps ahead of the law. Oh, and lots of monuments and gold paint.
In Trump's mind winning is _convincing_ people that he won not actually _winning_.
Yeah, the goal was to make federal employees have a "normal private sector experience."
That was not a normal private sector experience. Bosses are normally not out to hurt their employees for no reason. I’ve been in one mass layoff and the bosses were almost apologetic about it and we all got pretty generous severance to avoid hard feelings or lawsuits.
Right. This is the distinction. Private-sector companies are generally (pace a few PE gimmicks) not suddenly taken over by people who want to run them into the ground and destroy their ability to function.
The IRS guy to have norml private sector experience enfoing the law?
His attacks on universities and science are also partly about vengence. Trump correctly perceives that these people are at the center of oppositiln to him.
Also possible that just slashing the number of federal employees was the point
I think granting them having a point at all is giving them too much credit.
While DOGE cuts are obviously a factor, I think it combined with the remote work phenomenon to paint a wider & more dismal picture here. Prior to 2025 RTO mandate something like 40% of the workforce utilized at least partial telework still, and 10%+ were fully remote. A lot of the job losses were due to RTO demands and folks that had already out-migrated taking the offer to leave and early retirement (DRP).
Further "only" something like 40-45% of the DOGE cuts were in DC proper where the rest were in MD/VA as noted, and if it were truly only DOGE cuts you'd expect to see rising unemployment rates in those areas as well for the same reasons, but you don't. PG county is at 5.3% and Montgomery county at 4.2%.
So there's the twin drags of DOGE and remote work that combined at the worst times for wards that don't really have their own economic nexus back on like the DC suburbs. But if a Dem administration comes back in and enables hiring but allows for remote work, I don't think these numbers recover much.
The combination of lingering disorder (eg, aggressive panhandling in front of the grocery store), destruction of the local built environment, and military police vibes featuring both crazy traffic stops by US marshals and roving clusters of bored reserve members is also unhelpful.
I think you are overstating how many left because of RTO. Feds were under heavy pressure to get to more than 50% time in office under Biden. True remote people were not that common in January 2025.
Also, retirement incentives are fine in a vacuum, but it was a pretty coercive offer. It was made clear at many agencies that if not enough people retired, there would just be deeper RIFs (read: more forced firings). They were targeting specific percentage headcount reductions that were leaked in spreadsheet form, so this was a credible threat. And the reality was that if you were 71 years old and you came into the office after a quarter of the agency's prime working age people were laid off, you weren't likely to see a lot of smiling faces around the water cooler.
Biden made a big hem and haw to appease Bowser and literally changed nothing after months of review. Biden should have just reenacted the pre-Covid office policies that Republicans in the house wanted. So many people living locally in DC went full remote near the end of the “Covid emergency” in June of 2023.
We have had very different experiences. The Biden RTO effort was a big deal and had hundreds of thousands of feds pissed off.
At my agency almost no one was full remote and the handful of people who were had legitimate reasons-- so legitimate they're still remote now.
For us it went from two days a week if are in the office to two days a week if you are in the office and your boss has less flexibility. All the people who went full remote during the Covid emergency got grandfathered in. The only people adversely affected were those already showing up in the office.
It created a sense of unfairness and a bunch of unnecessary meetings.
We went from almost everyone teleworking 4 days a week (managers and new hires were more like 5 days a pay period), to in 2023/2024 everyone being in office 3 days a week. Only a small number of people got medical exceptions.
Now, obviously, everyone's in 5 days a week. But it was already not feasible to live far from the DC core coming in 3 days a week. And that shift was felt pretty harshly.
True remote people also extended well beyond the federal government. DC is still one of the highest % urban areas with a remote workforce. But I agree that the RTOs were often a bad bargain and led many to take DRP early. I think many agencies almost made TOO "good" of an offer and I've seen lists showing 1/3+ of agencies GS13+ roles left their respective agencies.
But it's also true that people didn't see the RTO coming and thought they would have some time; tons of people literally moved out during COVID going full remote and simply didn't return and their roles were not adequately backfilled during RIFs/DRP.
I guess I am reacting to the comment above because it minimizes the permanent damage done to civil service in this country, along with the upending of tens of thousands of lives, by waving it away as people voluntarily choosing to not come to the office.
The old offer was "we will underpay you but make it up in job stability, flexibility, time off, benefits, and opportunities to get started in your field." Then DOGE wrecked the job stability and flexibility and mass-fired people trying to get started in their field. So the new offer is just "we will underpay you." My guess is that this isn't attracting a great set of potential employees. Which is fine if you don't care whether the feds are competent at their jobs, but even most of the small-government types (not most of MAGA) actually do want the feds to be competent.
There is no backfilling. Some very senior people got golden parachutes where they could retire early and max out their FERS. Then there were proposal to cut fed benefits, pay, and increase FED’s FERs contribution to something like 15%.
DC was at ~50% remote work before the Trump admin v2 RTO and ward 7/8 were already putting up deep existential unemployment numbers. That's my point. The DOGE cuts just were running over a dead horse more than killing it in those wards. I'd argue that the DOGE cuts hurt the NW wards more than those across the river, but it certainly didnt help any.
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.
The Guardian and sloppy reporting - name a more iconic duo.
Tales of upper middle class woe are simultaneously more relatable for the Guardian's readership and less depressing than people at risk of actual poverty.
The framing of DOGE in your article is also very un-guardian; the idea that people having well paid jobs is Good actually, so they can spend money in the local economy. Many Guardian readers would regard that as heterodox thought on a par with believing in trickle down economics.
I’m in the biotech sector, which has had a global downturn in the last couple of years. People who spent a decade doing a PhD and postdocs, earning far less than government employees in DC, are struggling to find work in the sector. And those working face job instability as startups go under and large companies do layoffs. (And salaries in biotech R and D is not as high as some people may think).
Yet there are no sob stories in articles about the poor R and D researcher who was laid off and struggling to find work. Or for the downstream hardships of working class people in SF, Boston and San Diego that have to deal with downstream economic effects of a struggling biotech sector.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/biotech/ph-d-s-cant-find-work-as-bostons-biotech-engine-sputters-729f0036
Wasn't really that hard to find articles discussing this, but sure.
I take it back. There are a few sob stories
Honestly, the market for academic scientists is just brutal. Do a PhD and a couple postdocs and maybe we'll consider giving you a job that, if you work yourself into an early grave and play the politics just right, will become a permanent job in a few years.
Fuck the academia rat race. So much bullshit for substandard pay.
I've read a couple sob stories, they're not uncommon in Boston area coverage.
It's not good that as the US cuts it's research budget China is investing far more heavily in this space and growing strongly. Everyone is focused on keeping an AI lead but we're letting China catch up to us on biotech.
Is the biotech slump really about govt investment? Or is it VC investment? Things were pretty bubbly for a while there, made bubblier by new vehicles like SPACs, and IPOs with negative cash flow. And then so much VC money fled to AI. I really don’t know, would love to hear from someone who does. FWIW, I track salaries in these areas as part of my job, and I confirm that engineering salaries are lower in biotech vs medical devices, and far lower than consumer electronics.
It's tough to pull apart the factors as a layman, but it seems that investment is not really slowing down in China where they have a genuine comparative advantage when it comes to the regulatory framework (see below). They are also dealing with AI crowding investment and high interest rates so I find the government impact somewhat plausible.
>>GluBio’s sickle-cell drug candidates trail rivals from Novartis and Bristol-Myers, but Lu said it could close the gap by doing early-stage research and testing in China. It takes about two to four months to get a clinical trial going in China after seeking regulatory clearance, compared with six to nine months in the U.S.
>>In China, there are more patients and healthy volunteers who are willing to participate in trials, Lu said, and they can be enrolled more quickly at a single large academic medical center rather than spread out among many different centers.
>>“Lower cost, high quality, high speed, for sure, that’s the trick of success,” he said.
>>https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/pfizer-biotech-china-glubio-molecular-glue-dd938650
And you'll find many stories of VC investment going there instead of the US now, for instance:
https://archive.is/dGyB7
It’s interest rates and now the AI boom crowding out other investment.
Have interest rates hit biotech harder than other VC target areas? How big is this impact compared to cuts in govt r&d?
It’s more of a broader economic issue. Lots of firms shedding jobs, tech slowdown more generally.
We left a zero lower bound environment to one that requires an ROI.
And what about the poor biotech investors...
I lost wayyyy to much money
Make a Trump donation of sufficient size and then queue up for your bailout
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.
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.
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.
I don't think these bad consequences were intended by DOGE necessarily (they do seem to have believed, subjectively, that they would save money at least) but they are all things that people like Grover Norquist for decades would have described as good consequences. Starve the beast. All of these people down to the local barbers are bloodsuckers who deserve to be hurt, and there certainly isn't a lot of sympathy for the population of the poorest wards of DC.
"Put them in Trauma" -- Russ Vought, head of OMB and Project 2025 architect
He wanted all federal workers to be so demoralized they leave.
I remember when the fuckers we’re contemplating taking away our statutorily required transit benefits.
Yeah, no. Melon Husk absolutely intended the bad consequences.
MY should remark that one of his pet policies, moving federal agencies out of the DC metro areas, would also harm the DC metro area economically (though hopefully it would have more benefits than DOGE did outside of DC).
BLM and USDA are having functions moved west
This is one of those ideas that seems like a good idea to a policy wonk, but probably won't work out very well in practice. Without telework/remote, they're basically going to kill the career of one person in dual working families.
Is the purpose of these agencies to support the lifestyle of particular families, or to provide government functions?
Workplaces change all the time. A company will move its headquarters. I as a PhD student had to move 3000 miles to finish my project when my professor decided to move our lab. Did they ask me if that was going to be good for my partner’s career before doing so?
I don’t think a private sector company would try to move an organization full of highly educated professionals from DC to Grand Junction, Colorado, the 271st largest metro area in the US. Obviously lots of people are going to quit, which was exactly what happened.
This is the obvious rejoinder. USDA already tried to move their economic research wing to Kansas City under Trump 1 and lost 90% of their staff. It's not about coddling random federal employees or whatever he thinks the argument people are making is; these types of moves are fundamentally different from some bank relocating from one major metro to another, and it's reflected in the attrition rate.
I know folks at the ERS. I know a guy who moved to the ERS for a remote position so he could be near his wife’s cancer specialist.
And you know why Trump did this arbitrary and malicious relocation on only the ERS? It’s because the Trump admin asked an agency that is legally required to provide empirical and politically neutral policy assessments to assess the distributional benefits of the 2018 Jobs Act.
ERS had the gall to show that most farmers didn’t benefit from the law.
And that is the publicly stated intention.
Right this is the point. If the intention is to make the government agencies function less well, then it is bad. I suspect there was a lot of that. People with an ideology that government is inherently bad have an incentive to make government agencies perform badly.
But there’s so much focus on grievances of particular employees, that they are talking like the purpose of the agency is to provide them employment with terms that they like. But the purpose is to execute government functions. There should be more discussion with this framing.
If it’s a matter of recruiting and retaining talent that is crucial for operations, sure. But that wasn’t the claim
...this is exactly my point? You think someone who spent years in academia would be familiar with two-body problems and be able to think through what it means for running an organization dependent on professionals.
It happens all the time in my industry - my former employer moved ~half it's high-skilled roles from the Hartford area to Boston, Charlotte, and NYC in 2015-2018.
When you are hired in for a position that has had remote/telework policies in place for two decades it is not reasonable to assume that everything will be changed with no planning or transitions in place.
Congress passed laws authorizing and implementing telework and remote work to save costs. There was no benefit-cost assessment for the inflexible RTO mandate. There were no resources allocated for relocation or ensuring popper facilities. I know someone who has to work in a condemned building because they didn’t have workspace available. I know another who still doesn’t have a permanent workstation with wired internet.
Your choice to pursue temporary training is not the same as employment or a career.
People’s jobs change, end, or switch configuration all the time, based on the needs of the employer. This idea that people have a right to have the current terms of their employment extend indefinitely just doesn’t exist.
Government workers are there to serve the needs of the people and the taxpayer. To do that, the agencies need to be able to recruit and retain talent, for sure. And of course to do that you want people to be able to build careers.
But the primary goal is efficient and capable operations, not accommodating the particular work arrangements for certain individuals and families.
You wrote “I volunteered for a PhD that required me to move, therefore government workers who accepted lower pay for increased job security, stability, and long standing work arrangement policies that are congressional supported, should receive none of those work conditions or protections.”
You think that government workers should have no employment protections, even if they are provided by statue. (Many of the benefits were in work contracts that the Trump admin annulled arbitrarily.)
You think that government workers should be arbitrarily and politically fired with no redress.
You think that government workers should have their long standing work arrangements rapidly altered with no resources allocated for relocation, facilities, or transition.
And telework and remote work are congressional authorized by statute for the stated purpose of “recruitment and retention.”
If you want government workers to accept DOGE style political and arbitrary firings, then government workers should receive benefits and pay comparable to the private sector.
In practice, the USDA move during Trump's first term just led to the loss of institutional knowledge. After DC-based employees accepted early retirement, they couldn't find qualified replacements willing to be based in the new locations and positions were left unfilled.
Just because these things happen occasionally doesn’t mean they aren’t massively disruptive! You can surely understand that moving causes problems, and people usually try to minimize it unless there is some very specific reason why it’ll eventually result in things being better!
It also makes it hard to recruit early career people. In my 20's, I was interviewing for a possible career at the FBI, but decided against it since your first rotation has to be at smaller field offices. I was a single man. Who was I going to date and hang out with in practice at 25 if I followed that route?
The only benefit of RTO is that I now weight lift every day.
On unemployment in Hawaii: The state also has a significant number of homeless people, who presumably don’t show up in the denominator. There is a widespread belief there that state and local governments on the mainland will buy their homeless people one-way plane tickets to Hawaii, so they become someone else’s problem.
Edit: To be clear, I am not endorsing this claim about dastardly Mainlanders. As pointed out, it is not even close to the easiest or most cost-effective way for a different state to push their homeless people somewhere else. Presumably opposition parties in other states would love to slam their opponents about “wasting taxpayer dollars on Hawaiian vacations for bums and junkies,” if anything like that was happening. This is a surprisingly widely held belief there, though.
Seems much more plausible to me that homelessness is higher in Hawaii due to the aforementioned high cost of living ("everything is about housing supply" strikes again!) combined with mild weather. If a city in the Lower 48 wants to ship its homeless to another city, it could literally ship a dozen or more people via intercity bus to another state for the cost of a single plane ticket to Hawaii, and the bus has the advantage of not needing photo ID to board.
Considering this is the exact same conspiracy story told in San Francisco, I doubt it’s true. Plane tickets are expensive!
Rather bad form to post this on a thread specifically detailing the many negative consequences of believing in baseless conspiracy theories, but okay.
How do they make sure these homeless people actually get on the plane?
One important question is how well the government continues to function despite the DOGE cuts. I have a tax matter before Maryland - the comptroller's office apparently doesn't have capacity to answer phones meaningfully. They have not answered by email or mail in months. Is post DOGE Federal government really doing worse than Maryland's baseline bureaucracy? If not, DOGE may end up a decent experiment.
We have far too many on-paper governments (90,000 different jurisdictions) and far too few actual employees doing things for those jurisdictions. That's a longstanding DOGE-independent issue, caused by Americans thinking that if you just write sprawling, unenforceable laws and then hire a couple of people, you have actually done something to solve the underlying problems.
That's an entirely separate problem from DOGE, which took a highly capable jurisdiction within the areas that it operated and wrecked it for no reason.
DOGE didn’t cut too much in direct customer facing employment. It was much more in terms of lifesaving care for people in Africa, future oriented research, state department, and various things like that.
Maryland’s state government how soured me on the state party.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.