I think the main issue for anyone wanting to take the offer is simply: this was never authorized by congress, so the money to pay people to September is questionable if it exists at best. Meanwhile, there's a government funding deadline on March 14, 2025. So there's a very real chance at this deal offering something closer to ~1 month of pay before it suddenly gets dropped due to budget negotiations.
It would be an incredibly generous and nice buyout package, but obviously if it gets torn up after a month it's not that great of a deal.
Aren't Twitter workers still trying to get their severances and they took the offer when Twitter actually had the money to pay.
Considering that SpaceX is so far behind on its bills that dozens and dozens of companies in Texas have had to place liens against the company, my guess is that neither the Twitter people, nor the SpaceX people, nor the federal buyout people will ever see a dime.
For some reason, links to stories about the leins and SpaceX becoming notorious for not paying its bills are hard to come by, but it's in the printed newspapers regularly; as recently as yesterday. Here's and older link I could find: https://www.chron.com/culture/article/spacex-overdue-bills-t...
The article mentions $2.5MM liens which is drastically less than 1% of expenses of $1445MM ("[SpaceX] generated $55 million in profit on $1.5 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2023")
It don't appear to be because SpaceX is having trouble paying.
I would guess SpaceX are delaying payment as much as possible because it is cheap lending and because it's run as an extremely mercenary company.
Their costs of deliquent payment are likely below their lending costs. So optimally don't pay until the cost of deliquency exceeds lending costs (maybe ≈ junk bond rate per year).
While interesting, I don't see how it might make any difference to any federal workers' decisions?
Musk doesn't pay "because he can get away with it" isn't better or worse than "because there's a money shortage"; and in any case, the federal government being delinquent is a very different kind of catastrophe, as is it making promises it refuses to keep.
There's a possibility of contagion from Musk to the US government, but I very much agree they're different — and it's much worse if that contagion goes from potential to actual.
Who give a shit what their revenue is. It tells me nothing about how they pay their vendors.
2.5mm in liens is just how much they have proveably shorted construction workers in Texas. It doesn't count other vendors doing work that isn't elegible for a lien, or how many workers got shorted, but it just wasn't enough to worry about.
If you were one of the 70+ businesses that held a lien against them, you would think differently.
> It don't appear to be because SpaceX is having trouble paying.
Having the cash to be paid out, and having the systems in place to pay your bills are two different things.
> I would guess SpaceX are delaying payment as much as possible because it is cheap lending and because it's run as an extremely mercenary company.
Violating the terms of your contract isn't cheap lending. It is fraud. The fact that they are getting away with it isn't a defense.
> Their costs of deliquent payment are likely below their lending costs. So optimally don't pay until the cost of deliquency exceeds lending costs (maybe ≈ junk bond rate per year).
Consistently and intentionally violating the terms of payment is, as noted above, fraud. They are getting away with, and they might continue to get away with it, but mercenary businesses getting away with crime is a bad thing.
Sigh, these rage bait style of responses are as bad as the original article. Reuters was not even able to figure out what % was due to contractors as opposed to Tesla itself.
Everything you said says nothing of how they pay their vendors. $2.5mm is not exactly breaking news for construction projects. Most large projects have some percentage of total project value in liens.
I know we all want to get upset but its too hard to say either way, the dollar amount is far too small, it maybe involve a large portion of contractors and based on the cost of the development does not seem to be a rampant issue.
>> Most large projects have some percentage of total project value in liens.
I hate to be this guy but please provide a source for this. I’ve been involved in the construction industry for quite a while, almost exclusively on large and mega projects, and “most” of my jobs have not had any percentage of their total project value in liens.
One company that refused to pay for work my (then) company performed is SpaceX. Our work did not permit filing a lien.
My experience with projects and AP in general. ~$2mm across 70 liens without any split between contractors vs spacex is not that interesting. Did not look like they even accounted for a chain of liens based on the same original unit of work. The report came out in 2024 and the count and $ sum was from 2019, so over 5 years including COVID years. During COVID liens jumped quite a bit and on projects that span multiple years I don't find $2mm over 5 years that shocking.
Now SpaceX could totally be stretching their NWC as far as it goes and always paying late on purpose. Really impossible to tell in this style of shock reporting.
I would be surprised in your experience that you have never had cases of a GC not paying on his end and those folks throwing a <$100k lien on the project. Or a dispute between the GC and payer.
There are disputes about payment on lots of projects I've worked on. That wasn't your claim. You claimed that liens were filed and perfected on "most" jobs, and that is not my experience.
And I said that was my experience that liens often crop up and the scale of these were not out of the norm especially on the project size and timeline. After all the project is actively being used and some of these are not purely new construction related. Boo.
It could be, also, that they are refusing to pay because they are not happy with the delivery and looking to fight it further in court. I’d say they have real cash flow issues when they stop paying their employees and electricity bills.
I mostly agree with you. I wasn't excusing or agreeing with the behaviour. I was only trying to ponder the amoral financial incentives.
Aside: I think most moral people struggle to even recognise amoral decision making. I also suspect that learning to be more sociopathic can be profitable. I don't much admire most doyens of business. Trying to fight amoral business people seems like a personally losing game because you eventually internalise their tricks.
That’s still an expense even if they didn’t pay. Same as when you bill a customer, it’s considered revenue even if they didn’t pay. They probably have cash flow issues since it reached the lien stage.
Tesla is a fraud just short of Enron. (Enron was a complete fabrication. Tesla is a real company with fabricated valuation.) The valuation is based on hand wavey gibberish. The company has repeatedly sold consumers products that don’t exist. The concepts of duty of care, loyalty, and obedience are foreign concepts to the owner of the company.
I don't know offhand what TSLA's stock price is, but I think it's fair to say that the speculative value is at least very high if you believe that Tesla Optimus is at all a viable competitor to Boston Dynamics Atlas. I see much more long-term potential value in that than the car business.
Robotaxi is also a pretty interesting bet. I'm skeptical that it'll pan out, or at least that it will ever reach the same level of safety as Waymo without lidar, but on the other hand AI has obviously significantly advanced and been significantly democratized compared to when Tesla first launched Autopilot over a decade ago. More significantly, I see the decentralized rollout strategy as a potentially viable path to beat Waymo to the punch of a full-scale deployment. Waymo might still get there first based on its headstart and massive warchest, but Tesla's strategy is essentially crowdfunding it while using the market to optimize geographic distribution. The downside is that allowing the Robotaxi to be used in arbitrary/novel locations might be significantly less safe and/or more computationally expensive than Waymo's approach, so it's a more uncertain bet than Waymo.
It’s about 180x earnings, just under $380/share today.
Elon dangles all sorts of bullshit to get you thinking about nerd nonsense. “OMG, a Tesla robot will do my laundry on Mars with my robot rocket ship!”
It’s all bullshit. They’ve been dangling the imminent $25k car for a decade. The Tesla roadster that people put huge deposits on is nowhere to be found.
People are figuring it out. My previous comment would have created a 100+ comment thread in HN 5 years ago.
Tesla was very profitable. Gross Margin is 14% now of revenue now. 1/4 of their their $8B profit is emissions credits. That's not shabby and they have lowish debt ($20B).
But it isn't what I'd call insane. Google's gross margin is 58%, profit is $349B.
I'm not sure why you're comparing the gross margin of a car company to an internet company. General Motors has a gross margin of 10%. Ford's is 7%. Historically Tesla's was ~25%, but yeah it's fallen a bit since I last looked.
Only because they're funneling every dollar they earn into Starship. But as Starship contributes absolutely nothing to current revenue, excluding those costs is the only fair apples-to-apples comparison. We don't know their exact costs because SpaceX is still a private company, but estimates are on the order of 60% profit margin across their business lines.
Fair enough. They were able to exploit it with a massive share offering at a high price, which not only got them in the black but set them up with considerable holdings sufficient to survive the next downturn. So they're not going anywhere. But yeah, I don't think they have any ideas for future growth.
They should have used that money to buy GOG and go into digital distribution competing with Valve & Epic, or something like that.
But then again, so many stable companies get pushed by their investors to make big ambitious bets, then go belly-up. I kinda got respect for them just focusing on a good brick-and-mortor game buying experience.
I am complete outsider and know nothing about this so I am sorry to ask but in my view this is a shocking proposition. Can anyone corroborate this?
EDIT: Specifically the claim that "SpaceX is so far behind on its bills that dozens and dozens of companies in Texas have had to place liens against the company"
They churn through employees fast and they usually exit through burnout (no offloading) and the people wanting to work there skew towards young people who don't know what they're doing. A lot of work gets delayed, dropped, etc and some bad suppliers even take advantage of that ("the last person said they'd do X").
I know it's en-vogue to hate on Elon companies, and a lot of people would love to hear that the World's Richest Man is having financial issues, but in reality it's a bunch of starry-eyed newgrads trying to make the world better but taking on more than they can handle.
It's remarkable that, for a bunch of young people who don't know what they're doing, they've completely decimated any competitors - both public and private.
I don't know what the person you are replying to is talking about. They clearly don't know anyone who works at SpaceX. The age there does trend young, but think 24-year-old flight controller for Apollo, not intern that doesn't know anything. I have friends who work at SpaceX and gripe about how difficult it is to hire people. But not for lack of applicants--their standards are just so high. Nearly everyone working at SpaceX is cracked.
I know a few people working at SpaceX. Most are good. But a few I wonder how they ever got hired there.
As a customer of SpaceX, though, I have to say their customer service is barebones. It is almost a relief when I work with another launch provider since they provide a much better service and support. I always compare it to a low cost airline in my head, like flying Spirit instead of Emirates kind of thing.
The average age of everyone in the room at Mission Control during Apollo 11 was 28. The managers in the room were outliers (e.g. Gene Kranz was 36), which drew the average up. The median age was younger.
The Manhattan Project was made possible by similarly young grad students.
You can be as crusty as you like, but the reality is that young smart people can be extraordinarily effective under the right conditions.
Flight controllers execute the mission, but they also rely on the engineers who built the things and wrote the procedures. Flight controllers often are young, even today and even in control centres outside SpaceX. The engineers designing and building the systems tend to be a bit older.
They've outcompeted by improving their designs faster, by being willing to take risks and do stuff that might work, rather than requiring 9000 levels of process for everything. To my mind that's completely consistent with the kind of company that might lose track of some invoices and not pay until a supplier kicks up enough of a fuss.
all the other competitors are unserious and/or treating it as a money siphoning scheme. in particular, the public contractors siphoning money from the government and blue origin siphoning money from bezos.
It would be surprising if spacex wasn't just awful at paying things on time, as there's no reason they should have actual financial difficulties.
These guys are idiots, fucking morons, and can’t get anything right. Somehow they’re also outcompeting us on everything. It isn’t clear why, but it must be because we are smarter.
China very effective at copying all the stuff SpaceX is doing despite this being deliberately made difficult by ITAR, suggests there's a lot of room for the American (and ESA) competitors to be structurally inept without needing Musk's staff to be demonstrating an unusual (as opposed to industry standard) degree of genius.
They have copied the external look of the rockets (which is, for obvious reasons, not protected by ITAR), but to my knowledge no one, China or otherwise, has managed to match the internal engineering prowess nearly a decade later.
To say that China is "very effective at copying all the stuff SpaceX is doing" is quite the stretch.
I sure hope so, but also caution (admittedly as an outsider, your posts suggest greater familiarity than I have) that there's not enough evidence yet to be confident of that — finally getting to launch is really impressive, but their first orbital capable rocket is still a sample size of 1.
(Counter point is that New Glenn's one orbital launch is more impressive than all of the Starship launches combined, as SpaceX is willing to burn hardware during tests and they have many more Starship tests to go).
I know people at SpaceX, but I don't know anyone at Blue Origin. We're all very curious to know what has changed, as they very clearly have made changes. There was a large shakeup in company management there in late 2023, and the turnaround on timeline was stunning. They are certainly moving very, very fast now.
China is the world's largest economy by large (in terms of their internal costs - PPP), have 1.4 billion people meaning a proportionally larger share of extremely capable outliers, a highly capable technocratic orientated leadership with defacto authoritarian powers to get things done, and they are highly motivated to demonstrate successes in space. And a lot of SpaceX's 'secret sauce' isn't really secretive. For instance that Starship is made out of stainless steel is a big deal, but now provably correct. And rapid reuse/landing is again now obviously viable and a very good idea, which was not at all apparent for many years.
In spite of all of this they are still a very distant 2nd place behind SpaceX. If anything ITAR hurts more than helps SpaceX since it means their talent pool is strictly limited to strictly domestic talent. They seriously have something "special" going on.
Are they behind? China has a space station and they have done a sample return from the Moon. They've landed on Mars as well. If you stick to a narrow definition of rockets, there's a case to put SpaceX ahead. But overall, they are closing the gap with the US very quickly. I would not be surprised if they put humans on the Moon before Artemis or SpaceX.
Yeah I'm definitely only speaking in terms of rockets. In terms of achievements I think China is probably #1 overall, but it's close -- SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission puts them well ahead in terms of human spaceflight. That said if we just dropped the whole SLS nonsense and started dedicating NASA's $20 billion+ per year to actually doing stuff, our achievements would rapidly surpass given the edge in rocketry.
Artemis definitely isn't going to be putting anybody on the Moon. It again relies on the SLS which is just an endless money pit. But I do think it'll be interesting to see if SpaceX gets there before China. But I think the big picture is on Mars. I expect whoever gets their first will probably foretell who dominates space for the next century. Because once you can put men on Mars, the entire Solar System starts to viably become your playground.
Damn, all these fucking morons and idiots are not structurally inept and everyone else somehow is. It must be because we are very intelligent that these morons are successful.
Yeah, I've always been trying to be objective as possible when it comes to the hate sent towards Tesla, SpaceX, etc from the heat Elon is getting but having lived near Hawthorne, I've met a couple of people who worked at SpaceX and it is insane. I had a really good friend who moved from the midwest with his wife to spacex and she became a favorite at spacex which meant she lived at spacex. He would see her like once a week and eventually they went to shit. I had applied there before but after seeing that I was no longer interested
I think people in the industry know? I went to a SpaceX recruitment event back in 2010, and even then they were very upfront about it. People give their heart and soul to the company, and their turnover from burnout is shockingly high. The recruiter had some nicer way of phrasing it, but it was completely transparent what they meant.
To be a neutral as possible. The claim is very much a hit piece that makes a good soundbite or headline. Most large construction projects have single digit liens that get placed against it and in this case we don't know what % of the liens are because of contractors not paying and which are SpaceX themself.
Hadn't heard of it either until up-thread so I looked. The two primary articles that were found on a search were from Reuters and the San Antonio Express News. Most other seem to just be referencing the Reuters article and using the same quotes. Tend to think the opinion up-thread is probably close, and SpaceX is basically not paying because they can, because people want the work, and because they can make more holding the money and delaying as long as possible, while eating relatively small fees.
There's also a "somewhat" unique one from MySanAntonio that goes over the general range of lawsuits that are being filed against Musk in Texas over a range of issues. It happens to include the Reuters article lawsuits and liens as one of the many listed.
They're hard to come by because people think rockets magically solve all of our problems and so any problems they introduce are ignored for the "greater good".
That would be a separate issue, those are not the terms of a buy-out package initiated after the acquisition, but rather wanting to enforce the terms of their original agreements (because Musk terminated them).
This is not true. There are thousands of cases at various stages still in progress. This ruling was specific to one specific avenue being pursued. Source: the body of the article you posted.
Can you quote the part about thousands or provide a source? I see that there is an ongoing executive lawsuit and one for managers but didn't see anything about thousands of individual lawsuits.
> so the money to pay people to September is questionable if it exists at best
Incorrect.
The money is budgeted through September (end of federal FY). Things are currently only funded through March 15 (CRs and whatnot). The money is or will be there. Historically, even if there is a furlough, this money is backfilled and folks are paid. Note that there will probably be riots if lengthy furloughed folks don’t get back pay.
> So there's a very real chance at this deal offering something closer to ~1 month of pay before it suddenly gets dropped due to budget negotiations.
Correct.
The speculation is that:
1. The “resign” folks will be put on admin leave in March 1 (or earlier).
2. Budget impasse in mid-March. Furlough ensues.
3. Folks on admin leave just end up getting cut, or not paid, and/or not back paid due to peculiarities of admin leave.
> It would be an incredibly generous and nice buyout package, but obviously if it gets torn up after a month it's not that great of a deal.
I think it’s above average, but not “incredibly generous”. People get $25k VSIP and VERA offers all the time. This may not seem like a lot, but many fed employees live in low COL areas and/or earn relatively low wages.
The best parts of the package, assuming they deliver, would be things like insurance (for non-retirees) and possibly TSP contributions and matching (if those are allowed).
If they want the numbers they say that they want, I think something near this level of package is necessary.
So the fed defunding whatever they like by fiat gives the Republicans nothing to offer the other side to play ball because anything that they offer could easily be taken away. Its like showing up to the auction with monopoly money.
Without the dems they need almost every Republican to agree because their margin is only 5 votes. Historically this is difficult because their ranks now include several morons and extremists most notably the lady who actually believed Jews were responsible for starting wildfires with space based lasers.
If a handful of extremists don't ask for crazy nonsense they will still have every hand out for pork.
Then it goes to the Senate where it needs 60 votes including dems to pass anything. The first round of crazy if it passes anything might easily end up with something too stupid to pass the Senate without also termination of the fillibuster.
Republicans only hold the house by two seats so to pass something they need to have everyone on board. Any single republican member of congress that wants to hold the whole thing hostage for demands pretty much can.
> Is it a given there would be a budget impasse, if all institutions of power are held by Republicans?
No. American political parties are more akin to continuously-branded coalitions than parties in the way they work in parliamentary systems. There is a minority of House Republicans who will vote down any budget bill because they reject the concept of federal government.
Generally a small cadre of extremists within the ruling party holds the entire government hostage for a few days over performative nonsense for future campaign purposes.
> Is it a given there would be a budget impasse, if all institutions of power are held by Republicans?
I’m not an expert on this topic, so please take these comments with a grain of salt:
1. The simplest way a budget impasse could start is with internal feuding within the Republican Party. Some Republicans are very aggressive deficit hawks all the time. Some Republicans are only “deficit hawks” when a Democrat is president, but they spend freely when a Republican is president. Note that almost all of the largest budget deficits since 1990 have been under Republican administrations (Covid years under Trump and Biden were wonky and should probably be asterisked). So the pork-seeking Republicans and the deficit hawk Republicans can get into a stand off about what the budget should be.
2. Even if Congress is on the same page, Trump can choose not to sign the budget if he doesn’t get his pet issues addressed. This may seem like something that they should be able to work out beforehand, but his “priorities” change, sometimes daily, often based on who he happened to have spoken to last.
3. Some republicans want the government to break. The playbook here is to break the system in some way, point out that the system doesn’t work, and then make attempts to privatize that system or massively overhaul that system (likely with massive cuts of workers and largesse to contractors). It may seem odd that an elected official strives to make the government not work, but they are able to make that tack work for them at the polls. I think that this is a deep (and warped) issue that is hard for me to explain well.
Also, the last House was wracked with all sorts of deadlock because the Republican majority was only 5 representatives, and having 5 splinter off was incredibly easy.
The current House has an even smaller majority of 2 currently, so it's now infinitely more possible for a deadlock to happen.
2 are nearly guaranteed to break because we have a couple of republicans that always vote no on budget bills because they want massive cuts to everything.
That means either the bill ends up completely destroying federal funding, which risks losing centrist republicans or republicans in tight district races. Or the bill ends up trying to win over a few democrats in similarly contested districts, which risks losing a fair bit of republicans that reject any bills that have democrat votes.
The counterpoint from what I have been reading is that the Dems will not be helping without concessions, particularly about oversite regarding Elon musk, and doge.
That is what Trump is doing via DOGE so the burn-it-down camp seems pretty well served, more than anytime since the post-war demobilization anyway. The impasse, if it occurs, is more likely to be with those in Congress that don’t want to reduce the size of government.
I think the burn-it-down camp is better described as true believers in free-marketism, and they genuinely expect business to be booming and things to work great when they've cut back on government functionality.
DOGE acts different. It seems to me DOGE is about crashing the US economy and/or world economy to attempt wild and radical Silicon Valley theories about alternate societies. As such, its actions are inclined to ruin the fortunes and the business of the free marketeer camp, because those folks are functioning in the real world and have businesses, employees, and pay those employees in dollars.
So I don't think the 'burn-it-down' camp should favor DOGE. It is in no way their ally and is there to ruin them, in order to rebuild a society upon somebody else and leave 'em ruined. It's pretty plain to see DOGE's opinion of those people based on its attitude to H1B visas, for instance.
> It seems to me DOGE is about crashing the US economy and/or world economy to attempt wild and radical Silicon Valley theories about alternate societies
I see absolutely no evidence that the DOGE crowd wants to crash the economy and while they do have a utopian ideology so does the left.
Additionally, the DOGE crowd would say they’re trying to dismantle an unaccountable deep state conspiracy that threatens the American economy through an accelerating accumulation of government debt and regulations and has been trying to transform society globally for decades through political, social, economic, and military intervention all to serve the progressive elites.
I think both of your views are lacking in charity and perspective, although the DOGE view in so far as I’ve accurately described it has vastly more evidence backing it up.
The quote is “markets will tumble” by which he clarifies that it will be a temporary market overreaction not “crash the economy” like it’s 1929. Those are qualitatively different things.
He intends to make the market crash (or at least is taking actions that will almost certainly crash it), but he thinks it will recover afterwards. The first part is pretty certain with what they're doing. The second part is almost impossible to predict, because no one can really say what the break points are (i.e. how much it can crash and still quickly recover afterwards). See the mortgage crisis of 2008 for what an unexpected runaway effect looks like.
The US is $36 trillion in debt with that debt growing at an accelerating rate. This is happening at the time that our technological (let alone economic) edge over most of the rest of the world is fading to completely gone, and our own growth rate is starting to decline. To many, this does not seem to have the makings of a sustainable state of affairs.
And not only that but a lot of the spending we engage is a mixture of minimally beneficial and/or outright corrupt. For instance at one point the Air Force was paying $10,000 for toilet seats. It's only after that received extensive publicity that they swapped over to simply 3D printing the seats, probably for a few bucks per seat. [1] There's about a 99.999% chance that the supplier for those $10,000 toilet seats had a rather low degree of personal separation from the person signing off on paying $10,000 for them. And now imagine how much you could save if you started wiping this nonsense out of the entire government.
Government spending, however, is accounted as part of GDP and other economic metrics. Each one of those toilet seats sent the GDP up, improved the economics of the company delivering them, and even created some jobs. So getting rid of this nonsense will obviously 'hurt' the economy in the short-run, but in turn you get a sustainable system, dramatically reduce spending, and create a more competitive economy. When it's even possible to sell toilet seats for $10,000 (easily replaceable by 3D printing), who cares about the private market? To say nothing of the fact that merit/competitiveness is obviously completely nonexistent or farcical for many government contracts.
Filibuster is just a procedural rule that can itself be removed by simple majority, and it has already been watered down on a case by case basis when that was politically expedient, so there's no hard line there. It's actually kind of amazing that we still have it.
> The money is budgeted through September (end of federal FY). Things are currently only funded through March 15 (CRs and whatnot).
Since the budget is only funded through March, the budget can be modified in March in order to extend the funding for it (all those "government shutdown avoidance negotiations"). At which point it won't matter whether it was budgeted or not.
If they were not paid because they were on "admin leave", does that look bad for Trump, or does that look bad for Congress? And who in a Republican Congress will want to do that anyway? They're mostly on board for this bullshit aren't they?
I don't think that's ever really been a problem for Trump. Everyone I talk to who supports him expects him to be a hail-mary grenade thrown into DC—a big middle finger to the powers that be. They feel completely disenfranchised and want a shake-up.
Amazingly, so far, it hasn't hurt his approval numbers.
If you believe the unreliable polls. He actually started higher than he did in his first term. His job approval is near the highest it has ever been. It is higher than 7/8 of Bidens term. See
The numbers are irrelevant. It is a second term presidency. What matters are the numbers for those facing reelection in less than a couple years. Even the burn down crowed don't want to remain on a wagon heading for a cliff in four years.
Given the levels of turmoil and also the levels of power grabbing, I think the president's approval ratings are very relevant.
For one, if they dip as low as they might given the expected economic hardship and the other cultural issues, you might start seeing rioting.
For another, I don't think it's a given this is Trump's final term. There already is a congressman trying to get in legislation to change the constitution to allow a third term. Even if that fails, the SCOTUS has already taken some egregious decisions in relation to Trump (full presidential immunity even for political assassinations) - what they might think they can get away with in the next four years is anyone's guess.
FWIW the constitutional amendment to enable a third term for Trump is guaranteed to fail. No matter how it is drafted, even if they do a convention, the ratification still requires 3/4 of state legislatures to vote in favor. And Republicans don't have 38 states. They won't have them even if every single state with split legislature goes full red.
I won't speculate on whether they could pass it. Democrats have been too sure of themselves for the last 7 or 8 months, and where has that gotten them? But whether it passes or not, he won't survive long enough. He's an old geezer, fat, and in poor health. Strong change he doesn't even make it to the halfway mark in this one.
Nothing ever looks bad for Trump. His followers will always make excuses for him. The latest is that Trump campaigned on “America First” and isolationism and now MAGAs are cheering his ideas of using American troops to take over the Gaza Strip and making it a tourist destination.
I guarantee Trump and his sycophants will just turn around and say they were lazy bums who wanted to get paid to do nothing, and the fact that this option was presented in the form of an early retirement offer will make exactly no difference.
You've gotta understand the dynamics of social media information warfare. Loyalty trumps any other considerations like factuality or consistency, people will denounce tomorrow what they championed today if need be. I've seen some pro posters who post contradictory responses to Trump or Musk statements and then just delete whichever one gets less positive engagement.
> If they were not paid because they were on "admin leave", does that look bad for Trump, or does that look bad for Congress?
It would be Trump/Elon.
Someone told me the details of how they could not pay people. It’s administrivia. It will go unnoticed by most just like how the twitter folks not getting paid went unnoticed by most.
> And who in a Republican Congress will want to do that anyway?
They give zero fucks about fucking over feds or former Feds, as they are (allegedly) all lazy and useless.
The end result will be less money spent (trivial, but still) and a lower head count moving forward.
The Republican rhetoric on this largely doesn’t jibe with reality.
Yes, there are underemployed people in the federal government (as exist in any large org). Identifying that slack and cutting it is not something that can be done with laser shots from space. They can only be done from the ground, imho. The current way they are doing things is going to end with a lot of unpleasant unintended consequences.
Unfortunately, a big part of the Republican playbook in the last decades has been to intentionally cripple government institutions so that they can then claim that the institutions are not working well and thus should be entirely dismantled. This is done either to remove institutions that are regulating business (currently happening with the CFPB) or to replace institutions which are helping people so that private companies can step in (one of the main reasons for attacking the ACA aka Obamacare).
The idea in Project 2025 is mostly to take this to a whole new level and apply it to the majority of the federal government.
I think the adminstration's plan to execute on this is basically garden leave. They tell the "retiring" employees to stop working, but keep them on the payroll so they keep getting paid.
This administration has been playing a lot of games with "budgeted" vs. "delayed" vs. "actively being worked on" (or not). So this isn't really that different than the abrupt cancellations or delays or re-org'ing of funded and legislatively mandated work.
The main difference is the uncertainty. IMO anyone would be incredibly foolish to accept a deal from a random email with such limited info on the exact terms of what happens in edge cases like you describe: shutdown, budget shenanigans, actual official RIF, etc.
Almost any reply to a political thread in the next four years is going to be "That sounds illegal" but it's only illegal if the law gets enforced. I encourage anyone responding with "That sounds illegal" or "They can't do that" to also include in their response, "...and it will be enforced by [xxxx]." and try to come up with a realistic xxxx.
EDIT: I'm not making any judgment about whether this particular thing is legal or not--just pointing out that it doesn't matter if it's legal if nobody in power intends to enforce the law.
If you work for a local government, say, and your boss says ‘hey, here’s my plan: you stop coming to work, and I’ll make sure you get paid anyway for a few months’, if you accept those terms and go along with that plan, and then later on it turns out your boss was not allowed to do that, and you got paid a bunch of government money illegally… Normally that might come back to bite you, potentially years later. That’s the exact kind of shape and form of various public corruption scandals.
I would be very nervous about personally benefitting from what might amount to a scheme to embezzle government funds.
Just because nobody in government today is interested in looking into whether or not this is legal doesn’t mean it will never come under scrutiny.
I like the analogy, additionally, it seems like just 'stopping coming to work' is something that you could be fired for cause for. So if it comes up later that hey, this person has not been working due to a agreement that the government had no right to agree to.
Well we'll be nice and just fire them, won't even ask for salary to be returned.
You would have to go pretty far to prove to a standard I would accept that "Go work from home, and do nothing, we will keep paying you" is an illegal order.
Firstly: Its telling these people to work from their principle place of work, their home. Something thats been commonplace since covid.
Secondly, "Do Nothing" seems like a very legal thing for these people to be doing.
I suspect that theres not a court in the land that would convict a government employee for doing nothing.
In the context of general employment, "do nothing", is legal. "Wait" is legal.
Orchestrating a grand plan to waste government money by requesting multiple staff to stop working might be a grey area that the courts will decide on. But no employee would be expected to take it to court to test its validity instead of following a lawful direction.
Musk is not "requesting multiple staff to stop working" he's asking people to voluntarily resign and promising if they do they get paid until September 30 as if they had not resigned.
It's not clear to me that this is even a "direction" never-mind a "lawful direction".
The way the staff member opts into this arrangement is to write "I resign" in an email. There is no "direction" telling them to do this. It is entirely voluntary behavior on the part of the federal employee.
The issue being discussed I believe was whether they have any legal protections if they don't get paid.
I don't think anyone was claiming they'd go to jail for resigning or anything like that.
Since the promise to pay staff who resigned doesn't necessarily appear to be legal it doesn't appear they necessarily have recourse if not paid given their resignation was voluntary.
But for purposes of debating what someone should do illegal and unenforced generates the same outcomes as legal and if we're only concerned about outcomes it's rational to treat them as equivalent.
There's no difference in the short term. Something being illegal, doesn't mean it will stop anytime soon in this political situation. Remaking the same obvious point is tedious and smacks of word games to try a to make a backdoor political statement. Yes, some act is odious and against a law. Not relevant to whether or not it will have the desired consequence, regardless of who is ever held accountable.
Yikes. Not trying to make any statement other than legality and enforcement are two distinct concepts. I think it's important to consider all 4 combinations.
What political statement do you think I'm trying to make? I can't even identify what side of the aisle the statement you think I'm trying to make would fall on.
Sometimes a comment is just a comment, not a secretly coded political message.
> There is a simple dictionary difference between "legal" and "illegal.
This is kind of response is a repeat of exactly what I have described.
Again, "illegal" was used in context to mean something else. ie The damage will be remedied...which it cannot fully be, nor is it likely to be. Sampling conversations going forward from that, is where the thread has been allowed to be unraveled.
Elevating the original statement to be more than what it meant in context, is irrelevant. Posters are continually choosing new (eg dictionary!) interpretations of the sentiment at every turn.
That's amusing but irrelevant. Sometimes we may not only be concerned about what you call "outcomes." To cover those occasions, we use a variety of different words.
For the government, it largely does because the individuals are immune from lawsuits and the government fining itself is a pointless ouroboros. Many things can't be retroactively unwound reasonably.
Once the impact has been made, it's pretty sticky. Once these workers are gone and have been replaced, we're unlikely to unwind it. Once people are deported we're unlikely to un-deport them (I'm not even sure what that would mean).
Completely correct for individuals, though. Unwinding is simple there, you can just send them to jail at a later date.
The larger problem is that they are at the border of or past crimes that either will get prosecuted eventually or we are at the end of democratic controls (starting at term limits) so that these people never get prosecuted.
Looking at the Madoff saga and how some people got clawbacked decades after the fact, the wise position is to not take the offer. Today Trump is in power. Tomorrow, that might not be the case.
> How can something be illegal before any judge ruled on it?
If someone steals from you and there's been no conviction, was a crime committed or not? You're still out whatever was taken, but by your logic no theft has occurred until after someone has been convicted of committing the crime.
Exactly, until the judiciary system decides on the illegality of the act, the rest of society is oblivious to the nature of what happened. I'm sure that if something like that happened to you personally you'd know many of the facts at play, but if you cannot prove thorough the courts that something illegal occurred, it didn't
What role do you think the legislative branch of government plays? The judicial branch can rule on the constitutionality of the laws that have been passed and resolve other issues, but it isn't a requirement for the law to come into effect.
Illegal acts should be called out, even if our government is failing to enforce the law. Otherwise it will become easy for the acts to get ignored entirely.
It would be nice if anyone would state a law being violated. A lot of people seem to be making a lot of assumptions too about what DOGE/Elon are doing vs what the president or directors of the agencies (for instance) are doing
Definitely in uncharted territory, but these are some possible laws that have been violated:
Impoundment Control Act of 1974, Privacy Act of 1974, the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA), Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), Internal Revenue Code’s Section 6103.
If you're already allowing the question to be begged, there's really no need for specificity in the argument.
Because if there was no law being broken, that means that the building was not on fire. People tell me that shouting "fire!" is supposed to be bad when there is no fire. I don't think they would accept it as being "low-specificity."
We are kind of locked into what we have. A single digit percentage of House races are ever contested. The vast majority of House districts are won by the party that already holds them[1].
If 4% or 18 seats were switched four years ago why wouldn't that matter because currently the majority is thin and only a few seats. That could flip in two years. My guess after the gaza comments is more likely than not to switch.
>At minimum, drawing people's attention to the ongoing issues can result in a different batch of congressional representatives in the future.
>Politics doesn't always act on instant gratification.
The odds are slim to none since the public didn’t already act, 4 years after the previous act of treason by Trump, on top of the fact that he campaigned on pardoning his treasonous co-conspirators. In fact, he was rewarded with control of all 3 branches of government.
I would say an extraordinary amount of effort from foreign adversaries had to be undertaken to get that outcome.
Careful not to assume the public is composed of rational actors all of whom have good information, when they're demonstrably not and haven't. Drawing people's attention to the ongoing issues can result in a huge amount of buyer's remorse among people who tried hard not to pay attention to the election in hopes things could be more 'normal' if they voted for what they thought would be the political party they knew.
The Democrats were leading by 8 or more until the worst debate performance in history followed by a weak replacement. People never really cared about the capital riot. They cared about getting costs down... costs are going up with tariffing the world and businesses will suffer when they are shut out of foreign markets.
Things have already changed since the last election.
This. Remember when he literally did a commercial for Goya products from the resolute desk? His justification was that they were being "cancelled" and that the law surrounding the white house endorsing products for political support was his to enforce or not and he was just not gonna enforce it.
Sure. Remember this when people say that the dems constantly complain about the repubs, and that people are tired of hearing people say things are illegal.
My guess is that at this point, talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words.
So saying the same thing, just a different language.
And no: I have zero clue what the actions would look like. Maybe suing the govt?
Also, sounding illegal and being illegal are two different things. I really hope these discussions lead to more posts to neutral reference material, rather than just asserting things are illegal.
Indeed... welcome to the newest "failed state". Although, that term reminds me of Sarah Chayes' book on corruption, reviewed at length in [1].
> But, as Chayes studied the graft of the Karzai government, she concluded that it was anything but benign. Many in the political élite were not merely stealing reconstruction money but expropriating farmland from other Afghans. Warlords could hoodwink U.S. special forces into dispatching their adversaries by feeding the Americans intelligence tips about supposed Taliban ties. Many of those who made money from the largesse of the international community enjoyed a sideline in the drug trade. Afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, Chayes began to reassess the problem. This wasn’t a situation in which the Afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. The government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether” — the enrichment of its own members. Washington supported Hamid Karzai and his ministers and adjutants in the hope that they could establish a stable government, help pursue Al Qaeda, and keep the Taliban at bay. But the Karzai government wasn’t a government at all, Chayes concluded. It was “a vertically integrated criminal organization.”
I expect a vast sea of lawsuits. There are multiple ways that things can be enforced or not. But for some things, sure, if say, both enforcement duty and presidential pardons are used or not used to fit, then for these cases, illegal doesn't matter anymore. "It's not illegal if the president does it", was it?
In the case of taking early retirement, or accepting a pile of money for doing X / nothing, then you better be somewhat certain that it will last long enough.
Things can be illegal even if there's no enforcement mechanism, and while it's a really frustrating situation, people are right to be vocal and proactive about saying it.
Yes, and it would be valuable to help understand what enforcement agencies people think can/should do enforcement, and also to help educate those people when they're wrong.
It matters a lot in that it makes the difference between whether you can get a court injunction or not, and in that if there are sufficiently high levels of demonstrable illegality, a government would lose political legitimacy and citizens/military might simply cease obeying it.
I am not taking a position on this particular policy being legal or not, it's too technical for me to know about and it's not something I want to research.
> I encourage anyone responding with "That sounds illegal" or "They can't do that" to also include in their response, "...and it will be enforced by [xxxx]." and try to come up with a realistic xxxx.
I encourage before doing that to find out if the thing is actually illegal, and to cite the law that it violates. This will be better than relying on sounds or smells.
True. The rule of law died on Jan 20. Musk is likely doing a lot of things that are strictly illegal, but it seems quite likely that Trump has assured him he has his back with pardons if need be. Also, Trump controls federal law enforcement agencies that have likely been told to look the other way. The only legal vulnerability would be at the state level and they're not doing things there.
This kind of hyperbole isn’t helpful when the outgoing President hands out pardons like they were coupons, nor when the President can’t remember signing EOs and is known to have limited mental faculties for the past few years, all while being shielded by his inner circle. I mean the Constitution is pretty specific about a President not fit to do their job.
If you had said “the rule of law stayed dead on Jan 20th” I might disagree but it’s at least a defensible opinion.
The reason it's defensible is that now checks and balances are gone because there aren't even token checks/balances from partisanship--the remaining functions of government are controlled by a single party, purging anyone who isn't loyal and willing to do whatever they deem justified.
>You realize that the check and balances never required that different parties head each branch of government?
They do in effect, because the existence of political parties means there is no reason for members of the same party to check and balance each other across different branches, as opposed to collaborating across branches to consolidate their power.
It will be enforced by a future administration, is the answer.
If a federal civil servant receives payroll, but does no work, for months on end, they have not taken a buyout, they have defrauded the federal government. What is the statute of limitations for that crime? Longer than 4 years. And Trump is term-limited.
That said, I agree with others that the more likely outcome in this specific case is that everyone who takes the “buyout” simply has their payments cut off rather quickly.
That's called giving up and it's exactly what they want you to do. Do not concede without a fight. Call your elected representatives and tell them you expect them to hold these people accountable and to be loud about it.
They're doing something you don't like so the assumption is that it's illegal, but people aren't even sure what law it's supposed to be. And they're probably right that it's illegal, because there are so many laws that any given thing is a violation of any number of them. But that's the problem. If you actually enforced all of the laws on the books, everyone would be in jail.
The only reason they aren't is not that most people are violating precisely zero of the many thousands of laws they've never even heard of, it's strictly a lack of enforcement.
Which is where that attitude comes from: If the only reason anybody isn't in jail is that they haven't become a target and so nobody has bothered to look up which laws they're breaking, whether you broke a law or not is no longer relevant because the answer is always yes, and the thing that determines whether you go to jail is who your friends (or enemies) are.
If you want to get back to the rule of law, you need to get back to having only laws that ordinary people can understand, remember and follow.
which representative? the one that "represents" a cracked district and doesn't see me as a constituent? or the senator who also doesn't see me as a constituent because of my address?
My understanding is that when a job is available, it is because a job billet has been approved, which means that the position is funded through the lifecycle of the position.
The job isn’t going away, the person is going away. Was the job needed? Look at any employer and ask that.
That's because of a then ongoing pandemic and making an allowance. That's completely different than just do nothing for 6+ months then quit. If you can't see that, there's no hope for this discussion.
So the OPM grants them a sabbatical or extended vacation or a hundred other things they have the discretion to do.
Pretending or hoping everything unorthodox or unprecedented is somehow illegal is already becoming tiresome to read about in comment sections and it hasn’t even been a month of this administration.
If they were serious about the offer, they would get it passed through Congress on a party line vote via reconciliation, they have the votes, there is nothing the Dems could do to stop it.
> so doing this is pointless and only going to slow you down.
That's a feature. Going slow and giving Democrats a chance to howl is called "democracy". It's our system. Unilaterally moving fast and breaking things without even allowing a chance for debate or input from the minority party is a different system, called "autocracy".
And that Republican majority can pass bills through the Congress, and the Republican president can sign them into law, and the elected Democrats get to have their say. But MAGA can't just come in and completely trash everything people did just because they disagree with the priorities that came before them. How would you run a country that way, if you have to start from scratch every 4 years? How could you operate a business that way, if things you do can just be made illegal by decree? How can you run a research agenda if your secured funding can just be pulled at will?
I’m certain you felt the exact same way when Biden spent his first weeks in office doing the exact same thing, issuing executive orders to systemically reverse everything Trump did in 4 years.
It must have been deeply upsetting when the White House press secretary was asked at the time why he was skipping congress, and she said that Biden was not going to “delay action” by going the legislative route.
And I’m sure you’ll feel the same way when the next Democrat president does it too right?
Biden was my 10th option for POTUS, and I felt about his overreach the same way I feel about Trump's. But Biden is gone, Trump is POTUS, and what Trump is doing still represents a new overreach into territory that, again, the other side would not like if it were applied to them, yet you seem to be reveling in it.
> It must have been deeply upsetting when the White House press secretary
yes.
> And I’m sure you’ll feel the same way when the next Democrat president does it too right?
yes. You're trying to catch me in a "gotcha" but I don't support abuse of power no matter which side is abusing that power.
Possibly you’re a victim of the super polarized environment today but this is hard to believe. You’ve written dozens of comments attacking the current administration. How much ink did you spill over Biden 4 years ago?
How about instead of questioning me personally we focus on the discussion at hand? My personal politics don't matter, but since you're making it about that, I'm a leftist so I don't see how it's hard to believe I don't agree with Biden on most things.
Like most people on HN, I don't comment about politics here often, but I made my displeasure known at the time in other social circle. I'm here now, as I think most people are, because this is some next-level shit. Comparisons to anything Biden did are strained.
I generally don't find it hard to maintain a consistent view of executive power no matter who is wielding it, because it always comes back to: what if it was wielded against you? This is the question everyone who is in support of this right now needs to be asking themselves.
The last time democrats wielded this much power they created the new deal.
The last time republicans wielded this much power we became a global power.
Both Roosevelts.
Both hated by their opposition.
History looks kindly on both.
Trump is not a Roosevelt, but in a way neither were they in their day.
I’m a centrist. I believe the greatest living president is Clinton and it’s not even close. I hope leftsts become pragmatic again and choose a Clintonesque nominee next time.
Wait you believe the greatest living president is the one responsible for the whole concept of “if we make China rich they’ll become a friendly democracy”?
The policies that backfired so spectacularly that the working class voted in Trump for some degree of reversal?
If you can’t see that precedent has been set for this already, given the implementer and their proclivities, there is indeed no hope for this discussion.
Or were you just trying to bash trump because you’re angry?
That’s cool if you’re angry, but you’re missing the actual debate.
Sure, but those same employees also had to stay home not working for months while they were getting their clearances, so clearly that's considered reasonable.
Yes it is. That regulation is just not currently being enforced. Which is an important difference because at some point down the line retroactive enforcement might occur.
The way things are escalating between the two parties, perhaps even somewhat likely to occur. But who knows, perhaps presidential pardon can be generalized - before it becomes necessary to reign it back.
the problem is that email has no legal basis. They make promises they are not entitled to make. This is really, really bad, it's like someone that doesn't work for your company at all and is just friends with your CEO sent you a buyout proposal from their personal email.
yeah this is not a buyout, this is someone asking people to resign and that MAYBE their employer will look the other way while they don't work until the effective resignation date but no guarantees about it.
That's a setup for firing people on the spot for cause if I've ever seen one.
It is incredibly foolish to entertain this offer. OPM v Richmond[1] held that the government has effectively zero liability for lying about financial benefits that haven't been specifically authorized by Congress.
Fortunately, the current US president has a long and storied history of going out of his way to pay people mutually agreed-upon sums from prior contracts.
Kind of odd seeing people casually discuss the mechanics/details of what's been going on this last week, as if they whole thing isn't just flagrantly illegal.
If they don’t fulfill their end of the agreement (paying until the date in question) then surely any agreement to quit in return for X months pay would be broken? So you’d still be employed unless the pay out is made?
This is where I go ”I know nothing about US law but if I wouldn’t win this argument in any court even without representation then it must be fundamentally broken”
The argument would be ”those who entered the agreement didn’t have the authority to do so” but obviously that can’t hold water.
The question is whether if the deal gets voided by the court, the employee has to still quit or whether they can then return. Especially since the employee wouldn't be formally terminated until the end of the twelve months.
Have the exact payment details been released? Because I understood it as "you will get paid same as always through September, you just don't have to show up to work". Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that doesn't sound like a "buyout" in the traditional sense.
It is not a buyout. OPM has said that agencies can opt to put people who choose this on administrative leave (but they don't have to, they can keep the people working). So the effect is what the name is "deferred resignation", OPM pinky swears that you won't be cut before 30 September in a RIF or other actions if you take this offer and you'll get your biweekly pay as normal.
What's your source for the assertion that it's not a buyout and it's up to the individual agency if the employee is required to continue working? You might be right that it's not a buyout, but the official Office of Personnel Management FAQ seems to clearly describe it as one:
Q: Am I expected to work at my government job during the deferred resignation period?
A: No.
Q: Am I allowed to get a second job during the deferred resignation period?
A: Absolutely! We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so. The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.
Q: Will I really get my full pay and benefits during the entire period through September 30, even if I get a second job?
A: Yes. You will also continue to accrue annual leave and sick leave during the deferred resignation period until you separate. You will be paid a lump sum for accrued but unused annual leave upon separation.
Q: Can I take an extended vacation while on administrative leave?
A: You are most welcome to stay at home and relax or to travel to your dream destination. Whatever you would like.
> I am certain of my decision to resign and my choice to resign is fully voluntary. I understand my employing agency will likely make adjustments in response to my resignation including moving, eliminating, consolidating, reassigning my position and tasks, reducing my official duties, and/or placing me on paid administrative leave until my resignation date.
That is what resigners agree to. There is no guarantee of leave and it is up to their agency, not OPM. The FAQ has previously contained information contradicting the OPM Fork letter so it's not surprising the two pages disagree still.
It's not a buyout because it is not a lump sum severance. The payout for annual leave is given to all departing feds (resigning or retiring or RIF'd), it is not unique to this offer.
Doesn't the budget to pay these people already exist? They are current employees, after all. Their terminations will still shrink the budget, just not as soon as a termination without a severance package.
Maybe there are some legal differences in offering what would otherwise be wages as a lump-sum payment, but the budget for those wages already exists (else they could not be employed).
Didn’t the budget already include pay for these people through the end of the fiscal year though? Will they need more money if the people stop working now vs stopping in September?
The government is still an employer and subject to the same liability if not more so. I'd think workers would have a strong case to sue for damages if that happened. I'd take that bet. I can't imagine a situation where a judge wouldn't side with the employee on this.
Not American here. Isn't Congress controlled by Republicans? If I understand correctly, it would take 5+ Republicans voting against the party line for a Republican bill to fail to pass? Is this common?
For the House of Representatives, the state will hold a special election to fill vacancies:
> When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.
- Article I, Section 2
For the Senate, the governor of the state may (per their legislative body's approval) make a temporary appointment and will also hold a special election:
> When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.
If the gov will not be funded and you don't believe the gov will honor it's severance agreement why would you believe the employment contract will be honored after March 14?
There’s many examples of government shutdowns where workers received back pay even when they didn’t work those hours.
So future administrations are likely to retroactively approve payments if it becomes a political issue. Honestly taking the buyout without an act of congress backing it is likely the more risky here unless you where already planning to leave which is likely why most people took it.
By law they have to be paid for the furloughed time in the case of a shutdown, since 2019. Previously, they were typically paid for that time whether they had to work through the shutdown or not but it was not guaranteed.
The employees, suing in Federal court, since they have a clear and obvious loss to point to, they will have standing. Judges can either obey the law or not. If they don't obey the law, then we are much further along on the authoritarian spectrum then everyone thinks, but so far Musk has lost a lot of court cases and has several emergency injunctions against him doing anything.
Judges can write as many judgments as they want, but who's going to enforce those judgments? Only an executive branch that is interested in the rule of law is going to care about judgments.
That was a different situation because those people continue to be employees. The gov gave them back pay during shutdown because it wants them to continue to work after the shutdown (so services keep being rendered).
In this case, Trump/Musk don't want these workers back, so there's no political incentive or pressure to pay them. They can just not do so if it's "not funded by Congress" (usually there's fine print about this, at least there is in gov contracts, which are similar).
I recall there being some significant gaps, so these people had already returned to work.
But it’s not just about current workers, new administrations have handed out money to people for past issues years or sometimes decades after the fact. Just as an example the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was about compensation for people exposed during the Cold War.
$50,000 to individuals residing or working "downwind" of the Nevada Test Site
$75,000 for workers participating in atmospheric nuclear weapons tests
$100,000 for uranium miners, millers, and ore transportershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Exposure_Compensatio...
I can’t blame anyone for taking the risk. That’s life changing money for normal people. And if you’re in a good spot to get a new job fast, I could see taking a chance on it.
Well, their positions are funded (depending on how FY25 funds were allocated to the agency). The order just means they can potentially not come to work until September.
Well it is a good thing Trump and co are so well known for paying what they owe. These people are dumb if they take the offer. Job market has been cooked for 3 years already, these people will not fair well.
Correct. Donald Trump has had a reputation for stiffing people for close to 50 years now.
These workers will resign, and won't get paid what they were told they'd get paid.
This is a man who is so cheap, so petty, he held up billions of dollars worth of economic relief during COVID just so he could have his signature on a bunch of stimulus checks.
Can we not just make things up please? His buyout plan was approved by congress and signed into law before he allowed anyone to opt in which is the entire crux of the issue.
I wrote it elsewhere, but no. It may or may not be a paid vacation. Agencies get to decide themselves, not OPM, whether the employees are put on leave or continue to work. There is zero guarantee that anyone will get administrative leave under the offering.
And what happens when you try to come back to work? Will Musk pay you or allow you into the office? He literally has control of the federal budget for payments now.
We are getting into banana republic territory now with no rule of law.
I definitely wouldn't put it past Elon Musk to offer a buyout, collect a list of names who "accept" and then fire them all as disloyal, without any buyout. It would be on-character.
Specifically we're getting into territory where political actors choose to behave like there is no rule of law, in hopes they will be believed.
Not sure about that one. Nor do I think the election would have gone the way it did if people generally figured their choice was to have Elon Musk's word be law, and everything else including the Constitution to be thrown away as old hat.
I really don't think people priced that into their decision, so buyer's remorse becomes a real factor. People may demand that rule of law not be thrown away.
Political actors are already acting like there is no rule of law. Denying birth right citizenship, promising benefits to people that wasn’t funded, declaring the TikTok ban that was passed by overwhelming bipartisan majority and upheld by a conservative Supreme Court wasn’t relevant, giving Musk so much power, etc.
We are way past the point of rule of law.
While the population as a whole may not be in favor of it, because of how the way the electoral college works, even knowing what they know now, he would win. Not to mention how the Senate is setup - each state has two senators regardless of size - and gerrymandering.
Hell at this point, I hope they reinstate the full state tax deduction, let states tax more, defund the federal government and let the red states rot in poverty and the Blue wealthier states work together
The list of expenditures never authorized by Congress is staggering. You're spot-on about the authorization risk but it's just the latest in a perpetual issue. Congress has normalized funding "zombie programs" through autopilot appropriations rather than proper reauthorizations. Notable zombie programs include VA health, women's health spending, NIH research...
House Rule XXI (blocking unauthorized spending) gets waived a majority of the time. 50% of expired programs haven't been reviewed in 10+ years. 2023 alone saw $236B in improper payments.
So IMO while the buyout could get axed the pattern suggests they'll likely kick the can with another CR. Perhaps this administration will try to force a different tack, I suppose we'll see.
As someone who worked on a NIH funded project whose funding wasn’t renewed last fall after 10 years. Those 10 years included a bunch of renewals. NIH projects aren’t zombie and need constant attention. Plus all research done has to be put in the public domain.
》 So there's a very real chance at this deal offering something closer to ~1 month of pay before it suddenly gets dropped due to budget negotiations.
I do not see your arguments
US has worker protections, even if US government goes bancrupt, it has to pay its obligations. And if government refuses to pay, no worker, even if employed, is getting anything!
And you think that an offer accepted by sending an email with "Resign" in the subject line is subject to these protections? You think DOGE is even authorized to make said offers? Why, because Elon and Trump said so?
Also your last line is just bizarre. The US government can very much selectively pay some parties but not others during a shutdown. That's kind of the definition of a shutdown....
Plus this administration is already brazenly breaking laws. You think they won't violate worker protection laws? Sure, maybe the courts sort it out in a year or two, small comfort to the people who were relying on that income to pay their rent in the meantime.
The requirements for making a contract are minimal. If your friend says "I bet you a hundred dollars that you can't run over there and back in less than a minute" and you say nothing in response but start running, you've entered into a binding contract. Your other points still stand, but an email that makes an offer and makes it clear that you accept by responding "Resign" and a response to that email that says "Resign" is definitely sufficient to be subject to contract law.
Binding on illegal contracts is tricky. If I offer X for murder, and you do the murder and I don't pay you; you can't seek recompense in the courts.
If the government's offer is illegal, those who accepted it and performed their part of the contract may not be able to force the government to perform its part.
I think I agree, on reflection, that it is not a binding contract. But (correct me if I'm wrong) I don't think it's a matter of consideration- in a wager, each party stands to gain the agreed upon amount depending on the outcome, which should qualify for that criteria AFAICT. I think the informality of a between-friends bet and gambling laws are what do the example in.
Yeah that clarification helps and I agree there - there's a bunch of exceptions of 'joking bets' etc. I first read the offer as "I'll give you $100 if you can run there and back in under a minute" rather than each party being able to win the $100 which would indeed satisfy the consideration requirement.
This is confidently wrong. The requirements for contracting with the federal government are nothing like the requirements between private citizens. There are specific statutory procedures which must be followed for an enforceable government contract, including but not limited to congressional funding.
Maybe I should have quoted the part I was disagreeing with, but I thought I had made it clear.
>And you think that an offer accepted by sending an email with "Resign" in the subject line is subject to these protections?
I'm saying that if you say "accept this agreement by sending 'Resign' in the subject line" and someone does so, that's a legally valid offer and acceptance of a contract. Are standards higher for the federal government on this?
Here's a quick blurb from a law firm blog, notice the "acts at its peril" language which is not the standard for private citizens contracting together:
"Authority Issues. Contract awards and contract modifications may be made on behalf of the government only by duly appointed contracting officers acting within the limits of both available funding and their delegated authority. This public policy principle of limited authority is strongly supported in the law. To the extent that a company incurs costs based upon the directions or promises of government persons without this essential authority, the company does so at its financial risk. Moreover, the contractor has the responsibility to know the scope of authority of the government official with whom it deals, and acts at its peril."
No, they don't. Contracts are enforced by the threat of the state's monopoly on violence. If the US goes bunk, who exactly are you going to to get your money? The courts are bunk too.
Even if the government exists, if Trump and Musk hold the payment system and you somehow get a judge to tell them to pay, they can just say no. Then what? Are you going to go Rambo? They hold a monopoly on violence and imprisonment.
This is why government's need to be set up with so many layers of indirect power and checks against direct power. this is why the military (should) have no role in governance.
If congress doesn't allocate the money, they won't be paid, even if they have a contract that says they will.
Imagine Trump decided to offer a worker a trillion dollars. He writes a contract with the worker. It is irrelevant - the worker won't be paid because the executive branch is not allowed to spend money that hasn't been authorized by congress.
> The buyout offer entitles federal employees to stop working more or less immediately and continue to be paid through Sept. 30.
> The federal workforce's normal attrition rate is about 6% a year, meaning some of those who've taken the buyout may have been planning to leave government service anyway.
Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving...
>> Congress technically already authorized it when it approved the FY 2025 budget. That's why they are getting paid to September. That money was already approved and appropriated by congress, signed into law, and is the budget for that agency. They're spending that money how congress directed them to, but in a way congress likely never anticipated.
No money has been appropriated beyond March 14th.
"the promise to pay employees beyond Mar. 14 is unauthorized. The Anti-Deficiency Act prohibits an agency from entering a contract 'before any appropriation is made unless authorized by law.' The deferred resignation program offers employees pay that is not currently appropriated. Current appropriations will expire on Mar. 14th and, therefore, agencies currently lack the legal authority to agree to pay employees beyond this date."
Congress hasn't actually agreed on a FY2025 budget though right? We're just running on Continuing Resolutions currently. So the budget is actually subject to change when this CR runs out March 14th.
In addition to what the others have stated regarding the 2025 budget being locked... Congress also authorized a lot of the things being ransacked right now like USAID. The rule of law seems to offer very little real protections here. So much of the US government is run on precedent and tradition and is incredibly vulnerable (as we're finding out) to folks who give zero fucks about precedent and tradition. Unfortunately the Democratic Party is still completely beholden to those precedents and traditions and have absolutely no clue how to handle opponents who don't.
Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving...
I'm guessing the vast majority who take the deal were already planning to leave? So we're wasting tax payer money giving them 8 months severance when it could have been 0.
I also suspect that there really isn't nearly as much "waste" here as Musk is alleging, so we are going to be forced to re-hire people, while still paying a ton of workers for 8 months of no work.
This doesn't seem "efficient" to me, but "efficient" is a word that doesn't actually mean anything without context, which they don't provide.
I suspect that after all these cuts, they're going to realize that some of these things actually are required in order for the American people not to complain too much.
I just remember in Trump's first term, and this is something that has stuck with me since, was how he promised, on day one, to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, only for a few weeks after taking office saying "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated" [1]. It was funny, because pretty much everyone but Donald Trump knew that healthcare could be extremely complicated. The ACA was not repealed, at least not completely, nor was it replaced.
I think a similar thing might happen in a month or two; these departments are going to be cut, there will be lots of delays and complaints and eventually Trump will go out and say "No one knew that these government services were actually necessary". Then they might have to rehire a bunch of the people that left.
I'm skeptical. Most of these federal jobs either marginally improve millions of lives or are completely critical for 10k Americans. The former is so spread out it will be hard to connect the dots; chronic stress of wondering why is everything sus these days. The latter mostly serves the already disenfranchised, e.g. adult daycare cuts.
> Most of these federal jobs either marginally improve millions of lives or are completely critical for 10k Americans.
Firstly, are you basing this assertion on any sort of reality, or are you just 'sus' about it?
Secondly, marginal improvements for millions of people in many different areas is nothing to scoff at - that is precisely what a government is supposed to do - and will add up to very significant improvements very quickly.
I don't think that they're saying that doing marginal improvements for millions of people is anything to scoff at, I that they are saying that it's a lot more difficult to directly quantify.
The only thing that saved the ACA was McCain who saved it as the last great act at the end of his life.
All of the sensible, principled Republicans have died or retired. The modern Republican Party seem willing to go off the cliff with him.
The tech sector is firmly in his pocket and all of the news media are owned by corporate giants who are literally bribing him to get what they want by “settling lawsuits”.
I always thought it was silly when people said they are leaving the country if $x wins even during the first Trump administration. But I’ve never seen anything like this or imagined the complete disregard for the law by either party before and I’m 50.
Yeah, I'll admit it's kind of wishful thinking on my end.
My wife is a Mexican immigrant. She does have a green card, and our attorney has filed the paperwork for her citizenship about four months ago. She's probably fine, but it's scary. I have to keep an ear to the ground for the news, and figure out if we need to evacuate.
Who the hell knows what is going to happen? If Trump signs some sort of order revoking all green cards, even if it gets struck down by some miracle, a lot of damage can still be done in the interim.
We have our immigration attorney's phone number on speed dial. It's depressing that I have to do that, but I'm not sure what else I can do.
He’s already made thousands of Venezuelans illegal immigrants that were here legally under temporary protection status and threaten deportation and tried to revoke birthright citizenship.
He’s definitely going to do his best to keep people out from “shit hole countries that only send rapists and murderers” (if it isn’t clear, I don’t hold that opinion)
I'm gonna wait until the next Presidential election but if it is won by a Trump loyalist I will try very hard to move to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Australia, etc.
A fascist dictatorship? You still need a functioning government for that. (It doesn't function for the people, but it still requires a large number of competent employees.)
Anarchy? Mad Max? Everybody dies, so no government employees are needed?
Takeover by Canada, Mexico, China, or Russia, so it becomes their problem?
Or do you just claim that they're so stupid that they haven't thought past "Hur, let's, like, destroy the government, man"?
Seriously, what do you actually claim that they actually want?
That functioning police force needs a functioning tax collection system to fund it, and a functioning civil society to pay for it. So you need enforcement of contracts, and a functioning financial system, and working roads, and all kinds of stuff. You can't just sit there and say "we've got the police, so none of the civilians can touch us" - not for long, anyway.
If you look how every dictatorship works, they always make sure that the military and police force do well. That and they look the other way when police steal from people.
Sure they do. And to do that, they need a functioning society, at least functioning well enough to produce the things that the military and the police need and want. (And that means that the police can't steal too much from people.)
A dictatorship can't be just a thugocracy. It has to keep society running, perhaps not up to western capitalist standards, but at least above the point of collapse.
And there is always prison labor that you can depend on. Especially with private prisons. Prison labor is already being used to fight wildfires in LA for instance and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. That’s cheap labor and another benefit it’s all those “drug dealing thugs” anyway.
> Or do you just claim that they're so stupid that they haven't thought past "Hur, let's, like, destroy the government, man"?
I don't think they've thought much past that.
We can look at the US Postal Service as a bit of a microcosm of this entire situation. Conservatives have been complaining about the Post Office my entire life, using that to restrict funding to it, which causes it to operate worse, then use that as justification to reduce funding to the Post Office, in a frustrating cycle. There's probably several reasons to why they do this, but I think the main one is that their goal is to replace it with private, for-profit "equivalents", like FedEx or UPS or DHL.
I suspect that this might be a similar thing. They're wrecking the government by yanking away all funding, causing things to get worse, and then using that as proof that the government does things badly, so they can replace these things with for-profit versions that we contract out.
You act as if any of these people are logical. My best guess is that they want all of the power in the states and to privatize whatever is necessary for their cronies to profit from much like Putin did in Russia.
Some of the Republicans just want to maintain power after Trump is gone.
Trump is stupid and easily led and operates out of grift and animus. Musk is definitely going to get something out of this. Most likely federal contracts.
Also a lot of Trump voters see him as their best defense to maintain their “way of life” and see the trends where the US is becoming a majority/minority, secular country. It was bad enough that this country let an “uppity Black” run the country for 8 years.
I don't think there's really a meaningful "they" as a single entity there.
It might sound weird, but I believe Musk is genuinely on some kind of a megalomaniac mad scientist superproject that requires taking power of the largest world economy to realize, quite possibly involving Mars. The guy is narcissistic to the extreme, and I think he really wants to end up in the textbooks as some kind of messiah figure on a planetary scale.
Trump's political desires are much too primitive and gut-driven to classify as "fascism"; really any authoritarian arrangement will serve him just fine, but if his inner circle arranges full-on fascism for him, he'll take it.
Then you have the Christian nationalists, who have very specific plans about, well, everything, but are also very sure that what they are doing is in accordance with God's plan and desires and therefore by definition great and cannot fail.
Then there's all the big biz tagging along for the sake of deregulation and lower taxes mostly, but also to try to be there to slow things down wrt stuff that hurts them directly like tariffs.
I think that's a legitimate question. I can float a possible explanation, though I can't come up with more than a lot of circumstantial evidence (anyone following this line of politics will be aware of all that).
You mention Russia, and I think it's Russia, but you're wrong that it becomes their problem. It's their opportunity and their revenge for the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR.
Trump's run by them, in some fashion, and doesn't really know anything about the systems he's dismantling. He's just being instructed where to do the most damage, and to run his mouth in any sort of way to provide justification. It doesn't matter if he's believed.
All the stuff he's breaking is fundamental to American power, notably soft power exerted on the world, but also the R&D, the health system, the whole nine yards. Russia wishes all of that to be destroyed and not brought back. They would like it if the dollar is not the world's reserve currency. They'd like it if the world behaved as though Russian claims of the CIA lurking behind every tree overthrowing every government, were accurate and legitimate descriptions of what the USA really is.
So that's Trump and the relatively few people firmly in his corner, 'Freedom Caucus' types who've been known to openly threaten their peers with Russian blackmail, and of course Russia itself which publically made an announcement about how they expected great payback from the help they'd given Trump in this election.
Now, to Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their ilk. Unlike Trump, they are not completely dependent on Russia. In fact some of them like Musk actively collaborate with Russia as equals. There's a catch: Russia doesn't want to deal with equals and won't help people who are too powerful. So, Elon Musk is in some ways going rogue even in this context. He is probably trying to execute Russia's goal of ruining the US because he's imagining some kind of reinvention of society, and he probably believes he'll have Russia's help behind him as he transforms society into some godawful mess he'd like, perhaps like one from his childhood.
He's likely to be horribly surprised to discover that he has not gained Russian trust, even though he's served them well. Trump is completely theirs, but Elon can't be trusted unless he's completely ruined, so what Elon wants is Bond-villain power, and no matter what happens he's not getting that fantasy fulfilled. This is his high point, while he is still doing the damage his allies need. Once that's done, he's on borrowed time.
That's what they want. None of them expect it to be 'a functioning government' for various reasons.
A large part of the GOP playbook around their goal of smaller government is to make the government work worse then use that to argue government can't do the job and it shouldn't do it or it needs to be privatized. "We can't give immigrants their due process before deporting them that takes forever! (We also refuse to expand the number of judges serving those cases)" "Public schools are horrible and don't work! (We've been choking their budget for decades)" etc etc.
Well, it depends on what goals Trump and Musk consider worthwhile. Just hypothetically, if they dont consider healthcare for all a worthwhile goal - possibly every dollar spent on Obamacare is waste from their perspective.
I think they will find a lot of waste - question is if people in the USA will agree.
Well that's what I mean, "efficiency" is a term that doesn't mean anything in isolation, and because of that they can define it to mean whatever they want it to mean and declare victory as a result.
I also think there might be some shady math going on; they're counting every canceled thing as "savings", but I don't think they're going to count the cost of rehiring the lost workers and redoing these contracts.
A lot of federal workers spend their time overseeing projects run by the private sector. Whether or not those projects are worth doing, funds have been appropriated and the private sector will get their day in court and get their funding. Now with no oversight from some useless bureaucrat (our project manager defending our interests).
> Well that's what I mean, "efficiency" is a term that doesn't mean anything in isolation, and because of that they can define it to mean whatever they want it to mean and declare victory as a result.
Efficiency does have a sensible definition in isolation: an efficient system is one in which there are no more Pareto improvements. From the government perspective, you could consider this in terms of the cost/service frontier, and actions which move the government towards that frontier improve efficiency.
However, I do agree with your practical concern that 'efficiency' is being used without regard at all for the services being delivered. This seems particularly likely since the government is attempting to eliminate whole departments or agencies by executive order, implying it gives no value to said services.
Pareto Efficiency should not be the be-all-end-all (and only one subset of "efficiency", so your definition is only useful in isolation to Pareto Efficient). It only guarantees nothing is worse off, but that's only a relative comparison. A result of 99% of the wealth goes to 1 individual and 1% of the wealth is with everyone else is Pareto Efficient but not a good world! Efficiency can also be used amorally, e.g., Death Camps are an efficient way to kill undesirables!
> Efficiency does have a sensible definition in isolation: an efficient system is one in which there are no more Pareto improvements. From the government perspective, you could consider this in terms of the cost/service frontier, and actions which move the government towards that frontier improve efficiency.
I had to look up Pareto improvement, and I don't think that many systems exist where improvements are better in "every way" like the definition suggests.
For example, most big tech companies will use something like Kubernetes (or an equivalent) to deploy multiple instances of a service and then load balance between them, even when none of them have reached full capacity.
In one sense, this is "inefficient", in that we have computers sitting idle that could be doing work, but it's also efficient in another sense, which is to minimize downtime; if one of the computers or service crash, you won't experience much (or any) downtime because one of the replicas will handle requests.
Someone could get rid of all the replicas and then claim victory in that they made things "more efficient" by reducing the cost, but that will come at the expense of possible downtime.
Every system is different, and figuring out where on the spectrum you draw that line is rarely clear-cut, and there is almost always tradeoffs no matter what decision you make. Sometimes you can live with more downtime and it's better to cut the costs of the extra computers, sometimes downtime is not an option and you need a ton of redundancy.
Humans are not computers, so it's not the best analogy in the world, but I think it still mostly holds; it looks like in a hand-wavey way they're just defining efficiency as "spending less money", but that really doesn't make any sense unless you can show that you're getting comparable results while spending less cash.
I'm not saying that the government is perfect with spending money, obviously, and it's entirely possible that DOGE will find something that really should be eliminated. I'm just saying that it's rarely cut and dry, and it's very rare that cutting something is just a universal net improvement.
Well you can be sure the billionaire aligned media will only tell the part of the story in their best interest, so who knows how much of the actual story will be told to any portion of the population.
This is one of the problems with voluntary redundancy, which is quite common in some countries. You do tend to lose the people who can easily find jobs elsewhere and get left with the people who can’t, so it selects for a less skilled workforce when all’s said and done.
I would not leave. Getting into the federal system was hard before, it's going to be near impossible now. For people who are not AI experts, engineers, doctors, etc. the federal government offers pay and benefits unparalleled to anything those same people would find in the private sector. Not to mention the job protections that really don't exist in any other private sector American company.
I feel like that used to be true, but I'm not sure it's been true for the last ~decade or so. My mom works for the federal government as an attorney. She likes her job, but she has mentioned to me that there are just as many layoff rounds, if not more, as you'd get in the private sector.
Moreover, there are a lot of things that are kind of bullshit; her office refused to provide paper towels or soap in the kitchen, so she had to spend her own money and bring them in herself.
Are soap or paper towels expensive? No, it's not beyond her means, but it's not like most private sector jobs "brag" about having paper towels near the sink, it's usually not considered a "perk".
ETA:
Just a note, these complaints go back to even the Obama years, I think.
I would also worry whether I would receive my pension payouts. Depending upon future governments to pay out for your work investment seems risky. My ignorant impression is that pension funds will always be raided (whether private or government) and payments seem to decrease regardless of past promises.
Here's a detailed look at how total compensation compares between the private sector and federal positions by education level: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235
The key takeaways:
- staffers with high school or some college make more, on average, working for federal gov't, primarily due to the benefits. But it's an exaggeration to describe the difference as "unparalleled"
- comp is roughly equivalent for holders of bachelor's
- comp for holders of professional degrees or doctorates (JD, MD, MBA, PhD) is significantly lower on average for federal jobs
> For people who are not AI experts, engineers, doctors, etc. the federal government offers pay and benefits unparalleled to anything those same people would find in the private sector.
This is just not really true. I work in the private sector with former federal employees and every single one is making more money now than they were in government.
What is true is that there are jobs in the government that are not available at all in the private sector, like prosecutor, police officer, military officer, spy, law clerk, legislative director, special agent, etc.
Many of these require high educational achievement and/or expensive training and are compensated to attract talented people. But it’s also true that most of those people who leave for the private sector make more money there.
> if you already happened to be planning on leaving...
This is why you should ignore any absolute numbers about people taking the buyout.
You want to look at the relative percentage taking the deal compared to their normal turnover.
If the number of people taking the "buyout" isn't significantly higher than their normal turnover, that's a sign that they're just overpaying people who were already leaving.
I heard that on average 10,000 employees retire every month. So if you had planned to retire in Jan/Feb/Mar, you might as well take the buy out and gain a few extra months of basically "free pay". That is assuming that it actually arrives in your bank account.
Except that the money hasn't been approved by congress and will probably never be paid because the employees will have absolutely no method of redress it it is not.
> Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving...
What does "planning on leaving" mean? I am personally planning on leaving this year, if a better opportunity shows up. As I was last year.
"Planning on leaving" means very little until you have a firm offer in hand. And when you do have that offer, then you are just leaving, not "planning on leaving".
>> The buyout offer entitles federal employees to stop working more or less immediately and continue to be paid through Sept. 30.
Except it doesn't entitle them to stop working. OPM cannot tell workers to stop working or put them on leave. It's up to their agency to determine if they will keep them working or put them on leave. The framing by whoever is in OPM is disingenuous.
When you put it that way it does seem like a win win for both sides. The Trump haters get almost a year of paid vacation and the administration gets less internal drama.
Pretty standard government worker deal. I am not crying too many tears over government workers facing just a smidge of the uncertainty that everyone else has been living with since Covid. Your salary/promotions/healthcare/retirement are no longer guaranteed by just doing enough to not get fired (which is almost impossible)? Boo hoo, Welcome to the reality that everyone else in the world works in. In tech we are scrabbling for jobs, navigating layoffs, and fighting tooth and nail to prove we create value and justify our salaries. I don't think it is cruel to request "public servants" do the same.
8 months paid would be an insane deal for private industry layoffs. We all just get a sad email and some well wishes.
Most of us in tech also get paid far, far more than anyone in the public sector. It’s always been my perception that the reliability of the job is a perk that makes up for the subpar salaries. I don’t think public sector workers are as spoiled as you make out.
I work in private industry (cybersec) and we have a pension + 401k w match. It's great. I dont think I would ever work for the state or federal gov. Their pay sucks.
Both!? That's unusual, congrats. My point is that the straight pay comparison to a gov employee doesn't count as people go there for the safety and pension. Pensions can really add up the total amount and the spouse collects money as well after the pensioner passes on.
To compare to a private job, the actual pay a public employee made per hour of work cannot be known until after the pensioner and spouse are deceased.
I've always found this approach of reducing the number of employees unwise from the company perspective (but pretty good for the employees, though).
While the unsatisfied employees are the target, my observations indicate that a high percentage of active and skilled people are willing to take this offer, as they are sure that they will find a new place within a reasonable time, so it's basically, free money. And those are the people that the company should try to keep as much as it could.
While the "give me a task with the perfect description, and I will do it" folks will stay until they are kicked out, as, usually, they are not up to taking the initiative.
That's why I saw how the companies that were changing the rules in the process: "well, it's an offer, but your manager needs to approve that first", and other tricks to be able to reject it for the top performers. Needless to say, it leads to the bad moral.
However, the companies I'm mentioning had way fewer employees than the federal workforce, so the chances are that with that size it's impossible to do it the "right" way.
Yes, but I believe this is the intent. It's not a matter of it being good for the business when the CEO of said business intentionally wants it to fail.
On a larger level, if the active & skilled people are taking the deal, doesn’t it mean they’re likely moving on to something that is a better fit and thus good for society anyway?
Part of two groups will leave, the actual skilled, hardworking people who know they can get another job. And the people who are retiring anyways.
Part of me thinks that just ends up with a higher percentage of worse workers.
Obviously many hard working people will stay, but you'd be pretty certain the people will little skill and value, ironically, are going to be the highest percentage that stay as they know its not going to be easy to get another job.
Good, we want the competent and skilled people within government to go to private enterprise in big numbers, so they can amplify their skills and effect in private enterprise. Then we can reduce the number of government agencies, because they are always less effective than private enterprises.
The problem is when we have the lazy and incompetent bureaucrats sticking around, and us the taxpayers are paying for their pension while getting back very little in return.
Honestly, I'm not sure what all the screaming and crying on hacker news is about; hackers are all about creating efficiency with unorthodox insights and skills. pretty sure no hackers have said "why yes, I've love to pay more in taxes for the bureaucrats to retire in style after doing very little"
> because they are always less effective than private enterprises.
I think this is one of those ideas that has been spouted for so long that we don't really stop to think about whether it is true. Private and public entities (and employees) certainly have different incentives, but they also have different mandates, and I've certainly known plenty of inefficient private enterprises and efficient public ones. Do you have any way of verifying or proving this idea that you can share?
> I think this is one of those ideas that has been spouted for so long that we don't really stop to think about whether it is true.
A lot of people with considerable expertise in the area have looked into whether it's true. They almost always come to the same conclusion: overall it's a wash.
If you look closer some industries (like say your corner coffee shop in a big city) are clearly better off private, and others like roads and fire fighting don't work when privately held.
In general a competitive market will out-do public owned, free markets that aren't competitive are worse than public owned.
But there are always exceptions. A fine example is the health system. I don't know why, but as the US demonstrates even with a competitive health market public ownership outperforms a purely private system by a fairly large margin.
There are some pretty significant differences between Twitter employees and federal government employees, starting with the fact that a lot of latter group are part of a powerful union.
That power comes from the idea that the federal employees can shut down government operations if they stop working. This administration (supposedly) wants dearly to shut down government operations, so the union doesn't have any power.
Confidently incorrect. Federal employees marked as "mission critical" cannot strike, but other federal employees can. Unions take this into account and have workers strike on-behalf of mission critical employees.
Didn't President Reagan fire almost every air traffic controller in thr 80s? Weren't they unionized as well?
My understanding is that the consequences of that decision is being felt even to this day. I only know about it because of the recent airplane accident
Military members are government employees. I imagine they would be extremely circumspect of being deployed against other government employees who were cheated by a bad-faith deal.
There is no "they". The military adheres to the law for only as long as those laws are enforced. If the US military can commit war crimes abroad and be protected from outside prosecution, there is nothing stopping them from doing the same inside the US. All it takes is for one person in charge to ignore charges in a military court, or simply not comply with a legal summons in civilian court.
Look at how the US treats the International Criminal Court today, a legal body it itself helped create after WWII. Not a huge leap to think they will ignore state courts in the US. Who's going to arrest them?
Because the paychecks come from the same place. If your boss publicly cheated your coworker and then sent the mob to break his kneecaps for protesting, wouldn't that concern you? For purely selfish reasons if nothing else.
Sure, but even in a normal situation, all the Union can do is provide greater resources to initiate legal and possibly work actions. Which, in a normal situation might be very effective.
This is NOT anything resembling a normal situation; to treat it as such is merely an exercise in normalcy bias.
Under an authoritarian regime, as is being setup as we type, legal actions are irrelevant as the judicial and legislative branches lose independence and serve the executive. Work actions likely result in the union being decertified and dissolved.
Yeah well some dude from South Africa is running around in government buildings fucking with computers and no one seems to be doing anything about it. Anything goes these days. Union or not.
I think they'd "like" to, but he legal protections for the employees in this case are vast compared to twitter. But as an employee, I would worry that they would try... we already have an administration that SCOTUS has decided is above the law in other ways.
There's a lot of people that, due to their living situation, wouldn't be able to comply with the new executive order banning work from home. If the choice is between being fired either way, I can see many people opting to take the possibility of a severance while they find alternative work
I'm in this situation. I was hired fully remote (and no office to "return" to), many states away from DC and no intention to move (not for an administration that would have no scruples about firing me at any point, for any reason).
Since I'm fairly sure my goose is cooked either way, I am considering doing the deferred resignation thing just to get a few more dollars in my pocket before the inevitable comes.
Finding new work is going to be freaking great with rapidly dropping consumer confidence and the random ass tariff changes scaring the hell out of businesses.
The offer mirrors Elon's offer to Twitter employees and many of them did not receive the money they were promised.
Elon doesn't have the legal authority to make this offer today, it's poorly defined, and not a standard separation policy for federal employees. I'm not saying they won't be paid out, but I would't bet my livelihood on it
>Thinking that the new administration will just openly refuse to pay people's salaries as part of a formal deal?
The chief executive of the new administration is literally and actually widely known for doing that exact thing repeatedly, for decades and decades, up to and including screwing local municipalities who entered into binding legal agreements with him to incur expenses to be repaid in full as part of his campaign.
> Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will "protect your job." But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.
> In addition to the lawsuits, the review found more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work — since the 1980s. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y., air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm. On just one project, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, records released by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1990 show that at least 253 subcontractors weren’t paid in full or on time, including workers who installed walls, chandeliers and plumbing.
> In courtroom testimony, the manager of the general contractor for the Doral renovation admitted that a decision was made not to pay The Paint Spot because Trump “already paid enough.” As the construction manager spoke, “Trump’s trial attorneys visibly winced, began breathing heavily, and attempted to make eye contact” with the witness, the judge noted in his ruling.
Do you know who the President and his crony is? Have you seen Musk and Trump lie, repeatedly, about paying invoices and stiffing people? Have you seen Musk not pay his Twitter employees after he took over? Do you have a memory problem?
Why would you believe otherwise? Trump is notorious for nonpayment, and Elon doesn't exactly have a good record in that area w/r/t Twitter's severed employees. Sure, historically, you might claim something about the government meeting its obligations, but if the last two weeks have shown us anything, it is that President Trusk believes that nothing the government did before matters.
Of course, if they decide to not pay you it won't matter if you took this or tried to keep your job. So you may get a head start and turn your time to searching for a new job now. If they do end up following through with the buyout payments in the end, that is an added bonus.
The budget for USAID was also appropriated by Congress, but they still decided to freeze everything "pending review" (instead of at least reviewing while initially leaving things running), and then locked out domestic employees and recalled overseas employees - all without consulting Congress. So they obviously don't care one bit about what they are legally required to do. And why should they, as long as they have the supreme interpreters of laws firmly in their corner?
OK so? Do you think the president has to obey the laws? Will the FBI arrest him if they don't? What do you think the consequence will realistically be?
You've clearly not been paying any attention to what has happened to the judicial system in this country. Trump and Elon are both infamous for ripping people off and often getting away with it via the (compromised) court system.
And even if they were to 1. find an uncompromised court, and 2. win a judgment to get paid... Who is ordered to pay them? The Treasury, which is under the control of...? You guessed it! The very people who do not intend to pay.
Who is going to enforce the law? Trump appointed judges? Even if the lawsuits are successful, our system depends on the Executive branch respecting the verdict.
At least during his last term you had Republicans on both the state and federal levels who weren’t sycophants. They’ve all died, retired or are now kissing the ring.
> Interesting they say their goal is 5-10% when normal attrition is six percent, that means essentially their goal is -6 to 4%
Basically, yes.
If they had worked within the existing VSIP (voluntary separation) and VERA (early retirement) systems, maybe by tweaking things like max payouts, they could have almost guaranteed 10%+ by September, imho.
The haphazard and non-standard way they’ve gone about it, however, makes me think that they will be at the low end of their range.
The other possible explanations are:
- they don’t really intend to pay those who resign (e.g., via admin leave status and then having a furlough in March)
- their ultimate goal is to have people not take the deal so that they can just fire with impunity. Imho, this type of reduction will only work for folks on probation (who, imho, are the only ones who should actually consider taking the resignation offer).
The plan seems to be to fire almost all government emoloyees. The only historical parallel I can come up with is the De Baathification program in Iraq 2003.
Being asked to take a deal that the administration may be offering illegally is a wild situation to be in. Especially when the administration doing so seems to have little regard for the law, and SCOTUS has deemed them above the law to some extent.
Are you making a deal they will actually pay, and could it be that the administration simply chooses to ignore the courts?
These tend to work through in stages: fastest ones to accept were already looking, and next up are those that are on the fence, and so on...
The 8-month buyout offer is significantly better than the one-time offer from Clinton in the 90's [1], even adjusting for inflation, so I'd expect that there's a large group of individuals & families that are just taking the time to evaluate the decision.
Well, except that Clinton went to Congress for authorization to make those offers and got a law passed, and didn't do a blanket offer to every employee they could blast out an email to, and did them as actual buyouts rather than extended no-work leave.
They have separately promised $1T or even $2T in cuts and and laying off 200K won't even come close. Not to mention they are offering these as blanket buyouts seemingly without regard for job function so they will inevitably end up needing to hire back some percentage of roles unless (as I suspect) they intend to just stop doing a bunch of critical work.
Not an American, but the reported resignation process of just sending arbitrary content email with subject "resign" to "hr@opm.gov" feels like the real aim is to collect emails and response time data to establish cluster system health metric to determine which nodes can be murdered safely.
It's almost strange to me that this aspect, and stupidity of injecting non-compiling code to human mainframes collective that runs on legalese in an attempt to collect such data, seem to be rarely discussed.
> Not an American, but the reported resignation process of just sending arbitrary content email with subject "resign" to "hr@opm.gov" feels like the real aim is to collect emails and response time data to establish cluster system health metric to determine which nodes can be murdered safely.
Is that all it takes? Think they check DKIM and SPF?
It's all completely crazy. There are rumors that some of offer emails didn't pass DMARC in the first place. Reportedly it started with someone from xAI showing up at an OPM physical location with a computer to plug into the network. People calling it coup or analogizing the ops team to Chinese Red Guards aren't exaggerating.
As someone who has been offered similar buy-outs, the one presented here is a poor deal. I would not have taken that one unless I already had a job waiting for me.
But does this include benefits ? How about contributions to the pension, what will be the pension benefits when you retire ? Will you be fully vested when you leave ? What happens to your security clearance (if you have one)
There are many unknowns, so to me, if you work for the federal gov, you would be insane to take this package. Unless of course you already have a guaranteed Job you can start when you leave.
Plus many IRS employees tried to take this package and was denied, now the Fed has a list of employees that want to leave. Will they be fired once Tax season is over without the 8 month package ?
The one where it's offered by an administration with a history of lying, particularly around the fulfillment of past contracts. Payment is only guaranteed until mid-March.
Are you someone who took a federal job where you were working from home, and the nearest office near you is 5 hours away? And now you can't sell your home in time for the deadline to start working in the office?
Then yeah, you take the gamble on not getting paid. The only problem with this approach is you cannot collect unemployment like you can if you're let go.
It's interesting that annual attrition rate is 6% according to the article. I hadn't considered that before. The buyouts could end up costing more than they save if the only people who take it were the ones already planning on leaving.
But maybe the argument is if enough people take it before the March budget deadline, then each departments budget can be proportionately reduced in the next cycle.
Does anyone know the math and politics on this? Why didn't DOGE just put hiring freezes in place and wait for people to leave? Honest question. I'm not looking to bait anyone into mud slinging about Trump and Elon.
Without wanting to mud sling, this has not gone through the usual oversight and review committees that something like this usually would, so I suspect it hasn't been planned out and costed (much like other recent policy announcements). When "move fast and break things" meets public finance.
I think the messaging was intended to create a psychological effect rather than a budgetary one. By voluntarily giving up a benefit to stay with the federal government post-Musk takeover, employees may feel more committed to the new regime. IIRC Zappos used to offer people a payout to leave directly after hiring them, it was a similar signal of commitment.
1. Under RIFs, close to half of the civil service will get a better severance than this offer. So any thinking person would wait for a RIF.
2. Under VERA, people will lose this "severance" but get access to their pensions years earlier. Since VERA only applies if you have 20+ years (25 if under 50) that's 20+% of their current high-3 for the rest of their lives, sets a nice baseline income. A WG employee who started at a depot at age 18 could collect their pension starting at age 43 and get $20-30k/year for the rest of their life and still be young enough to get another job and keep earning until 60 and retire a second time.
3. A substantial number of federal employees are already working on-site (not necessarily in offices) in areas where there are not a ton of other jobs. Ask a civil servant at China Lake to resign, they have to move too, there are few jobs in the area besides that base.
4. Many federal employees are federal employees because they care about the mission. They'd rather keep doing what's been asked of them to keep things like critical infrastructure operating than go home and let things fall apart because no one is doing the work.
The problem is that the new regime appears to be more interested in amputation than footwear for most of these depts/agencies. Those less committed to their mission of walking and running will leave. Those left behind will be the more intransigent veteran operators, "somebody has to keep everyone's feet attached".
I'm going to try not to mud sling but looking at the managerial history of the people involved does not make taking erratic pointless action a total surprise.
Move fast and break things mentality over the boring strategy of letting a hiring freeze slowly work. It’s also psychologically challenging the people that stay to “admit” they can’t get a job in the private sector, which helps the Elon narrative. They want to make government employees feel bad.
Plus these people are unlikely to ever get paid. This is all operating outside of congress. If the institutions survive at all this could become a mess of expensive lawsuits and settlements. But I suppose their intention is to permanently cut Congress out of the picture.
The goal is burn down the federal government, it doesn't really matter to them what happens. Expensive lawsuits and settlements, sign me up! It isn't their money.
Can you please be more clear on what is being looted in your view? I can see how a lot of money can be made from having the government fund a project that you benefit from. For example DOGE uncovered that Senator Lindsey Graham sits on the board of International Republican Institute which was funded by USAID. I don't see how someone benefits themselves financially by cutting government spending since the revenue stream that they could direct into their pocket has now dried up.
They "uncovered" something that's in financial statements, posted on the agency's website, on the org's website... way to go. You can go read 50 pages of audit that's been publicly available because they got government funding.
You can also see the filings that show that Lindsey Graham doesn't get paid for being on their board, nor do any of their directors, and you can go see what they did spend money on. There's a more or less equivalent org that draws its directors from Democrats like this one does Republicans. Speaking of "uncovering" you can go read the press coverage from 2018 when the first Trump administration pushed to cut the funding of the National Endowment of Democracy (which sits above these two party-associated organizations). Of course this was in a time where the Trump administration actually behaved as if Congress controlled the funding.
For an amusing detail you can read the letter sent by senators at the time defending the NED's funding, and observe the signature of Marco Rubio, who now purports to have taken over USAID in his capacity as Secretary of State.
As far as I can tell there's not even any evidence that DOGE did anything specifically relating to this group beyond just that they killed USAID. DOGE fan Twitter accounts have posted about it, just linking to those same already-available filings. Fans just reading down the list of things USAID funded gets you this same result. It's definitely a good place to go if you want to see a bunch of incurious people posting "head exploding" emojis.
> It’s also psychologically challenging the people that stay to “admit” they can’t get a job in the private sector, which helps the Elon narrative. They want to make government employees feel bad.
That's probably their angle but tbh I'd think more of the tenure of someone who turned down money to keep their job than one who quit it for a one time payment.
> Later in the agreement, it makes clear that any of the administration’s obligations “are subject to the availability of appropriations.”
In other words, if it's not in an upcoming deal to raise the debt ceiling, then it won't necessarily be funded. As many in this thread have speculated, it is not guaranteed.
Late to the party, but I know of at least two highly-paid coworkers that already had plans to retire, but are now just hoping for several months of extra pay (it's essentially the only situation where I would recommend someone take this offer-- if it works out, great for them; if it doesn't, well they were going to leave anyway)
The other people it makes sense for (assuming they actually follow through) are those who are remote and don't want to or for some reason cannot move. This gives them an exemption to the RTO order and time to find a job.
It’s quite similar to the student loan forgiveness in terms of it being about financial obligations to middle class citizens and it being attempted without Congress, as well as the likelihood for overpromising and underdelivering. The ordinary citizens making a choice in a way that would have an effect like promissory estoppel adds an interesting wrinkle but I don’t see how it changes the constitutionality of it. I think that many of those calling it unconstitutional are being hypocritical, even though they may be right.
I personally thought that student loan forgiveness was unconstitutional.
That being said, alot of the actions of the current admin are designed to push the boarders of executive power. They are trying to move fast and break things and do an end run around congressional oversight, before the courts can catch up.
The example of this is USaid, which was probably not legal in the method they went about. But no one will be putting that egg back together.
Contrast this to when Biden did his student loan forgiveness, it was telegraphed for months, and a court immediately blocked it pending review. And most importantly it was a single action.
All that being said, both are bad, my overall point is that we as Americans deserve better, and 'but they did it first' is not a valid excuse.
My hope is that we finally start reducing the power of the executive branch. The past 100 years of congress abdicating it's responsibility has been too much.
If you are a federal employee that got an email from these scumbags, look at who is extending this "offer." Trump, who has stiffed everyone who ever did work for him, and Musk, who still is being sued by lots of Twitter employees especially execs, for their unpaid severance. They are the most untrustworthy people ever to serve in the federal government.
The quality of the comments is really disappointing. I'll add an optimistic one -- this is the first time in my lifetime that I've felt like the federal government was actually making serious progress on an important problem without being forced to by some emergency. I'm very curious to see what things look like a year from now.
Exactly what I was thinking. They can make up any number they want, we have no way to verify it. This could just be a lie to further demoralize workers and/or make them afraid of missing out on the chance to get a buyout.
Could be. But people need a sense of purpose. I'd rather have 20k people with a make-work job than 20k people collecting unemployment. Running too lean is also bad for resiliency, which is a lesson that every manufacturing company learned during the pandemic.
I'm sure that the guys who are otherwise being incredibly cruel to almost everyone in the US in some way, but who have offered an uncharacteristically generous severance package, have every intention of honouring that package.
> The government needs to be downsized by millions
Curious about the reason for this. Is there math that shows the first- and second-order effects of specific roles being removed? I ask because I've seen so much talk about the need for this, seemingly without much being supplied in the way of reason.
this is what you might call a vibes-based analysis. proof that the government needs to be dramatically downsized is found in the way it feels good to say and jives with relevant preconceptions.
Plus, the positive side effect of the government sector getting as efficient as the private sector and especially the tech sector, would be the massive expansion of the domestic foosball manufacturing industry.
> Unfortunately public sector unions, which shouldn’t even exist
You what? Why in the world do you think unions shouldn't exist? I had a parent that did a lot with FEW (Federally Employed Women) and NARFE (National Active and Retired Federal Employees) at TACOM, where I learned how much the union does for federal employees, so your statement sounds like complete nonsense to me.
Who knows how evenly spread it is? It may be that each service gets better, it may be all services stay the same except for, say, NRO, and we miss a nuclear center being built.
I'm guessing you meant the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, not the National Reconnaissance Office. Considering that since the NRC was created in 1975, no nuclear plant license initially submitted to them has begun commercial operations, I think it would be difficult to further impede progress.[1]
I have no clue whether these buyouts will be beneficial or not. It really depends on how government responsibilities are structured. If everything operates under the same rules but there are fewer workers to process everything, then it will hurt economic and technological growth. If, on the other hand, there is a lot of dead weight in these departments, or the rules change to streamline certain processes, then it could be a net improvement. It will probably be years before we have a definitive answer. And as you say, it will probably be different for different parts of the government.
1. Some new nuclear power plants have come online since 1975, but they were all from licenses that were initially submitted to the NRC's predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission. Also the NRC did approve two new nuclear reactors at an existing plant, and those did begin commercial operations 19 years after the license was applied for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
The idea that government workers cannot be hired and fired at will is wrong.
Government workers should have no more rights than the single mother working at a restaurant or business, or anyone working at any normal business in the US.
I other words, they should not have more rights or protections than the people who pay the taxes that pay for their salaries and benefits.
One of the most fundamental problems in various types of organizations with these types of protections is what I call "human rot". These are people who are lazy and incompetent and who only remain employed because of these protections as opposed to merit, doing a good job and actually making valuable contributions to the organization.
Locally, one of the most disgusting examples I came across is a middle school "science" teacher who is a chiropractor and teaches absolute nonsense and falsehoods to our kids. For example --and this is just one of many-- he has been teaching that the moon does not spin on its axis. Yeah. Beyond that, he is a jerk to the kids and does not allow them to ask questions. He cannot be challenged or fired for any of it. He is protected. And we wonder why our results in education are shit.
Maybe instead of punching down("everyone should have to live as bad as I do/did") you should be raising people up("everyone should live as good as they do/did")?
Why not ask yourself what is stopping yourself from having those protections in the private industry(hint: some people do have those protections in private industry) instead of focusing on taking them away from others?
Reality. Plain and simple. As reality changes the "protected groups" that we thought were essential to society become a drain on it. Teachers are an excellent example as they have been deprecated for my (and most living persons') lifetime.
> Why not ask yourself what is stopping yourself from having those protections in the private industry
Easy: Reality. Read on if you care to understand.
> Maybe instead of punching down("everyone should have to live as bad as I do/did") you should be raising people up
You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. What some of these protected groups have is a fantasy, a Ponzi scheme, that is only sustainable because they can take money away from us by force through taxation.
In the real world, a company cannot give their employees lifetime pensions at 80% of their last salary. This is crazy, yet, this happens across a bunch of government and other tax-supported entities.
I am not saying that everyone should live as bad as I do. I don't have a bad life and such is the case for most people. What I (and tens of millions of others) don't have is a fantasy where magical money supports exorbitant pensions, medical plans and other benefits.
Here's a super simplified math experiment. This isn't meant to be a precise model of reality, just a thinking tool to start to ask the right questions.
You hire a 60 year old for a job (again, for simplification). Say you pay them $100K US for that job.
Their healthcare plan costs $25K per year, which you also pay.
Five years later this person retires. Because they are in a protected class, you have to keep paying for their healthcare and, say, 80% of their salary for the rest of their lives. Let's say this person lives to 90, so 25 years.
Well, you need to hire another person to fulfill that role. You go and hire another 60 year old for the same role (simplifying so we only wait 5 years for retirement.
You pay this person the same $100K and spend $25K on health insurance.
In reality, this role now costs you $180K per year in salary and $50K per year in healthcare.
Why?
Because you have to carry the first ex-employee for the rest of his/her life.
Five years later, the second employee retires. Same protected benefits and conditions.
You hire someone for the same role again.
Now the position costs you $260K per year, plus $75K per year in medical.
You are 10 years into this experiment and the entire thing is unsustainable at best. If you have the ability to do it, you are forced to either outsource (China), negotiate a sensible deal or close down the business (because you might have dozens, hundreds or thousands of employees under similar conditions.
The steady state for this is when the oldest employees die, the limit function, if you will. At that point the role will cost you approximately $420K per year in salary and $125K per year in healthcare premiums.
This, of course, assuming there is no inflation and costs remain flat for 25 years, which isn't going to be the case at all. Assuming 5% per year inflation/cost-of-living increases, the numbers at the end of 25 years are $466K and $138K.
You see, what happens is that people read a comment such as mine and don't invest one microsecond actually thinking things through, much less analyzing it. This isn't difficult math. And this has nothing to do with wanting people to live, as you put it, as bad as I do. What I want is for the people WE pay to live in the same reality WE do. In this reality, you'd go bankrupt if you owned a business, small, medium or large, that provided such insanely irresponsible benefit packages.
In other words, these people live in a taxpayer-funded fantasy. And this is wrong.
And that doesn't even cover the issue of incompetence. If you cannot fire people when they are found to be incompetent, you might have to hire two, three or more people just to be able to get that one job done. Now were are in the realm of that position potentially costing you millions of dollars per year. This is incredibly wrong.
The math on the inflation is wrong BTW. I computed 5% every 5 years. I am not going to bother doing the 5% per year case because people just don't care to understand reality. I'll just say the numbers would be huge.
To my point, here's just one, of the likely thousands (if not tens of thousands) of examples of just how bad this can be. This is a local example, yet, you can find the same thing at every level of government and other taxpayer funded organizations. It's a Ponzi scheme supported by taxpayer money.
Yet, that's nothing compared to the Federal net unfunded liability of $30 TRILLION dollars (and rising), which is equivalent to 128 percent of GDP. This is INSANE.
We are in a crisis that is unimaginable for most people. It would not be too much of a stretch to call it existential. How many multiples of GDP can we actually survive until the entire thing comes crashing down?
So, yeah, all of the folks who's knee-jerk reaction is to downvote my reality-based post don't have a fucking clue. You'd think people on HN would at least make a little bit of an effort to do the math. Heck, ask ChatGPT if you are lazy!
Nope. There are a class of workers who have unfair protections that none of the rest of us have. We pay their salaries. They should be subject the same market forces we are. They should exist under the same rules that the average taxpayer lives under. They should have the same healthcare and benefit that the average taxpayer has. This applies to everyone in government. If we pay their salaries, they cannot have it better than we do on average.
They should be competent at what they do. They should be qualified. And they should not be protected from losing their jobs if they are no longer necessary or are bad at what they do. This permeates many levels of society. The local example is just the tip of the iceberg. You could go up the chain to city, state and federal and find similar problems.
It's one of the most fundamental questions and one that a lot of people do not understand because they have never run a business (or ran something trivial). There are countries where getting rid of unnecessary or incompetent employees is nearly impossible. This leads to businesses not hiring people because they cannot afford the dead weight or risk involved (also leads to illicit job markets). Being able to manage your workforce is one of the most fundamental tasks in a business. It is no different in schools or government.
We cannot optimize for the best people and best outcomes because we cannot get rid of dead weight. We get stuck with the incompetent because they cannot be fired. This is madness. And, judging from the downvotes, the ignorance does not escape some HN readers. I hope one day they are stuck with people who just burn their cash and they get nothing for it. Maybe then they will understand. It is unbelievable to me that such a fundamental understanding is lacking from society. We let idiots burn the cash we send them. There is no such thing as government money, it's our money. And it must be treated with more respect than to burn it on layers of bureaucracy and incompetence.
It would be an incredibly generous and nice buyout package, but obviously if it gets torn up after a month it's not that great of a deal.
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