Out of somewhere
Slash slash slash slash slash.
It’s almost Quaker in its simplicity.
President Donald Trump’s mass firings of permanent federal employees have already begun and are expected to accelerate over the next few weeks with tens of thousands more employees terminated. But the layoffs didn’t come out of nowhere.
This week, federal agencies face a deadline to provide Trump administration officials with plans for a reduction in force, a dramatic downsizing of the nation’s more than 2 million federal workers that will occur over the next few months. Along with layoffs, some agencies are expected to indefinitely extend their hiring freezes, eliminate currently vacant positions and consolidate offices as ways to reduce headcount.
To belabor the obvious, this isn’t a careful, planned, researched process of trimming the federal budget, it’s taking an axe to the infrastructure with zero regard to the consequences.
Guided by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department Of Government Efficiency aides, Trump has spent his first eight weeks in office focused on dismantling the federal government, including shutting down and laying off the staff of the United States Agency for International Development and taking steps to do the same to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Because consumers shouldn’t have financial protection. They should be cheated, and hope to do better next time.
The firings have affected all 50 states and include employees at agencies that Americans frequently interact with, including the National Park Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Internal Revenue Service, National Institutes of Health and many others.
We don’t need any of that. Eat, sleep, work; that’s all we need.
Fire them all; Musk will know his own.
Eating? SLEEPING!! It should be work, WORK, and MORE WORK! We’ll tell you what you need, and you’ll take what we give you with a smile. I mean Jeezuz, next you’ll be expecting pay. You should be happy to work for free.
I really, really dislike the current fad for declaring that a person has been terminated, when it is his or her employment which has been terminated. I might even hate the usage as much as Ophelia hates the fad for using martial words in place of accurate ones such as ‘argued’, or ‘disagreed’.
Now that’s off my chest, I have to say that I also despise the US government branches who are supposed to stop any illegal takeover by a would-be dictator and his cronies but are enabling it instead.
Except I very much doubt that quakers would have ridden roughshod over laws, individual rights, or behaved so callously to so many. I spent time with quakers as a youth (my mother was quite interested in them). I had a lot of respect for that group at least, although it wasn’t for me. Even then I was atheist for reasons I couldn’t fully define, but religious belief felt very false and wrong for me. I also wasn’t a pacifist, which for quakers is a big deal. Anyway, quakers, respectful, law abiding, pacifist, gentle, many of them very deep thinkers for all the apparent simplicity. Not at all like Trump.
Googling “ketamine musk” gets me this among other similar articles.
https://futurism.com/neoscope/elon-musk-drug-explanation
Musk was at least hiring competent engineers for his companies a decade or more ago. So saying he *used* to be competent is reasonable.
Rob @ 3 – Sorry, I didn’t mean the simile as a jab at Quakers. I respect them too.
What have the Quakers ever done for us?
Ah, Cadbury, Rowntree, Fry, those men who despised alcohol and thought chocolate would be a sufficient replacement*. They were also benevolent employers, providing housing, healthcare, and education for workers and their families, Cadbury (Bournville) and Rowntree (New Earswick).
*They were wrong about that, I enjoy a bittersweet dark chocolate with my port.
Sad that Cadbury has been conglomerated by Big Chokkolat and is now absolutely awful.