I know there are a lot of people who will disagree with me on this.
DOGE is doing exactly what has been needed in our Government for a very long time. I might go so far as to say DOGE is akin to Ivermectin in that it’s killing off parasites.
Then there’s Tulsi Gabbard who summarily fired a bunch of “Intelligence” workers who spent their days using secure servers to hold discussions of a sexual nature.
Pete Hegseth and Trump are cleaning house in The Pentagon and Kash Patel & Dan Bongino are working the FBI.
I’m looking forward to Pam Bondi restructuring the DOJ such that we never see the abuses of past years again.
I’ve been very amused at the Democrats complaining that Bongino isn’t qualified. Folks, he was Secret Service and apparently qualified enough to guard Hillary Clinton. He’s got the degrees, and law enforcement background. So Democrats once again are outright lying, because they don’t like him.
I swear to God, if the Democrats just started telling the freakin truth it would go a long way toward saving their party.
Alas, they’re so used to blatantly lying and getting away with it, that now they can’t stop themselves, indeed, they may not even know they’ve crossed the line between truth and fiction.
All of this popped to mind as I was reading the latest out of Washington.
As the government workers scream about being asked to spend 5 minutes writing a bullet list of their activities for the week, and national intelligence resources being used to host sex chats during work hours. Government workers are mad about actually having to show up at their place of business (government offices) and the IRS fires workers then (in my opinion) targets the taxpayers by closing 120 offices that typically provide assistance to said taxpayers in filing taxes, and USAID is closed freeing government workers who should have been raising questions about some of the expenditures to seek employment elsewhere…
As I processed all of this, I couldn’t help but think that government jobs are freakin cushy. After the dust settles I’ll be applying for one of those jobs!
Probably not…
These government jobs appear to be playpens. I say that as someone who while working in technology saw a lot of software development playpens usually populated by mostly Indian workers and very young fresh out of college horribly inexperienced programmers.
Bean bags, video games, expensive coffee and energy drinks, top of the line laptops (when desktop machines 1/2 the price would have done just as well). Entire sections of departments were walled off and “No Go Zones” where the “Developers” spent most of their time chatting in Hindi, playing games, or sleeping. I suspect most of these people were H1B1s but I don’t know for sure.
What I do know is that there wasn’t a lot of work getting done. I also know that schedules kept slipping, products kept being delayed, and the quality of what work was being done was generally low.
Given the similarities, Musk & his techies are the perfect people to walk into these government agencies because they’ll take one look and know exactly what the hell is going on.
Even though Mush is a fan of H1B1s, I suspect that when he cleaned out X he saw a fair share of these “Safe Spaces” where screwing around on the company dime had become acceptable.
Someone like him, (God I’d love to help him tear through these government departments,) probably has to head to accounting. I’d love to walk in with him, then peal off to go into the technology wing and IT departments. Believe me, I know where to look for a bunch of lazy useless salaried and expensive individuals, frittering away money on equipment and technologies that are unnecessary to day to day operations but lots of fun to play with.
As an aside, the best day at one place I worked, was the day a new owner walked in, went directly to the developers playpen and fired everyone screwing around in there instantly. “You’re all fired! Go to HR they’ve got your packages waiting for you.”
This new owner had fired our HR department and replaced it with his own the week before. That’s why no-one saw it coming. The H1B1s all freaked out. Some crying, others angrily demanding their jobs be given back to them.
Their cries and complaints fell on deaf ears. The next thing he asked was if the contents of the playpen were personal property or had the company purchased it? When he got no answer, security, and hired movers, stepped in and started carrying the shit to the dumpster.
One of the developers threw his $3000 dollar Apple laptop across the room. The new owner pointed at the guy. Security escorted him and his broken laptop in the direction of HR. The new owner said quite plainly, the cost of that machine would be deducted from the former employee’s pay.
I remember thinking it was a great day even if I was about to lose my job too.
The arrogance and insufferable behavior the developers has shown to those of us tasked with testing their dreck software made it worth it.
Interestingly, we didn’t lose our jobs that day. The new owner asked for our honest evaluation of the state of the software and how far the project really was behind. We told him.
He cancelled the project and merged us into one of his other companies. Our original company disappeared completely.
It turns out this man bought our company for some patents and source code to previous successful products. Products that had been built, prior to the developer playpen being installed.
Because of this experience I see all the screaming, pearl clutching, and clothes rending as nothing more than what I saw at that company that day.
The layabouts have been caught. Unfortunately there are good people, good workers that are also being hurt in the process.
There’s another thing to consider too.
Having USAID, or IRS, or FBI, or CIA on a resume with an end of employment date in 2025 means these people, all of them, might be really screwed.
They’re radioactive and no-one will be able to tell if they’re good employees or bad ones. So potential employers may bypass them entirely. Why hire trouble? Most corporations are generally risk averse.
The lesson that I think everyone should learn from this is as follows;
The good employees either didn’t, or couldn’t say person X, Y, or Z wasn’t doing their fair share of the work.
Perhaps it was because of fear of retribution, or DEI, or just not wanting to engage in political infighting because the risk was too high.
(I’ve been there, I know those hard choices. “Do I rock the boat and turn this shitty job into hell on earth, or keep my mouth shut, collect my paycheck and pray upper management fixes the problem?” After all it’s their job anyway.)
Thing is, not saying something, not reporting it, does a disservice to the company, the department, and ultimately leads to corporate bloat decreasing the employees share of any bonuses.
There’s nothing worse than doing a shit ton of work, then having to suck it up when the laziest most worthless of your coworkers starts bragging about using their bonus, (that they “earned” simply by occupying space,) to book a vacation, when you know your boss won’t give you time off.
So the lesson everyone should learn, from government workers on down to mini mart employees is to speak up. If someone consistently isn’t doing their job, they shouldn’t have their job.
Hopefully with the rebirth of meritocracy, it won’t matter what race, gender, or national origin someone is. The only criteria will be, as it always should have been, is the person doing their work?
I think our government agencies are all learning that very lesson right now. It’s a hard lesson, there’s going to be a lot of broken eggs but it’s unavoidable because the situation has been allowed to get so bad.
I think that much of the problem can be laid at the feet of DEI, but seniority and tenure have as much to do with it as anything else.
Once meritocracy is removed there’s not much incentive.
When I started working in the late 1970s I worked my ass off because my boss had the ability to reward me with a check, which just made me work harder and yes, inspired competition between me and my colleagues. That in turn made our company successful and in the success we all got good raises!
By the late 1990s bosses couldn’t do that anymore, because it was perceived as unfair.
From then on we got yearly reviews and 2%-3% raises regardless of how hard we worked. So what was the point?
Not all of us were going to be able to move into management. Indeed not all of us wanted to move into management. Some of us liked being in the trenches and what we did without the headache of being a manager.
Unfortunately, that meant that if you wanted a decent raise to buy a house or have a child, you had no choice but to change jobs. In my opinion, the death of meritocracy and rise of employment racial quotas screwed America and American business.
We also had the overarching threat of layoffs, corporate mergers, and companies going bust. So even if we didn’t have merit raises, we still had to be at least a bit leaner, flexible, and aggressive to keep our employment somewhat stable.
The government workers in the news right now seem to have never experienced what we in corporate America took for granted.
For them, it appears that sitting in their cubicles, doing little work, not rocking the boat, and hanging around for years, was enough to get pretty high pay, excellent benefits, and decent raises and never fear being laid off, or losing their jobs for any reason.
I guess the real world intruding in their safe spaces is shocking and unsettling.
Our politicians screaming about unfair treatment of government workers have obviously got to be voted out of office too.
Their unrealistic beliefs and lack of oversight will simply insure that after this mess is cleaned up, they’ll allow the same mistakes to be made all over again.
First, some background.
Seeing the Ukrainian Ambassador essentially face palm it was pretty darn funny. Her expression was one of “Oh Shit! This isn’t going well at all.”
I keep seeing people talking about USAID being only 1% of the budget. As if somehow that justifies the waste.