I thought maybe you were using a cool word i'd never heard of before, like maybe a "vulture-ocracy" or something borrowed from the French, but then saw that the B and V keys are next to each other. Damn!
As long as Trump/Musk doesn't axe Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, they're safe cutting hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and tens of thousands of programs. Just for fun, I'd close every military base in a blue state and bring home all our troops in Europe.
My first impression of the 2nd term is a lot better than was my first impression of the first. Sounds like you have gotten stuck in the wrong silo, the one NBC was polling in that said Trump was going to lose.
There is a CNN clip making the rounds on Twitter about polls showing a majority support for DOGE and cuts. I certainly didn't expect that or for then to cover it (they weren't happy about it) so maybe this isn't a Sideshow Bob situation.
"It's almost as if DOGE wasn't carefully planned ahead of time to focus first on the worst examples of waste and fraud"
Like for example focusing on the worst abuses, waste, and fraud within a major government program that most can concede needs major overhaul and reforming...
like say for example,
USAID.
Perhaps DOGE should start with the obvious examples of abusive waste within specific programs like USAID, trim the fraud and abuse from within those programs first by announcing to the media "here's examples of taxpayer money going to pot", build grass level support for those specific programs to be cut, and then build from there. Granted, the other side might not appreciate the results and attempt to fight back via the courts a la "Yeah, we know that there are wasteful programs within USAID, such as spreading T ideology in various nations as well as constant and consistently starting new NGO's in various nations to overthrow nations that aren't US friendly, but we really, REALLY want these abusive wasteful programs to continue."
Oh wait a second. That's actually ocurring in real time.
Yeah, that was a huge PR triumph with normies that helps explain why DOGE's approval rating is so sky high: instead of taking enough to start with DOGE announcing a ranked list of what's getting cut:
1. Paying Roxane Gay $60,000 to cruise the fjords of Norway and lecture on the evils of fatophobia
They moved so fast that what wound up being heard by the mainstream public due to collaboration of the bureaucrats and press:
1. Killing children by saving 12 cents per day on some incredibly cheap medicine.
Also DOGE covered their tracks by releasing a list of several USAID's most abusive programs (e.g. money for trans education in Peru; money for trans broadway style play in Ireland--guess Riverdance needed a sequel somewhere). By releasing the list, that helped normies get behind DOGE even more in the long run.
Many of us are tired of decades of being the only country seemingly on the hook for saving the "poor kids in Africa". It means as much to me as being told as a kid I had to finish everything on my plate because "think of all the kids starving in China".
That's a Trumpian move: go after the *biggest* fish first, don't bother starting small.
Not only does it fit one of his mantras from The Art of the Deal -- "If you're going to dream, you might as well dream big"--- but it describes how he won the R nomination in 2016, which held a large field. In that race, he didn't bother trying to pick off the smaller candidates and look "serious" enough to take on the big fish. No. instead he first went right after the presumed front-runner Jeb Bush, fatally labeling him "low energy" and snarking him right off the bat in debates, getting him pegged as just another neocon Bush out for more foreign wars. Jeb never recovered, and sealed his own campaign with the famous "please clap" speech that displayed just how different being the Deep State's favorite and being the people's favorite were.
Trump was on a roll then and went after big fish after that. And here we stand, his having won 3 elections in a row.
Most politicos these days start small and try to build momentum. Which is why no one will remember their names.
So, what fraction of the Dept of Edu's budget is spent on NAEP?
And satisfying your curiosity is nice, but are the scores going up or down and would exterminating the teat-suckers at DofE make the underlying outcomes better or worse?
It says something about the quality of bureaucrats that they would rather the government went broke in a few years than cut off or shrink a few fiefdoms now.
My wife was once a federal bureaucrat and she told me the mentality was this- if Program A gets $ 1 million in 1993, it has to get $1.05 million in 1994 even if Program A really only needs $900,000 to get the job done.
The folks making 250k in political appointee jobs in the Federal Government have neither the ability nor the inclination to make big money at SpaceX or X. It would be interesting to know how many people Elon poached from NASA.
Agreed. It’s like all those teachers who talk about the sacrifices they made by going to work for the public school district over the private sector. They’d never hack it long term in the private sector and certainly wouldn’t have the cushy benefits which have a dollar value.
I know two GS-15s. One started as a teacher and then took a job with the Department of Education as he didn’t find teaching congenial. Fortunately for him, he’s long since moved to a different department. Make of that what you will.
Warren Meyer has written about the general government strategy for sabotaging budget cuts:
> When it comes to the military, Republicans use the same "closing the Washington Monument" tactics that Democrats use for social programs, essentially claiming that a 5% (or 1%) spending cut will result in the cessation of whatever activity taxpayers most want to see continue. This process of offering up the most, rather than the least, important uses of money when spending cuts are proposed as a tactic to avoid spending cuts is one of the most corrupt practices imaginable. No corporate CEO would tolerate it of his managers for a micro-second.
The Saw Doctors are an Irish musical group that were at their height thirty years ago. There’s a line in one of their songs in which a virtuous young lady is described as “collecting for Concern on Christmas Eve.”
Concern was, and is, an Irish Charity and NGO, much devoted to the usual left-wing, nation destroying causes.
Last week, Concern laid off over 400 staffers from their operations around the world, including many in the Dublin equivalent of K Street. The reason, cuts to USAid.
The American taxpayer has been paying the salaries of at least 400 people in one tiny little Irish “charity” for God knows how long.
You know if the choice is 400 Irish Concern employees on the dime of the American taxpayer or tanking my (and everyone else's) 401K and 529 because the gang who couldn't shoot straight freaked everyone the f_ck out with their incompetence, I personally don't think it's a hard choice.
Yes, actually. Sometimes the economy needs to crash to either get some social policies going, such as more domestic manufacturing. Which is a policy you promote because it has social benefits for people to do things that actually matter, the economic benefits are at best secondary.
Or do you believe that the world should be run by the worries of hedge fund managers?
I believe government should be run competently which was maybe Steve's point to begin with.
I understand that eggs need to be broken to make an omelette but you still have to make the f_cking omelette and I'd love to see the evidence this administration could make toast.
Yes, so do I. I'm just saying that the stock market is one of the worst ways to judge whether the government is competently run. Stock markets want stability, weak unions, low wages, and infinity immigration. This is also why I believe that Moldbug's idea of letting the top CEOs run the country is a horrible idea.
I suspect there is a very high ratio of BS jobs in government. A business has to make a bottom line so there is a constraint on hiring. The last thing a bureaucrat wants is to solve whatever problem is his remit. The best thing is if the problem gets worse; then he needs more budget and employees and a promotion. No doubt there are some few dedicated people, but the incentives all run the other way. With such a high ratio of useless bloat, it should be easy to identify the few who actually do anything. In fact, DOGE is asking federal employees to list what they do. Many will have trouble pointing to anything useful. In private business, 10% reductions happen every few years; these are so common they are not even considered reportable events. When has the government ever had any similar reduction? Never, to my knowledge.
Right. But you first need to understand, say, the federal weather bureau. Some of those guys have done a great job making weather forecasting more accurate, some not so much. If you demand big cuts without understanding what should be cut, the management will make sure the cuts ruin people's picnics by worsening weather forecasting.
Also, something Charlie Peters pointed out decades ago in the reformist Washington Monthly: only a few government bureaucrats have jobs where they don't do anything of value, instead you have a lot of jobs where employees do one thing valuable 2 hours per day and waste the rest of the day. So, the task is more complicated than just firing everybody who doesn't do anything important. You've got to fire people who do one or two important things, but who couldn't do 3 or 4 important things and give their tasks to the people currently doing 1 or 2 important things and who could do 3 or 4 well. That takes a fair amount of inside information, which takes time and incentives to acquire.
I have found there is the appearance of better weather forecasting (light rain starting in 13 minutes), while the actual accuracy or consistency leaves much to be desired. 3 weather apps will give 3 different results for the same zip code. I've seen both 0% and 100% chance of rain at the same time between forecasts.
Basically, that is just one example of how everything government does is subpar and mostly useless and I don't care about huge cuts. The media screams bloody murder about everything Trump does anyway, and at this point they don't change anyone's mind one way or another. Trump said he was putting Elon in charge of DOGE to cut and that is what America voted for.
Fair point, I'd have to see what they are based on.
But if government data informed weather forecasts don't come up in the first page of seach results in something like Google, what benefit is it to me as a taxpayer? If it got chopped tomorrow no one would even notice.
My vague impression is that the private weather forecasting services all buy the government's output and then put their own spin on it. It's not a bad way to get economy of scale with the government doing the heavy lifting of collecting an enormous amount of data and some degree of private competition in forecasting.
I live in the mid-Atlantic and I just lived through the absolute lousiest rain forecast in quite some time. What happened and what I was told would happen 24 hours prior were two entirely different things. How in this day of advanced technology are they still getting it so wrong???? Let Elon and Trump take a chainsaw to it all.
I was taught back in the 1990s that chaos theory means that weather forecasting a day in advance will never be very good and that four days out it will be basically hopeless.
Echoing what Steve says below, I am shocked by how well they do in southern CA predicting what the week will be like. Sometimes they miss the exact day of the rain or the spread, but you know it's coming that week and it does. Shockingly they don't get much better a few hours in advance.
The real key as that it rains when it's time to walk my dog.
What you write is plausible. However, my experience is with lots of people serving the public directly, best they can despite very complicated regulations and inefficient work rules, while a regional office seems to have little constructive work and seems to function mostly (not only) to slow down the rest of us. At the agency where I formerly worked, this seems to have been noticed by someone with authority.
Having said that, I have to admit that some amount of the wisdom in adjusting that agency must have come from the Democrat who previously ran it, because he went far out of his way to directly get suggestions from the bottom ranks. I spoke with him myself.
Oh man, if I had more time today this would definitely get me going. At a more fundamental level, with many government positions (including my own) it's simply not possible to measure performance or hold employees accountable in a reasonable or productive manner. An individual who is told to do everything assigned to a standard and neither less nor more cannot really be evaluated, especially relative to the average peer, except in the case of serious failure, like an SAT test that maxes out at 1000. This is in addition to the core problem - and affecting the private sector as well - of assessing security functions and overhead functions. I don't see the (incredibly impressive!) DOGE folks as having demonstrated awareness of this issue and the literature about it, or of doing the difficult conceptual preparation in reflecting on how it might be possible to reshape the conduct of government business in order to make it amenable to accountability and evaluation, which would necessitate a revolution in the way business is done.
To you first question, I haven't heard of them doing anything like that, but to be fair, there are several good reasons why they shouldn't spend time doing that. Keep in mind we are talking about a -very- small number of people, really just a few dozen, though almost all them of them seem through-the-roof smart and accomplished, minimum +4SD, with some very prestigious lawyers, and bunch of old hands who were key players in pivotal moments at the various Musk businesses, and some veritable software genius wunderkind, I think one from Thiel's circle.
The scope of the challenges they have taken on militates in favor of prioritizing activities where their work can translate into impacts of maximum scale and high-level automatability newly-enabled by "AI" and related techniques. This is NOT a group in the nature of some cadre which can quickly recruit, interview, and fill in a big organizational hierarchy with lots of new folks ready and able to work effectively as a team. Frankly, I think any of them would be immensely frustrated and have their valuable time wasted by trying to work with people who aren't remotely in their league of intelligence, motivation, quickness, energy and intimate familiarity and facility will all kinds of the latest high tech tools.
Even if they found someone who they already trusted was one of "our guys" and who was respected as knowledgeable and competent, they just don't have the luxury of the time it takes to engage one-on-one and assimilate small bits of insight and wisdom that way. To avoid the "paralysis of analysis" and maintain momentum and initiative against all the sources of resistance, they have little option but to bias in favor of cutting too much instead of keeping too much, with the assumption that if a genuinely huge mistake's been made that the pips will squeak loudly for attention with an explanation that can immediately be discerned to be valid and compelling, and in such cases, mistakes can be quickly and easily reversed. This is very much in keeping with the "move fast and break things" and "you can just do things" Silicon Valley / VC entrepreneurial ethos.
As for trust, there is zero of it outside the political appointees, and even there, the elites mostly only trust the other elites. It really wasn't that different during Biden, with trust outside political appointees not extending much below the level of top senior leadership. This is not some special Trump-world thing, it's something caused by the adoption of widespread adoption of social media and smartphones and already started getting bad in Obama's first team and has gotten worse and worse since. The point is, there is no ability to assess whether some career civil servant might be on-side and trustworthy. Even in my own rather extreme pro-DOGE case, I have to confess that I would be worried about what might happen to me in a future Democrat administration were it to become known I helped them in their mission as much as possible and to get a reputation as a Vichy collaborator or whatever. Most conservatives have a hard time getting very far up the chain without having learned to play their cards close to their vest and adopt the posture of a scrupulously neutral non-partisan professional. The Trump people already don't trust merely ordinary old-style GOPers (and they are indeed correct in not doing so, having learned that lesson the hard way), and the DOGE people seem to be aware they are never going to get the best out of someone with bureaucratic-career-interests mindset.
Your next question, "What are the odds that Democrats in upper management will use DOGE as an opportunity to purge the few Republican in federal employment?" - I think close to zero, at least, so far. Nothing that is happening so far is even close to being that individualized. However, there is a new wrinkle and we'll have to see how it plays out. You mentioned the GS scale (actually the pay doesn't max out quite like you said, even though the table includes numbers, for most cases one hits a statutory cap before that), but above GS are the various tiers of Senior Executive Service, who, while eligible for bonuses, these are so small they would make someone in the private sector laugh out loud.
Now, if you look at SES performance evaluation scores, for many departments and agencies it's not uncommon for 90%+ to score 4 or 5 (out of 5). Now, I get it, to an outside, this seems pretty 'sus' - fishy, fake, and corruptly self-dealing. But in fact, the scores are legit, that's the nature of the job. Absent big screw ups or scandals, "do what I'm told and only what I'm told" can't really be assessed any other way but satisfactory or pass/fail, and most senior executives are obviously going to be the kind of people who are going to know what to do to pass.
Ok, well, the Trump/DOGE either feel those numbers indicate corruption or else that lowering them to the point some people are going to fall below the new higher "adequate performance" threshold would be a good excuse to fire yet more people, since the law specially makes it much easier for the President to remove senior leaders for poor performance.
So in addition to getting rid of the woke, grants-and-university-selection-processes "What have you done for DEI lately?" language in the rubric for how SES's were evaluated in the past administration, the new hotness is to grade them on a curve like law student final exams that only allows so many SES's to get goods and excellent, and pretty much means that -some- non-negligible percentage of them are going to get 1's and 2's, which I'm told is unprecedented, but worse, probably unfair, if one happens to care about being fair, which I do. Get one 1 and you're likely going to get terminated. Two 2's in three years - terminated. Of course higher-up executives will be evaluated on whether or not they are producing the right curve-fit numbers for the evaluations of their subordinate SES's.
Now, the questions become, which SES's are going to get the 1's and 2's, and what will the real reasons be behind those selections, to what extent will that be competently politically supervised, and to what extent will the people who receive those ratings be able to object or challenge them as improper since - as is often the case - there is no good objective way to distinguish their past performance from that of those who received much higher scores? Will anyone getting a 2 be treated with extra leniency in subsequent years like some judges will treat defendants with two priors with more leniency to avoid a "three strikes" sentence? I really don't know. I have little concern that this will be used by woke executives to purge the least-woke subordinate executive. I am much more worried about this getting used corporate-soap-opera-mean-girls-style to get rid of perfectly competent and productive people who just aren't as popular or who don't suck up as much or who don't conform as much or who are just less attractive or charismatic. The government needs much less of that, but this initiative risks producing much more of that dysfunctional nonsense.
Cutting a bloated bureaucracy will inevitably be a messy business, full of mistakes that look like stepping on rakes. But there is no alternative; to take extended time o carefully evaluate everything means that in the end little nothing would be done.
When Musk downsized Twitter - X, he evidently benefited from inside advice, but in such a mass reduction probably some useful employees were terminated. Overall, the system did not break down. While there may be bad PR at times, the offsetting overriding factor will likely be the continuing exposure of gross "waste, fraud, and abuse" (should we just say WFR?) which will be effective counter-PR. So far the MAGA side has been dominating the PR battle. When Lefties fought cuts at USAID by playing up the small part that was humanitarian work, this was quickly dealt with by further exposures of WFR and by announcing that the desirable parts would be taken over by the State Department.
Though there is no vast upswell in President Trump's personal approval ratings, the polling on the Democratic Party is imploding, with a record low approval rating of 29% in a CNN poll, and 27% at NBC news. Only 63% of Democrats and Democrat leaners approve of the party.
As Michael Shellenberger has reported, this is why the homeless problem in California keeps getting worse despite all the money the state government spends on it. That money mostly goes to bureaucrats incentivized to maintain the situation, not resolve it.
I think there is a certain kind of person who wants mentally ill/drug addicts camping on the sidewalks, so that bad people like me cannot ignore it. Similar people are happy for the wildfires here because we must accept the dangers of global warming. I doubt there are cynical people trying to keep homelessness high in order for their job to continue. Here in CA the weather will keep attracting more not matter how many they find permanent housing for. Of course the kind of do gooders who flock to that sort of thing are constitutionally poor at creating housing. Fighting the regulation to do that would require a jerk like Trump. Can't have that. Anyway, the unsolved homeless problem in CA is little to do with lack of houses surrounding people. It's obviously drug addiction and organic mental illness and people on the left are against the only sort of effective measures we have for that so, no problem keeping that funding going even if they try their cute little darnedest.
Yes, for that kind of person, addled by ideological commitment, the open air drug scene is proof of the corruption of the present, which must be swept away in a revolution that will bring in an imagined transformative future.
For STEM majors, working in DCIPS, there is a separate pay table, linked below. Also, OPM has special rates tables for employees at various agencies that allow pay to exceed $200K. eg: FAA, VAMC, etc.
If you are a GS15, much of your compensation is in having a lot of people working for you. Why would you want to betray your loyal underlings by telling Musk which ones you could actually do without if he’s not going to make you substantially richer for it?"
There’s a good way to go about government downsizing and a stupid way. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s effort headed by Elon Musk is using the second approach.
First, it’s okay to eliminate obviously unnecessary positions like those used to promote DEI. No harm, no foul, but after that is accomplished attempting to micromanage complex government programs is a fool’s game.
Each government agency should by now have scores of Trump appointees in charge of agency management down to the regional office level outside of Washington DC. The way to proceed with minimal disruption is to give each of these appointees a set budget reduction target (say 10% or 15%) and let those individuals working with the senior civil service employees they now manage determine how to meet the new targets with the least disruption to services provided to the American people. DOGE simply does not have the ability to do this job and the stupid mistakes they are making will completely and permanently tarnish their ability to reduce government spending. This NYT article highlights the kind of stupidity Musk is engaged in:
Yeah, there is now a lot more pushback against DOGE blundering from Trump appointees than there was 6 weeks ago before Trump's specialists were in place in the agencies.
Does anyone really think that a perfectly executed, smart, tactical and significant cut of government programs would lead to fair coverage in which the press does NOT highlight some child dying for 12c a day, or whatever Steve’s point is? Newt Gingrich tried a more responsible tack in 1994 and was rewarded with …. Bill Clinton tacking to the center I guess. But find me a Democrat who will tack to the center today. Seriously.
Back at Unz, where Steve had a more extreme and niche audience, he was semi-regularly labeled as being a normie Republican. Just so—normie Republicans talk about government waste but don’t really want to cut it. I don’t doubt Steve wants to cut, but suspect at this point that whatever smart serious responsible tactic we could imagine would be hijacked quicker than Trump’s first term was.
"vureucracy" !!
I thought maybe you were using a cool word i'd never heard of before, like maybe a "vulture-ocracy" or something borrowed from the French, but then saw that the B and V keys are next to each other. Damn!
anytime!
Launching a surprise attack with no intelligence regarding the lay of the land you've chosen to fight on is not a wise tactic.
But they've been failing to implement like they know what they are doing.
Trump should be in his honeymoon period right now, but DOGE's PR blunders are a major weight:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/poll-voters-idea-doge-elon-musk-early-results-raise-red-flags-rcna196541
Mistakes like sacrificing credibility aren't that easily fixed. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
As long as Trump/Musk doesn't axe Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, they're safe cutting hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and tens of thousands of programs. Just for fun, I'd close every military base in a blue state and bring home all our troops in Europe.
My first impression of the 2nd term is a lot better than was my first impression of the first. Sounds like you have gotten stuck in the wrong silo, the one NBC was polling in that said Trump was going to lose.
You still take polls seriously, Steve?
There is a CNN clip making the rounds on Twitter about polls showing a majority support for DOGE and cuts. I certainly didn't expect that or for then to cover it (they weren't happy about it) so maybe this isn't a Sideshow Bob situation.
Most of those staff are gone.
Then why are they doing so poorly. And the children surrounding Musk did not work in the first Trump White House.
The multiple lawsuits that have order the government to rehire people and the constant backtracking and changing.
The government is not a start up where one can make constant change and try three or four times to get something right.
"It's almost as if DOGE wasn't carefully planned ahead of time to focus first on the worst examples of waste and fraud"
Like for example focusing on the worst abuses, waste, and fraud within a major government program that most can concede needs major overhaul and reforming...
like say for example,
USAID.
Perhaps DOGE should start with the obvious examples of abusive waste within specific programs like USAID, trim the fraud and abuse from within those programs first by announcing to the media "here's examples of taxpayer money going to pot", build grass level support for those specific programs to be cut, and then build from there. Granted, the other side might not appreciate the results and attempt to fight back via the courts a la "Yeah, we know that there are wasteful programs within USAID, such as spreading T ideology in various nations as well as constant and consistently starting new NGO's in various nations to overthrow nations that aren't US friendly, but we really, REALLY want these abusive wasteful programs to continue."
Oh wait a second. That's actually ocurring in real time.
Yeah, that was a huge PR triumph with normies that helps explain why DOGE's approval rating is so sky high: instead of taking enough to start with DOGE announcing a ranked list of what's getting cut:
1. Paying Roxane Gay $60,000 to cruise the fjords of Norway and lecture on the evils of fatophobia
They moved so fast that what wound up being heard by the mainstream public due to collaboration of the bureaucrats and press:
1. Killing children by saving 12 cents per day on some incredibly cheap medicine.
Heckuva PR job, DOGE!
If it's so cheap, why aren't their own governments paying for it? Because proportionally, they're even bigger crooks than ours.
Well, yeah, but to the median swing voter, that sounds like a good, not a bad reason to save a child's life for 12 pennies per day.
World's most important and unspeakable graph
--Ebenezer S.
Trump's got two years to do demonstrable good before worrying about Wet voters.
On your schedule he'd get a start on approximately the First of Never.
And that sounds like his First Term and the Wall. Not a good result.
Also DOGE covered their tracks by releasing a list of several USAID's most abusive programs (e.g. money for trans education in Peru; money for trans broadway style play in Ireland--guess Riverdance needed a sequel somewhere). By releasing the list, that helped normies get behind DOGE even more in the long run.
Why not take the time to investigate quietly, then announce the ridiculous stuff first, rather than letting your opponents set the battlefield?
i agree. But this is Trump's administration after all. Perhaps his obvious and abrasive personality is rubbing off on DOGE a bit.
Because that's a plan that routinely results in Nothing.
We've had enough of Nothing.
Don't worry so much about what offends your opponents, worry more about doing what YOUR VOTERS want. It seems to me to be working.
Many of us are tired of decades of being the only country seemingly on the hook for saving the "poor kids in Africa". It means as much to me as being told as a kid I had to finish everything on my plate because "think of all the kids starving in China".
By the way, I made up the part about Roxane Gay, so don't cite it. But I'm sure there are comparable expenditures.
That's a Trumpian move: go after the *biggest* fish first, don't bother starting small.
Not only does it fit one of his mantras from The Art of the Deal -- "If you're going to dream, you might as well dream big"--- but it describes how he won the R nomination in 2016, which held a large field. In that race, he didn't bother trying to pick off the smaller candidates and look "serious" enough to take on the big fish. No. instead he first went right after the presumed front-runner Jeb Bush, fatally labeling him "low energy" and snarking him right off the bat in debates, getting him pegged as just another neocon Bush out for more foreign wars. Jeb never recovered, and sealed his own campaign with the famous "please clap" speech that displayed just how different being the Deep State's favorite and being the people's favorite were.
Trump was on a roll then and went after big fish after that. And here we stand, his having won 3 elections in a row.
Most politicos these days start small and try to build momentum. Which is why no one will remember their names.
Who cares about government managers
Why not just abolish entire departments?
Right. Is there any evidence that the Department of Education does anything worthwhile?
I've probably posted 100 times about federal NAEP test scores over the last 20+ years.
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/naep-test-scores-mississippi-miracle
And how much have those scores improved in all that time?
They've gone down, right. American students are dumber now due to the demographic changes in the country.
So, what fraction of the Dept of Edu's budget is spent on NAEP?
And satisfying your curiosity is nice, but are the scores going up or down and would exterminating the teat-suckers at DofE make the underlying outcomes better or worse?
I don't want a more efficient government. I want a MUCH smaller government.
Even seemingly random firings will make the remaining employees get back to business.
There is no good way to do this.
It says something about the quality of bureaucrats that they would rather the government went broke in a few years than cut off or shrink a few fiefdoms now.
Wow, it's almost as if federal bureaucrats aren't saints, they are people who respond to incentives, and DOGE failed to think through the incentives.
Monthly Decimations! Let's put the ax back in "getting the ax."
Compared to whom? The omniscient saints you think ought to have been put in charge?
How about we just outvote the Wets rather than pander to them?
My wife was once a federal bureaucrat and she told me the mentality was this- if Program A gets $ 1 million in 1993, it has to get $1.05 million in 1994 even if Program A really only needs $900,000 to get the job done.
Senior executive service (SES) make more than gs 15.
Yeah, it looks like $250,600:
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/pay-executive-order-2025-adjustments-of-certain-rates-of-pay.pdf
What's the mean salary at Space X or Twitter?
The folks making 250k in political appointee jobs in the Federal Government have neither the ability nor the inclination to make big money at SpaceX or X. It would be interesting to know how many people Elon poached from NASA.
Agreed. It’s like all those teachers who talk about the sacrifices they made by going to work for the public school district over the private sector. They’d never hack it long term in the private sector and certainly wouldn’t have the cushy benefits which have a dollar value.
I know two GS-15s. One started as a teacher and then took a job with the Department of Education as he didn’t find teaching congenial. Fortunately for him, he’s long since moved to a different department. Make of that what you will.
It’s government to government employment. DOE shouldn’t exist. I’d say more grifting.
Warren Meyer has written about the general government strategy for sabotaging budget cuts:
> When it comes to the military, Republicans use the same "closing the Washington Monument" tactics that Democrats use for social programs, essentially claiming that a 5% (or 1%) spending cut will result in the cessation of whatever activity taxpayers most want to see continue. This process of offering up the most, rather than the least, important uses of money when spending cuts are proposed as a tactic to avoid spending cuts is one of the most corrupt practices imaginable. No corporate CEO would tolerate it of his managers for a micro-second.
The quote is from https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2013/02/sequester-madness.html ; I'm pretty sure he's got a fuller treatment of the issue somewhere else on his blog, but I couldn't find it.
Right. A completely expected tactic on the part of bureaucrats, so why just walk into the traditional trap?
Bring some creativity for figuring out how not to step on all the carefully positioned rakes.
Every rake that shows up is an opportunity for a good firing.
I'm amazed that Musk had a trusted adviser named Ben Sans Souci - that name translates as "No worries". What are the odds? Or did Ben change his name like previous Musk associate Brogan BamBrogan? See https://www.businessinsider.com/how-hyperloop-founder-brogan-bambrogan-got-the-greatest-name-ever-2016-5?op=1
I was making up a list of all the implausibly European-sounding names in Isaacson's "Elon Musk," like "San Souci" and "Karpathy."
The Saw Doctors are an Irish musical group that were at their height thirty years ago. There’s a line in one of their songs in which a virtuous young lady is described as “collecting for Concern on Christmas Eve.”
Concern was, and is, an Irish Charity and NGO, much devoted to the usual left-wing, nation destroying causes.
Last week, Concern laid off over 400 staffers from their operations around the world, including many in the Dublin equivalent of K Street. The reason, cuts to USAid.
The American taxpayer has been paying the salaries of at least 400 people in one tiny little Irish “charity” for God knows how long.
Thank God Donald Trump won the last election.
You know if the choice is 400 Irish Concern employees on the dime of the American taxpayer or tanking my (and everyone else's) 401K and 529 because the gang who couldn't shoot straight freaked everyone the f_ck out with their incompetence, I personally don't think it's a hard choice.
At least everything else is going really well.
Sorry but the government has no obligation to maintain your investments high lol.
Sorry but the government has no obligation to not crash the economy in other words.
Interesting theory on governing. I'll be curious as to how that one turns out..
Yes, actually. Sometimes the economy needs to crash to either get some social policies going, such as more domestic manufacturing. Which is a policy you promote because it has social benefits for people to do things that actually matter, the economic benefits are at best secondary.
Or do you believe that the world should be run by the worries of hedge fund managers?
I believe government should be run competently which was maybe Steve's point to begin with.
I understand that eggs need to be broken to make an omelette but you still have to make the f_cking omelette and I'd love to see the evidence this administration could make toast.
Yes, so do I. I'm just saying that the stock market is one of the worst ways to judge whether the government is competently run. Stock markets want stability, weak unions, low wages, and infinity immigration. This is also why I believe that Moldbug's idea of letting the top CEOs run the country is a horrible idea.
No one with a clue thinks that your stock values are a good measure of government competence.
My 401k hasn’t crashed. And now I’m paying for fewer grifters. It’s a win-win.
> At least everything else is going really well.
Agree.
Wasn't that Franz Joseph's line at the time of the First Balkan Crisis? Or maybe it was during the July Crisis, six years later. I forget.
36 trillion, right?
A wonderful sentiment.
"I walked up to her,
And made an os-ten-tacious con-tribution.
Then we had a session!
I used to love her, I used to love her once -
long-long time ago..."
You know what’s up!
I suspect there is a very high ratio of BS jobs in government. A business has to make a bottom line so there is a constraint on hiring. The last thing a bureaucrat wants is to solve whatever problem is his remit. The best thing is if the problem gets worse; then he needs more budget and employees and a promotion. No doubt there are some few dedicated people, but the incentives all run the other way. With such a high ratio of useless bloat, it should be easy to identify the few who actually do anything. In fact, DOGE is asking federal employees to list what they do. Many will have trouble pointing to anything useful. In private business, 10% reductions happen every few years; these are so common they are not even considered reportable events. When has the government ever had any similar reduction? Never, to my knowledge.
Right. But you first need to understand, say, the federal weather bureau. Some of those guys have done a great job making weather forecasting more accurate, some not so much. If you demand big cuts without understanding what should be cut, the management will make sure the cuts ruin people's picnics by worsening weather forecasting.
Also, something Charlie Peters pointed out decades ago in the reformist Washington Monthly: only a few government bureaucrats have jobs where they don't do anything of value, instead you have a lot of jobs where employees do one thing valuable 2 hours per day and waste the rest of the day. So, the task is more complicated than just firing everybody who doesn't do anything important. You've got to fire people who do one or two important things, but who couldn't do 3 or 4 important things and give their tasks to the people currently doing 1 or 2 important things and who could do 3 or 4 well. That takes a fair amount of inside information, which takes time and incentives to acquire.
I have found there is the appearance of better weather forecasting (light rain starting in 13 minutes), while the actual accuracy or consistency leaves much to be desired. 3 weather apps will give 3 different results for the same zip code. I've seen both 0% and 100% chance of rain at the same time between forecasts.
Basically, that is just one example of how everything government does is subpar and mostly useless and I don't care about huge cuts. The media screams bloody murder about everything Trump does anyway, and at this point they don't change anyone's mind one way or another. Trump said he was putting Elon in charge of DOGE to cut and that is what America voted for.
I've seen no rain for the next hour while rain is falling on my head. I understand chaos theory and all but...
Presumably, the 3 different weather forecasts are from private companies Adding Value to the government's forecast.
Fair point, I'd have to see what they are based on.
But if government data informed weather forecasts don't come up in the first page of seach results in something like Google, what benefit is it to me as a taxpayer? If it got chopped tomorrow no one would even notice.
My vague impression is that the private weather forecasting services all buy the government's output and then put their own spin on it. It's not a bad way to get economy of scale with the government doing the heavy lifting of collecting an enormous amount of data and some degree of private competition in forecasting.
I'd kind of expect better results then. Gov gathers tons of data from their resources, private sector really dials it in. Bummer it isn't working out.
I live in the mid-Atlantic and I just lived through the absolute lousiest rain forecast in quite some time. What happened and what I was told would happen 24 hours prior were two entirely different things. How in this day of advanced technology are they still getting it so wrong???? Let Elon and Trump take a chainsaw to it all.
Granted, I live in an easy place to forecast the weather, but weather forecasting has gotten dramatically better over my lifetime.
I was taught back in the 1990s that chaos theory means that weather forecasting a day in advance will never be very good and that four days out it will be basically hopeless.
Echoing what Steve says below, I am shocked by how well they do in southern CA predicting what the week will be like. Sometimes they miss the exact day of the rain or the spread, but you know it's coming that week and it does. Shockingly they don't get much better a few hours in advance.
The real key as that it rains when it's time to walk my dog.
What you write is plausible. However, my experience is with lots of people serving the public directly, best they can despite very complicated regulations and inefficient work rules, while a regional office seems to have little constructive work and seems to function mostly (not only) to slow down the rest of us. At the agency where I formerly worked, this seems to have been noticed by someone with authority.
Having said that, I have to admit that some amount of the wisdom in adjusting that agency must have come from the Democrat who previously ran it, because he went far out of his way to directly get suggestions from the bottom ranks. I spoke with him myself.
Oh man, if I had more time today this would definitely get me going. At a more fundamental level, with many government positions (including my own) it's simply not possible to measure performance or hold employees accountable in a reasonable or productive manner. An individual who is told to do everything assigned to a standard and neither less nor more cannot really be evaluated, especially relative to the average peer, except in the case of serious failure, like an SAT test that maxes out at 1000. This is in addition to the core problem - and affecting the private sector as well - of assessing security functions and overhead functions. I don't see the (incredibly impressive!) DOGE folks as having demonstrated awareness of this issue and the literature about it, or of doing the difficult conceptual preparation in reflecting on how it might be possible to reshape the conduct of government business in order to make it amenable to accountability and evaluation, which would necessitate a revolution in the way business is done.
Thanks.
At your office, has anybody from DOGE made efforts to identify employees who are fairly sympathetic to the new administration?
What are the odds that Democrats in upper management will use DOGE as an opportunity to purge the few Republican in federal employment?
To you first question, I haven't heard of them doing anything like that, but to be fair, there are several good reasons why they shouldn't spend time doing that. Keep in mind we are talking about a -very- small number of people, really just a few dozen, though almost all them of them seem through-the-roof smart and accomplished, minimum +4SD, with some very prestigious lawyers, and bunch of old hands who were key players in pivotal moments at the various Musk businesses, and some veritable software genius wunderkind, I think one from Thiel's circle.
The scope of the challenges they have taken on militates in favor of prioritizing activities where their work can translate into impacts of maximum scale and high-level automatability newly-enabled by "AI" and related techniques. This is NOT a group in the nature of some cadre which can quickly recruit, interview, and fill in a big organizational hierarchy with lots of new folks ready and able to work effectively as a team. Frankly, I think any of them would be immensely frustrated and have their valuable time wasted by trying to work with people who aren't remotely in their league of intelligence, motivation, quickness, energy and intimate familiarity and facility will all kinds of the latest high tech tools.
Even if they found someone who they already trusted was one of "our guys" and who was respected as knowledgeable and competent, they just don't have the luxury of the time it takes to engage one-on-one and assimilate small bits of insight and wisdom that way. To avoid the "paralysis of analysis" and maintain momentum and initiative against all the sources of resistance, they have little option but to bias in favor of cutting too much instead of keeping too much, with the assumption that if a genuinely huge mistake's been made that the pips will squeak loudly for attention with an explanation that can immediately be discerned to be valid and compelling, and in such cases, mistakes can be quickly and easily reversed. This is very much in keeping with the "move fast and break things" and "you can just do things" Silicon Valley / VC entrepreneurial ethos.
As for trust, there is zero of it outside the political appointees, and even there, the elites mostly only trust the other elites. It really wasn't that different during Biden, with trust outside political appointees not extending much below the level of top senior leadership. This is not some special Trump-world thing, it's something caused by the adoption of widespread adoption of social media and smartphones and already started getting bad in Obama's first team and has gotten worse and worse since. The point is, there is no ability to assess whether some career civil servant might be on-side and trustworthy. Even in my own rather extreme pro-DOGE case, I have to confess that I would be worried about what might happen to me in a future Democrat administration were it to become known I helped them in their mission as much as possible and to get a reputation as a Vichy collaborator or whatever. Most conservatives have a hard time getting very far up the chain without having learned to play their cards close to their vest and adopt the posture of a scrupulously neutral non-partisan professional. The Trump people already don't trust merely ordinary old-style GOPers (and they are indeed correct in not doing so, having learned that lesson the hard way), and the DOGE people seem to be aware they are never going to get the best out of someone with bureaucratic-career-interests mindset.
Your next question, "What are the odds that Democrats in upper management will use DOGE as an opportunity to purge the few Republican in federal employment?" - I think close to zero, at least, so far. Nothing that is happening so far is even close to being that individualized. However, there is a new wrinkle and we'll have to see how it plays out. You mentioned the GS scale (actually the pay doesn't max out quite like you said, even though the table includes numbers, for most cases one hits a statutory cap before that), but above GS are the various tiers of Senior Executive Service, who, while eligible for bonuses, these are so small they would make someone in the private sector laugh out loud.
Now, if you look at SES performance evaluation scores, for many departments and agencies it's not uncommon for 90%+ to score 4 or 5 (out of 5). Now, I get it, to an outside, this seems pretty 'sus' - fishy, fake, and corruptly self-dealing. But in fact, the scores are legit, that's the nature of the job. Absent big screw ups or scandals, "do what I'm told and only what I'm told" can't really be assessed any other way but satisfactory or pass/fail, and most senior executives are obviously going to be the kind of people who are going to know what to do to pass.
Ok, well, the Trump/DOGE either feel those numbers indicate corruption or else that lowering them to the point some people are going to fall below the new higher "adequate performance" threshold would be a good excuse to fire yet more people, since the law specially makes it much easier for the President to remove senior leaders for poor performance.
So in addition to getting rid of the woke, grants-and-university-selection-processes "What have you done for DEI lately?" language in the rubric for how SES's were evaluated in the past administration, the new hotness is to grade them on a curve like law student final exams that only allows so many SES's to get goods and excellent, and pretty much means that -some- non-negligible percentage of them are going to get 1's and 2's, which I'm told is unprecedented, but worse, probably unfair, if one happens to care about being fair, which I do. Get one 1 and you're likely going to get terminated. Two 2's in three years - terminated. Of course higher-up executives will be evaluated on whether or not they are producing the right curve-fit numbers for the evaluations of their subordinate SES's.
Now, the questions become, which SES's are going to get the 1's and 2's, and what will the real reasons be behind those selections, to what extent will that be competently politically supervised, and to what extent will the people who receive those ratings be able to object or challenge them as improper since - as is often the case - there is no good objective way to distinguish their past performance from that of those who received much higher scores? Will anyone getting a 2 be treated with extra leniency in subsequent years like some judges will treat defendants with two priors with more leniency to avoid a "three strikes" sentence? I really don't know. I have little concern that this will be used by woke executives to purge the least-woke subordinate executive. I am much more worried about this getting used corporate-soap-opera-mean-girls-style to get rid of perfectly competent and productive people who just aren't as popular or who don't suck up as much or who don't conform as much or who are just less attractive or charismatic. The government needs much less of that, but this initiative risks producing much more of that dysfunctional nonsense.
Cutting a bloated bureaucracy will inevitably be a messy business, full of mistakes that look like stepping on rakes. But there is no alternative; to take extended time o carefully evaluate everything means that in the end little nothing would be done.
When Musk downsized Twitter - X, he evidently benefited from inside advice, but in such a mass reduction probably some useful employees were terminated. Overall, the system did not break down. While there may be bad PR at times, the offsetting overriding factor will likely be the continuing exposure of gross "waste, fraud, and abuse" (should we just say WFR?) which will be effective counter-PR. So far the MAGA side has been dominating the PR battle. When Lefties fought cuts at USAID by playing up the small part that was humanitarian work, this was quickly dealt with by further exposures of WFR and by announcing that the desirable parts would be taken over by the State Department.
"So far the MAGA side has been dominating the PR battle."
In the MAGAsphere. The polls, however, don't indicate a vast upswell in approval.
Though there is no vast upswell in President Trump's personal approval ratings, the polling on the Democratic Party is imploding, with a record low approval rating of 29% in a CNN poll, and 27% at NBC news. Only 63% of Democrats and Democrat leaners approve of the party.
https://x.com/Real_RobN/status/1901319124875399670
As Michael Shellenberger has reported, this is why the homeless problem in California keeps getting worse despite all the money the state government spends on it. That money mostly goes to bureaucrats incentivized to maintain the situation, not resolve it.
So true. I’ve seen it described as the “NGO-Industrial Complex”, where Newsom gets to funnel funds to all his Far Left allies and supporters.
I think there is a certain kind of person who wants mentally ill/drug addicts camping on the sidewalks, so that bad people like me cannot ignore it. Similar people are happy for the wildfires here because we must accept the dangers of global warming. I doubt there are cynical people trying to keep homelessness high in order for their job to continue. Here in CA the weather will keep attracting more not matter how many they find permanent housing for. Of course the kind of do gooders who flock to that sort of thing are constitutionally poor at creating housing. Fighting the regulation to do that would require a jerk like Trump. Can't have that. Anyway, the unsolved homeless problem in CA is little to do with lack of houses surrounding people. It's obviously drug addiction and organic mental illness and people on the left are against the only sort of effective measures we have for that so, no problem keeping that funding going even if they try their cute little darnedest.
Yes, for that kind of person, addled by ideological commitment, the open air drug scene is proof of the corruption of the present, which must be swept away in a revolution that will bring in an imagined transformative future.
Bureaucrats and NGOs get their large cuts. They have no incentive to get people off the dole. Their incentive is to get more people on the dole.
RE: the question, there's a graph of total government employment over time at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT
And one of total federal employment at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
Thanks. For Federal employees (ex contractors):
Bush's 8 yrs, Jan '01 to Jan '09: 2,753,000 to 2,786,000 (+1.2%)
Obama's 8 yrs, Jan '09 to Jan '17: 2,786,000 to 2,813,000 (+1.0%)
Trump's 4 yrs, Jan '17 to Jan '21: 2,813,000 to 2,886,000 (+2.6%)
Biden's 4 yrs, Jan '21 to Jan '25: 2,886,000 to 3,007,000 (+4.2%)
Now do it with contractors.
> I suspect there is a very high ratio of BS jobs in government
This is like me suspecting that tomorrow will be Tuesday
For STEM majors, working in DCIPS, there is a separate pay table, linked below. Also, OPM has special rates tables for employees at various agencies that allow pay to exceed $200K. eg: FAA, VAMC, etc.
https://dcips.defense.gov/Portals/50/Documents/Compensation/DCIPS%20STEM%20TLMS/2024/2024_DCIPS_TLMS_Pay_Charts_STEM_CYBER.pdf
If you are a GS15, much of your compensation is in having a lot of people working for you. Why would you want to betray your loyal underlings by telling Musk which ones you could actually do without if he’s not going to make you substantially richer for it?"
That is a reason to use an axe, not a scalpel.
There’s a good way to go about government downsizing and a stupid way. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s effort headed by Elon Musk is using the second approach.
First, it’s okay to eliminate obviously unnecessary positions like those used to promote DEI. No harm, no foul, but after that is accomplished attempting to micromanage complex government programs is a fool’s game.
Each government agency should by now have scores of Trump appointees in charge of agency management down to the regional office level outside of Washington DC. The way to proceed with minimal disruption is to give each of these appointees a set budget reduction target (say 10% or 15%) and let those individuals working with the senior civil service employees they now manage determine how to meet the new targets with the least disruption to services provided to the American people. DOGE simply does not have the ability to do this job and the stupid mistakes they are making will completely and permanently tarnish their ability to reduce government spending. This NYT article highlights the kind of stupidity Musk is engaged in:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/travel/national-park-service-firings.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zU4.auCr.xN44vnAIiMzg&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Yeah, there is now a lot more pushback against DOGE blundering from Trump appointees than there was 6 weeks ago before Trump's specialists were in place in the agencies.
Does anyone really think that a perfectly executed, smart, tactical and significant cut of government programs would lead to fair coverage in which the press does NOT highlight some child dying for 12c a day, or whatever Steve’s point is? Newt Gingrich tried a more responsible tack in 1994 and was rewarded with …. Bill Clinton tacking to the center I guess. But find me a Democrat who will tack to the center today. Seriously.
Back at Unz, where Steve had a more extreme and niche audience, he was semi-regularly labeled as being a normie Republican. Just so—normie Republicans talk about government waste but don’t really want to cut it. I don’t doubt Steve wants to cut, but suspect at this point that whatever smart serious responsible tactic we could imagine would be hijacked quicker than Trump’s first term was.
Exactly right. Any cuts Trump makes will be characterized as immoral or only a rounding error in the federal budget. Or both.
Perhaps DOGE could get around the federal pay scale limits by hiring federal workers as private consultants.