It only "worked" because the key personnel decided to come back. Had they decided to move on to greener pastures, the end result would've been very different.
That isn't much of a point because federal employees are much more likely to return than Twitter technical staff. Interesting approach, specially because it's not my country.
>> federal employees are much more likely to return
Not necessarily. It's generally understood that federal employees accept a lower salary in exchange for career stability. If a career as a federal employee now has higher risk then at least some people will be expecting a higher salary.
I think that incentive is part of the problem. Federal employees should get paid more with a reasonable expectation of being fired. The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.
How is firing large amounts of people on a whim going to solve the problem of people not caring about their work?
From what it sounds like (w.r.t. Agenda 47 / Project 2025) DOGE is fund seeking for massive planned programs, not returning money to the citizenry or restructuring for efficiency.
It sounds like they are illegally looting agencies and programs that congress already funded, so they can fund the admin's proposed plans (virtual social cleansing, mass deportations, homeless relocation, freedom cities, etc).
It doesn't look like DOGE is trying to fund anything; at this stage my guess is they're trying to hack off the propaganda arm of the CIA/NSA and the web of NGOs on the theory that it is funding anti-Trump messaging. Otherwise targeting USAID for savings early is a bit pointless; what is $50 billion a year to the US government? They're $36 trillion in debt with no plausible path out of the hole. Annual deficit is around $2 trillion.
Or it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy. Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.
> Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said she has expressed “concerns” to leaders about the prospect of steep spending cuts and told reporters that, before she agrees to vote for the budget resolution, she wants “better clarity” about the next stage — especially when it comes to cuts. “$4.5 trillion doesn’t leave a lot of room for the president’s priorities,” Malliotakis said
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Also, why else would you directly reclaim funds as the executive? As a party, if you wanted to correct spending, you would do it in a budget. As the executive, if you wanted to get money without congressional approval, you would reclaim money that has already been appropriated. There are other ways (emergency orders), but they might not be popular with the party or a target voting base (in this case, more net spending).
It is the US Government. Nobody has minded funding their schemes since 1970. They're going to keep borrowing until something so terrible happens that they literally cannot borrow any more. It is a bipartisan consensus position that spans multiple powerful governing ideologies.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is much more likely to be using rhetoric than predicting how the situation will develop. If the Republicans as a party actually cared about the debt or intended to make meaningful improvements to the situation we'd have seen evidence of it in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s or 10s.
I'd love to be wrong, but there is pretty strong evidence here that they're going to tut-tut; maybe wag a finger or even in extreme situations someone will write a strongly worded letter. Then the government will borrow whatever they need to to pay for whatever hare-brained scheme is flavour of the month.
The problem here is that gilt rates have been on the rise for a year (most likely as a reaction to Trump's manifesto), meaning borrowing is getting more and more expensive. You can print more money, but that devalues the currency, which the USD has managed to shirk off by being the main reserve currency of the planet. Except, that might change soon - because of the seeming chaos of the Trump administration (based on experiences of the previous administration), people are eyeing up EUR as a safer place, and gold prices are moving in a direction that suggests people want out of dollars (even if gold is normally denominated in USD for most people).
Trump has therefore caused gilt rates to rise, borrowing costs to rise, and a potential currency devaluation.
If you want to see how that works out when people finally lose their confidence, see what happened to the Truss government in the UK: it's not pretty. The UK is still paying for that on multiple fronts, but we were able to end the experiment in 49 days - that's not possible in the US.
I don't think what has worked for the last 50 years - waving budget appropriations through, shrugging at the national debt - is going to hold up for too much longer, for multiple reasons. And when it falls, it's going to fall fast, and very hard.
I made this comment before digging deeper into appropriations impoundment.
However, it still seems plausible (in my limited understanding) that this strategy could still be the goal, if the goal is to first push appropriations impoundment to SCOTUS.
Here is the best cited and approachable article I found on the subject within the context of these events:
>Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.
They want to fund corporate tax cuts. the cut from 22 to 15 percent is estsimated to be worth 100-200b dollars of income for the government per year. That's about the yearly funding of the DoED.
So we aren't saving money nor paying off debt. we are just funding corporate profits.
Most likely the whole point is to destabilise and eliminate government structures with the goal of filling the resulting power vacuum with privately owned services. That's what Thiel and his ilk are all about.
The first part of this plan - destruction - is easier than the second half - creation. If they're successful with the second half, people will be worse off because it's a big step towards neofeudalism /strengthening oligarchy. If they fail, people will be a lot worse off because the structures they're destroying are actually doing important work.
They don't get paid more because the government is not a profit center. It gets money from the citizens and then appropriates those funds. raises and promotions need to be a strict process because all government workers have public salaries. They can probably pay a little more, but not anything close to competitive.
>The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.
blame the incentive structure, not the players. Government being efficient and saving money results in less budget next time. They are punished for their improvement. If Musk wanted governent efficiency, that's the angle to approach. Protecting against lower budgets after a high performance review would do wonders.
None of these people were let go because of the quality of their work. What incentive would they have to do their job well if their continued employment is not based on merit?
The advocates of Musk's firings will say that if these people could command a higher salary, they should be in the private industry producing goods and services for the population rather than the inherently wasteful government positions.
The profit-making part is when we pull back from being world policeman and instead sell nuclear weapons and weapon systems. Sorry, we won't go to war for you, but how about some H-bombs, Taiwan?
The problem with ongoing US "experiments" is how much the rest of the planet is dependent on American companies, related economics and politics, regardless of it not being our country, the schockwaves will be felt.
And this is the thing, the rest of the world has agreed to be dependent on American companies, because they believed in the legitimacy of the US and free international trade. If belief in that legitimacy goes away, we will see that dependence shift quickly. Let us begin with Mastercard and Visa where the US taxes every payment transaction in much of the world. Do we really believe that Europe couldn't run its own card schemes?
Starting with this year, Germany has legally mandated free and instant (few seconds) direct account to account transfers. For some shops, you can now either pay by SEPA (for free) or agree to pay a 3% fee for using VISA. They already started cutting out the US middleman.
The European Payment Initiative, the EPI, abandoned its plans for a card scheme and decided to focus on an account-to-account instant payment solution (A2A) for all kinds of use cases, all through a wallet. There is an interesting synergy here with the European moves to develop a common digital identity service and euro-wallet infrastructure.
They're not just trying to get rid of the US middleman, but the middleman altogether.
IMO, to me as layman non-American, it's not an if. The USA is done-for-except-not, just like Twitter has been for a while. This might be able to be undone, hypothetically, but is not being undone. Online armchair generals are already starting to discuss things like escalation strategy for European nuclear forces and so on.
I guess we'll be seeing Mastodon/Bluesky/Threads phenomenon across worlds, both horizontally and vertically in the coming decades, this time in real life with (more)real consequences.
There's going to be major efforts especially in Europe, to de-couple from the US. We saw this to some extent in Trump 1.0 but he didn't actually do much due to the ineptness of those around him and a Senate that was still dominated by the anti-MAGA GOP "old guard". This time it is much, much worse.
Right, but that's all Musk sees: they came back, and so it worked. He seems like the kind of person whose ego would make him believe that any other time he tries this, it would work too.
All key personnel were immigrants? Why did the others come back? Also, since the H1B were key to operations and therefore smart, couldn't at least some of them have found a new employer? 61% of the H1B population switched jobs that year, so why did all key H1B come back?
I think key personnel came back because they wanted to. It's the simplest explanation.
With h1b i think you have 60 days to find someone else to sponsor you or you have to leave the country. 60 days is no time at all to find and start a new job. Even if you’re smart.
Even in the best markets, I still had a 6 week interview to offer stage (5 stages). 45 days and if they decided someone else is better I may be out of luck restarting the process.
With a Visa, I would not take such a risk. Given the job market, they either need to extend the period, or somehow mandate companies decide on a full time candidate within 30 days of first conact. It's gotten beyond out of hand.
