while they are still pulling bodies out of the water, the orange guy is blaming DEI and Obama and Biden when he is the one that reaped havoc on this department already and making claims that investigators dont even know yet..What a despicable orange person. He is the one one watch where this incident occurred ,cant sluff off he is responsible for ALL..thats the job description
Investigators don’t know, and by typical policy the NTSB won’t claim to know for a year. The Tower was 2/3rds staff. Not sure how that is Trump’s fault, but plenty of articles about how the FAA turned away qualified white candidates for controllers because they needed to get their DEI quotas. These articles predate Trump’s election. Here’s one: https://www.natca.org/2023/06/27/dot-oig-faa-at-fault-for-controller-staffing-shortages/
Did you see the Quinnipiac poll showing Democrats with over 55% disapproval rating? Did you miss the John Stewart rant begging Democrats to quit demonizing Trump and start providing answers of what they would do with the power they seek? Do you think it might be better to explain why there were 1,200 fewer qualified air traffic controllers in 2023 than 10 years previous, when Obama changed the criteria for hiring?
Had a thought. Not an argument. I am honestly not sure what to think of this:
Trump wants to simultaneously have federal workers come back in the office, and then disperse those offices all over the country. E.g. Kash was speaking gleefully about moving Bureau headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama.
Yes, part of the back-to-office thing is an attempt to piss feds off the job. But most of it is a supervisory philosophy that people need to be where you can see them and they can see each other, to get all the random interactions that generate innovation.
But when it comes to Trump's direct reports- the agency heads - they might as well be working from home, if their offices are all over the hinterland. Trump won't be able to reach out and grab them, nor will they be a 5-minute drive from each other if they want to hash something out quickly. The same will apply to the agency heads' senior staff, who are supposed to hash out the details of interagency cooperation.
So how to reconcile an industrial-age workplace within the agency, with a postmodern distributed capital?
No permanent FAA director There is currently no permanent FAA director at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport12345. THIS IS TRUMPS WATCH WHERES THE DIRECTOR.iF YOU GOT ANY SENSE YOU CAN SEE WHY.. WHY did guy resign why wasnt he immediately replaced and freezes not put on in already highly understaffed air traffic people.s Gang that cant shoot straight sad these people are dangerous..
Good points JSM. I learned, while working as a government contractor, to be capable of working wherever I happen to be. I’m writing this on an iPad that has cellular connectivity and can reach all my work files and make phone calls anywhere in the world. With it, I can work from any place with cellular or WiFi coverage. With T-Mobile, I could even use Starlink. I can be at my desk, although my company got rid of assigned desks. I can be in my home study. I can work on airplane flight. I can work on a factory floor. It doesn’t matter if it is Baku, London, Kansas, Colorado, Alaska, or Houston.
I’m not a fan of the return to work directive. It doesn’t affect me, but it seems silly.
However, my wife is a nurse. She couldn’t do her job if she didn’t go to where the patients and means to evaluate and treat them are. I have a friend that is a lineman. He’s never at a desk, but he couldn’t do his job from a virtual environment. He doesn’t phone it in.
One of the most interesting aspects of these WFH / RTO discussions is the absence of commentary on how significantly the technology has moved on over the last 5 years. It is almost never cited in these discussions, which all seem to suggest this is just some kind of culture war.
Depending on the kind of work you do, many of the collaborative computerized tools now available probably make you more productive when you’re sitting in an online meeting rather than in the office.
But instead most of the debate seems to be centered around what the “good old days” were like.
Trump is talking about the stuff below. After an hour of research today, it seems that in 2012 to 2013 Obama sought to ensure racial equity for people passing the FAA air traffic controller qualification exam. Per the successful lawsuit cited below, a weird biographical questionnaire was used to rejigger scores by race.
The FAA buried this in 2018, and I haven't been able to find a complete version of the bio questionnaire (see a partial at Scribd). This is odd, as most official federal documents get archived for posterity.
I'm working with a small startup run by two bright Berkeley graduates. They think that they can create and run a successful virtual company with employees spread across the country. But they are failing to create a company culture, and don't realize they are missing all those small interactions which foster co-operation and teamwork.
I am an electrical engineer who makes industrial equipment. When Covid hit we all worked from home. One of my colleagues who was a mechanical engineer I had worked with for 10 years ended up getting fired because he ended up significantly missing deadline that caused equipment that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to miss ship dates. Some people can world unsupervised from home just fine, but some people can't. Being in the office keeps them focused and their supervisor can make sure they are actually working. I personally just don't believe that the average worker is as productive working from home.
Musk (who fed this stuff to Trump post Twitter -> X) is incoherent and wrong. Period. Musk is projecting a technology and development model on an industry that is completely different.
Government doesn't build cars or rockets or satellites. Government 'regulates' and sets standards. Government researches and reports findings a lot, and has lawyers who interpret laws. Government gives billions of dollars away through Social Security, Medicare, as veterans benefits, and through either contracts or grants.
Half of all government jobs might be automated, but these jobs are designed as patronage jobs and to build support for local elected people both Republican and Democrat. They had to create the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program back in the 1980s because no one would agree to shut down local--and obsolete--military bases anywhere.
The government tasks that cannot be automated are often very easily done remotely. At lower cost. In ways where DC politics could be defused by spreading the jobs all across the country. This is a simple analysis, as it did work just fine during COVID and the long and pointless lockdowns that followed. But, Musk is a retro "butts in the seats" manager. Is he in the wrong industry, or just insecure? His "only the paranoid survive" attitude fits with technology, but not the endless mediocrity required to pay routine bills. It's what the voters vote for...and demand...
There's an online tool that lets you look up government awards by keywords to see all the awards of a given type - such as "Migrant", "airport", "Control tower: and so on. I played about with it and some of the results seemed very suggestive. They'd be worth further study.
Keywords: F5H6HCJ64TB5 (= METROPOLITAN WASHINGTON AIRPORTS AUTHORITY i.e., Reagan, Dulles) Showing 21 results Taxpayer money spent: $385,158,726.00 - (Appears that10x less was spent on DC airports than on the homeless.)
Keyword: "control tower" Showing 49 results Taxpayer money spent: $249,370,342.20 (seems to suggest that 10x more spent on migrants than control towers.)
Notice also that the totals for homeless and migrants are incomplete. This tool can only list 100 results. That was OK for DC airports (21) and for "control tower" (49) but "Migrant" and "homeless" were over a hundred. How far over? I don't know.
This tool is at https://datarepublican.com/award_search/
I've known a good few government workers - most of them not very recently, but my experience with them is still relevant here, I think. In one office at the state level of s federal agency, there were about two dozen people. One truly worked hard and all day. One (back in the day) dedicated a lot of his time to organizing, or trying to organize, for a union. One did the research he hadn't been able to get funding for when he was a PhD candidate (or so I was told, although he seemed to spend a lot of time flipping through journals, which of course is PART of research - but he never generated a paper). What the department head did all day, I couldn't say - I was much too lowly.
In the office I came from in order to start working at that one, one guy spent almost all his time managing his portfolio - he was very into sector investing. Another, at my very low level, was late every Monday morning and left early every Friday, until our boss revealed to her that she had observed a "pattern of behavior" - whereupon my peer started putting in the right hours, but spent a lot of them chewing the fat with me and her other two coworkers. The computer room guys read books all day while running backup tapes (I did that job for a while and got a lot of creative writing done).
There were definitely people, many, in fact, who did their work. But their work did not take the number of person-hours that were being paid for.
In the modern era I have less exposure to government workers. But one I know, at a managerial level, works from home almost full-time, and takes a nap many if not most days. He definitely gets his job done - it just doesn't take 40 hours a week.
So I tend to agree with Musk 's overarching messages: for the most part, and given the choice, productivity will be higher when people are in the office. And, fewer people are necessary than we think.
Mark Hemingway @Heminator · Follow So a trans person tried to assassinate Scott Bessent, and a vegan trans cult is behind a string of murders including a border agent.
And it's radio silence from the same media that floods the zone on every bumpkin militia member that runs afoul of the law. 9:30 AM · Jan 30, 2025
MontifromMN @montividas · Follow Replying to @JDunlap1974 Resigning FBI Director Chris Wray tells 60 Minutes the Chinese have infiltrated our water treatment plants, our transportation systems, our energy sector, electric grid, natural gas pipelines.
So they did all this under his watchful eye? 11:38 AM · Jan 30, 2025
Arthur Welling @Carteach0 · Follow Replying to @JDunlap1974 Well then, Thank God he cracked down on praying grannies and parents attending school board meetings! That will show those dastardly Chinese spies! 1:03 PM · Jan 30, 2025
I think there are two kinds of people who work well in an 'at home' environment, leaving aside both solo operators and work that requires some form of physical contact with a client.
Paperwork drones who are executing repetitive well-defined processes on demand. People whose primary work is already largely meetings with people outside their immediate team and then processing that data.
Any team actually working collaboratively is going to function better with actual face to face contact. That isn't to say that it can't be done but regular contact is a net bonus.
It is incredibly unfortunate that these confirmation hearings will come to an end soon.
They are astonishingly effective in damaging both the New Soviet Democratical "brand" as well as ripping the GOPe mask off the uni-partiers.
Can you imagine watching these hearings and thinking they help Big Pharma Bernie, Screeching Pocahontas, Befuddled Bob From Colorado et al? Caught in lie after transparent lie? And stupid lies at that. Not even good ones. And topped off with palpable eye-popping fear in their Epstein loving faces like Schiffty-schiff.
I had a debate with Enigma on one of the boards about Trump's buy-out offer. Enigma thought the buy-out offer was lame, in part because federal employment is so secure.
This is a fascinating article about Trump firing people in the swamp. Many are saying these firings are illegal. He's firing Inspectors General, as well as members of the NLRB and the EEOC. There's a federal statute that says he can't fire members of the NLRB, except under very specific circumstances.
So far, nobody has sued Trump over these terminations. Why? Because Republicans have long argued that under Article 2, the president has wide authority to have the administration he wants, and that power can't be limited by Congress. And it's believed that the Supreme Court will likely agree with Trump's interpretation of Article 2.
Obviously, Trump can't fire anybody who is Article 1 (Congress) or Article 3 (Courts). But the argument that he can't fire people who are Article 2 seems weak to me. Congress can appoint people to the executive branch, and they are essentially up there for life? No way!
I wonder how many people are accepting the buy-outs? We'll find out this week, right?
I’m wondering if Vivek left DOGE because he disagrees with the current wholesale buyout offer plan. He seemed to want to execute a more surgical approach, and expressed more consideration for the humans doing the jobs. Personally, I don’t care, as long as the payload is chopped a lot. A lot of jobs created over last 4 years have been govt jobs. Not all are fed, but a lot are, costing all of us both in pay and benefits as well as swelling union ranks.
The other interesting thing about the distributed-capitol concept is that Trump can use it as a wedge issue to divide Democrats. Congresscritters' natural instinct is to love federal money in their districts. It will be very difficult for the D whips to get a member to vote against an agency headquarters with thousands of paychecks materializing in their state. Trump can even use it as a trade-off for all the frozen and eventually stopped earmarks.
Its irrelevant where the work gets done, its who you have employed to do it. You will have people in your office who take responsibility, are diligent, conscientious, share ideas and always go the extra mile; you will also have people who want to get through the day doing as little as possible. I agree --WFH exaggerates the behavior of both groups -- the first will work longer hours and be more productive, as they see the flexibility of being at home as an incentive and extremely useful benefit; the second will take advantage of the lack of oversight and contribute even less than were they in the office. if you have management in place who can identify those colleagues in the first group and more importantly has the skills available to remove those in the second, then your team will thrive, as will your business.
Vivek is running for Gov of Ohio. That requires stepping away from DOGE regardless if there were other conflicts or disgreements at DOGE. Campaigning will be a fulltime job in Ohio.
Whether Trump and DOGE can fire a large proportion of the federal workforce remains to be seen. I think the Administration might welcome a Supreme Court resolution of the extent of the Presidential power in this regard.
However, as has already been made clear (by earlier memos) to federal employees facing the decision of whether to “RESIGN” or not, if fed workers stay on they may well be reassigned to (e.g.) border patrol duty in the middle of the Rio Grande River. It would appear that certainly the President has that authority and power.
Mainline federal positions, contracts, and grants are funded with an eye to the FUTURE. They are sometimes still working with Fiscal Year 2022 funds, and have recently moved to FY2023 and FY2024 money.
The firings may or may not be legal, but Congress decides how it wants to spend money and the Executive Branch then spends it (with a degree of flexibility, yes). I never said or thought that political and de facto political positions were safe. Indeed, Biden came through like the Grim Reaper in 2021 too.
The buyout offer is extremely, absolutely, 100% lame. Many bad federal employees sit around doing nothing all the time, and the real troublemakers are often given make-work projects to keep it all nice and legal.
Some would say "That's cool!" and jump at the chance. In the middle of the river would mean they ride on a boat or get to swim for pay. The Feds already have routine work assignment rotations to fill gaps and gain experience. They fill random staffing roles for 3-6 months all the time.
Musk and Ramaswamy have childlike, comic-book imaginary projections of how government workers think. The reality is quite mundane, and government inefficiency frustrates most feds too.
1) The people who make up the vast majority of the bureaucracy do need eyes on them to make sure they are doing their work. Yes, the work can be done remotely. No, it's not getting done remotely.
The majority of these workers do not have productivity-based performance measures against which they are held to a standard. And those who do really don't, the only real metric is job tenure. These are low-productivity individuals and their productivity decreases without direct supervision.
2) Everyone complaining about the back-to-office move seems to be assuming this is the final state. It's not. It's just the beginning (as alluded to above with Patel's comments).
3) Private-sector white collar workers have also been experiencing increased back-to-office pressure/requirements. Trusk (Trump-Musk) just made it more dramatic, probably for the chaos effect that currently informs the administration's M.O.
1. No. The vast majority have objective deliverables. They must review X, write Y, process application Z. If they do not do it, everyone knows it is not complete. The bureaucracy manages contracts and grant programs, completes annual data collection/surveys, or database updates, customer service, and more.
Some agencies are broken, but they were equally broken before remote work.
2. No. The jobs follow what is mandated by Congress. Government could easily automate away many (most) federal jobs. Government standards are sometimes very, very, very low versus the private sector. Blame Congress for its gridlock and love of patronage. Back-to-the-office is an arbitrary change for work with steady workloads that was executed perfectly well during the lockdowns.
Updating how government functions would be fantastic, but tech and economic competition point to more remote work rather than less. Hire more low-cost right-wing people who want to live in Iowa and Kansas rather than pricey lefties in California or New York or DC. The Republicans say they want to relocate people out of DC and sell buildings -- do it immediately with closely monitored remote operations. Reduce staff over time as automation updates can be completed.
3. Yes, I agree. None other than DC's left wing mayor Muriel Bowser has pushed aggressively for return-to-work. She's trying to create make-work service jobs and support the office building owners (her tax base). Here the old money establishment is playing an ideological shell game to save their investments from bankruptcy.
The FAAs primary function is to insure our airways are operating safely. Both on the ground and in the air. The question then becomes; do DEI hires enhance safety or do they detract from it?
Comments older than 2 days are always moderated. Newer comments may be unmoderated, but are still subject to a spam filter and may take a few hours to get released. Thanks for your contributions and your patience.
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
45 comments:
Farage says elections being cancelled over politicians fear of reform
Seems reasonable. Politicians hate change.
California legislature walks back Newsome's $50M Anti-Trump slush fund!
https://cwbchicago.com/2025/01/2-undocumented-migrants-in-custody-for-murdering-63-year-old-chicago-man-who-was-found-tied-up-with-duct-tape-and-cord-ald.html
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2025/01/30/breaking-arrests-made-in-brutal-chicago-killing-with-a-key-detail-revealed-n2651393
while they are still pulling bodies out of the water, the orange guy is blaming DEI and Obama and Biden when he is the one that reaped havoc on this department already and making claims that investigators dont even know yet..What a despicable orange person. He is the one one watch where this incident occurred ,cant sluff off he is responsible for ALL..thats the job description
Investigators don’t know, and by typical policy the NTSB won’t claim to know for a year. The Tower was 2/3rds staff. Not sure how that is Trump’s fault, but plenty of articles about how the FAA turned away qualified white candidates for controllers because they needed to get their DEI quotas. These articles predate Trump’s election. Here’s one: https://www.natca.org/2023/06/27/dot-oig-faa-at-fault-for-controller-staffing-shortages/
Did you see the Quinnipiac poll showing Democrats with over 55% disapproval rating? Did you miss the John Stewart rant begging Democrats to quit demonizing Trump and start providing answers of what they would do with the power they seek? Do you think it might be better to explain why there were 1,200 fewer qualified air traffic controllers in 2023 than 10 years previous, when Obama changed the criteria for hiring?
ooo but don't call those power- thieves .... fascist
Had a thought. Not an argument. I am honestly not sure what to think of this:
Trump wants to simultaneously have federal workers come back in the office, and then disperse those offices all over the country. E.g. Kash was speaking gleefully about moving Bureau headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama.
Yes, part of the back-to-office thing is an attempt to piss feds off the job. But most of it is a supervisory philosophy that people need to be where you can see them and they can see each other, to get all the random interactions that generate innovation.
But when it comes to Trump's direct reports- the agency heads - they might as well be working from home, if their offices are all over the hinterland. Trump won't be able to reach out and grab them, nor will they be a 5-minute drive from each other if they want to hash something out quickly. The same will apply to the agency heads' senior staff, who are supposed to hash out the details of interagency cooperation.
So how to reconcile an industrial-age workplace within the agency, with a postmodern distributed capital?
I am honestly puzzled.
JSM
make AI avatars of everyone in cabinet and keep in Trump bathroom closet?
"nor will they be a 5-minute drive from each other if they want to hash something out quickly."
A phone/video call is quicker than a 5-minute drive, I'd think.
on server!!!
No permanent FAA director
There is currently no permanent FAA director at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport12345.
THIS IS TRUMPS WATCH WHERES THE DIRECTOR.iF YOU GOT ANY SENSE YOU CAN SEE WHY.. WHY did guy resign why wasnt he immediately replaced and freezes not put on in already highly understaffed air traffic people.s Gang that cant shoot straight sad these people are dangerous..
Good points JSM. I learned, while working as a government contractor, to be capable of working wherever I happen to be. I’m writing this on an iPad that has cellular connectivity and can reach all my work files and make phone calls anywhere in the world. With it, I can work from any place with cellular or WiFi coverage. With T-Mobile, I could even use Starlink.
I can be at my desk, although my company got rid of assigned desks. I can be in my home study. I can work on airplane flight. I can work on a factory floor. It doesn’t matter if it is Baku, London, Kansas, Colorado, Alaska, or Houston.
I’m not a fan of the return to work directive. It doesn’t affect me, but it seems silly.
However, my wife is a nurse. She couldn’t do her job if she didn’t go to where the patients and means to evaluate and treat them are. I have a friend that is a lineman. He’s never at a desk, but he couldn’t do his job from a virtual environment. He doesn’t phone it in.
One of the most interesting aspects of these WFH / RTO discussions is the absence of commentary on how significantly the technology has moved on over the last 5 years. It is almost never cited in these discussions, which all seem to suggest this is just some kind of culture war.
Depending on the kind of work you do, many of the collaborative computerized tools now available probably make you more productive when you’re sitting in an online meeting rather than in the office.
But instead most of the debate seems to be centered around what the “good old days” were like.
Trump is talking about the stuff below. After an hour of research today, it seems that in 2012 to 2013 Obama sought to ensure racial equity for people passing the FAA air traffic controller qualification exam. Per the successful lawsuit cited below, a weird biographical questionnaire was used to rejigger scores by race.
https://mslegal.org/2019/11/biographical-questions-forced-top-atc-candidates-out-of-faa-hiring-pool/
https://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/faa-aviation-medicine-reports/AM12-19.pdf
The FAA buried this in 2018, and I haven't been able to find a complete version of the bio questionnaire (see a partial at Scribd). This is odd, as most official federal documents get archived for posterity.
https://www.faa.gov/faq/faa-getting-rid-air-traffic-skills-biographical-assessment
https://www.scribd.com/document/218493751/ATC-Biographical-Questions
I'm working with a small startup run by two bright Berkeley graduates. They think that they can create and run a successful virtual company with employees spread across the country. But they are failing to create a company culture, and don't realize they are missing all those small interactions which foster co-operation and teamwork.
AI Demo: This Person Does Not Exist
It's getting better.
I am an electrical engineer who makes industrial equipment. When Covid hit we all worked from home. One of my colleagues who was a mechanical engineer I had worked with for 10 years ended up getting fired because he ended up significantly missing deadline that caused equipment that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to miss ship dates.
Some people can world unsupervised from home just fine, but some people can't. Being in the office keeps them focused and their supervisor can make sure they are actually working. I personally just don't believe that the average worker is as productive working from home.
Musk (who fed this stuff to Trump post Twitter -> X) is incoherent and wrong. Period. Musk is projecting a technology and development model on an industry that is completely different.
Government doesn't build cars or rockets or satellites. Government 'regulates' and sets standards. Government researches and reports findings a lot, and has lawyers who interpret laws. Government gives billions of dollars away through Social Security, Medicare, as veterans benefits, and through either contracts or grants.
Half of all government jobs might be automated, but these jobs are designed as patronage jobs and to build support for local elected people both Republican and Democrat. They had to create the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program back in the 1980s because no one would agree to shut down local--and obsolete--military bases anywhere.
The government tasks that cannot be automated are often very easily done remotely. At lower cost. In ways where DC politics could be defused by spreading the jobs all across the country. This is a simple analysis, as it did work just fine during COVID and the long and pointless lockdowns that followed. But, Musk is a retro "butts in the seats" manager. Is he in the wrong industry, or just insecure? His "only the paranoid survive" attitude fits with technology, but not the endless mediocrity required to pay routine bills. It's what the voters vote for...and demand...
Here's the outgoing FAA Director:
REMINDER: Biden’s pick to lead the FAA was a DEI hire who couldn’t answer a single question about aviation.
There's an online tool that lets you look up government awards by keywords to see all the awards of a given type - such as "Migrant", "airport", "Control tower: and so on. I played about with it and some of the results seemed very suggestive. They'd be worth further study.
Keyword: "Homeless"
Showing 100 (limit) results
Taxpayer money spent: $3,787,730,900.05
Keywords:
F5H6HCJ64TB5 (= METROPOLITAN WASHINGTON AIRPORTS AUTHORITY i.e., Reagan, Dulles)
Showing 21 results
Taxpayer money spent: $385,158,726.00 - (Appears that10x less was spent on DC airports than on the homeless.)
Keyword: "Migrant"
Showing 100 (limit) results
Taxpayer money spent: $2,817,411,427.41
Keyword: "control tower"
Showing 49 results
Taxpayer money spent: $249,370,342.20 (seems to suggest that 10x more spent on migrants than control towers.)
Notice also that the totals for homeless and migrants are incomplete. This tool can only list 100 results. That was OK for DC airports (21) and for "control tower" (49) but "Migrant" and "homeless" were over a hundred. How far over? I don't know.
This tool is at https://datarepublican.com/award_search/
MadTownGuy-
Just a "heads up"...
Biden's DEI pick, Phillip Washington, was never voted on, he withdrew his nomination. The outgoing director is Michael Whitaker.
I've known a good few government workers - most of them not very recently, but my experience with them is still relevant here, I think. In one office at the state level of s federal agency, there were about two dozen people. One truly worked hard and all day. One (back in the day) dedicated a lot of his time to organizing, or trying to organize, for a union. One did the research he hadn't been able to get funding for when he was a PhD candidate (or so I was told, although he seemed to spend a lot of time flipping through journals, which of course is PART of research - but he never generated a paper). What the department head did all day, I couldn't say - I was much too lowly.
In the office I came from in order to start working at that one, one guy spent almost all his time managing his portfolio - he was very into sector investing. Another, at my very low level, was late every Monday morning and left early every Friday, until our boss revealed to her that she had observed a "pattern of behavior" - whereupon my peer started putting in the right hours, but spent a lot of them chewing the fat with me and her other two coworkers. The computer room guys read books all day while running backup tapes (I did that job for a while and got a lot of creative writing done).
There were definitely people, many, in fact, who did their work. But their work did not take the number of person-hours that were being paid for.
In the modern era I have less exposure to government workers. But one I know, at a managerial level, works from home almost full-time, and takes a nap many if not most days. He definitely gets his job done - it just doesn't take 40 hours a week.
So I tend to agree with Musk 's overarching messages: for the most part, and given the choice, productivity will be higher when people are in the office. And, fewer people are necessary than we think.
Mark Hemingway
@Heminator
·
Follow
So a trans person tried to assassinate Scott Bessent, and a vegan trans cult is behind a string of murders including a border agent.
And it's radio silence from the same media that floods the zone on every bumpkin militia member that runs afoul of the law.
9:30 AM · Jan 30, 2025
https://twitchy.com/brettt/2025/01/30/abc-news-respects-pronouns-of-would-be-assassin-n2407615
https://twitchy.com/laura-w/2025/01/30/nyp-border-patrol-agent-murder-linked-to-trans-cult-n2407626
MontifromMN
@montividas
·
Follow
Replying to @JDunlap1974
Resigning FBI Director Chris Wray tells 60 Minutes the Chinese have infiltrated our water treatment plants, our transportation systems, our energy sector, electric grid, natural gas pipelines.
So they did all this under his watchful eye?
11:38 AM · Jan 30, 2025
Arthur Welling
@Carteach0
·
Follow
Replying to @JDunlap1974
Well then, Thank God he cracked down on praying grannies and parents attending school board meetings! That will show those dastardly Chinese spies!
1:03 PM · Jan 30, 2025
I think there are two kinds of people who work well in an 'at home' environment, leaving aside both solo operators and work that requires some form of physical contact with a client.
Paperwork drones who are executing repetitive well-defined processes on demand.
People whose primary work is already largely meetings with people outside their immediate team and then processing that data.
Any team actually working collaboratively is going to function better with actual face to face contact. That isn't to say that it can't be done but regular contact is a net bonus.
+1
It is incredibly unfortunate that these confirmation hearings will come to an end soon.
They are astonishingly effective in damaging both the New Soviet Democratical "brand" as well as ripping the GOPe mask off the uni-partiers.
Can you imagine watching these hearings and thinking they help Big Pharma Bernie, Screeching Pocahontas, Befuddled Bob From Colorado et al? Caught in lie after transparent lie? And stupid lies at that. Not even good ones. And topped off with palpable eye-popping fear in their Epstein loving faces like Schiffty-schiff.
Simply amazing and fun.
And Mazie Hirono! LOL
Nuff said.
I had a debate with Enigma on one of the boards about Trump's buy-out offer. Enigma thought the buy-out offer was lame, in part because federal employment is so secure.
This is a fascinating article about Trump firing people in the swamp. Many are saying these firings are illegal. He's firing Inspectors General, as well as members of the NLRB and the EEOC. There's a federal statute that says he can't fire members of the NLRB, except under very specific circumstances.
So far, nobody has sued Trump over these terminations. Why? Because Republicans have long argued that under Article 2, the president has wide authority to have the administration he wants, and that power can't be limited by Congress. And it's believed that the Supreme Court will likely agree with Trump's interpretation of Article 2.
Obviously, Trump can't fire anybody who is Article 1 (Congress) or Article 3 (Courts). But the argument that he can't fire people who are Article 2 seems weak to me. Congress can appoint people to the executive branch, and they are essentially up there for life? No way!
I wonder how many people are accepting the buy-outs? We'll find out this week, right?
I’m wondering if Vivek left DOGE because he disagrees with the current wholesale buyout offer plan. He seemed to want to execute a more surgical approach, and expressed more consideration for the humans doing the jobs. Personally, I don’t care, as long as the payload is chopped a lot. A lot of jobs created over last 4 years have been govt jobs. Not all are fed, but a lot are, costing all of us both in pay and benefits as well as swelling union ranks.
The other interesting thing about the distributed-capitol concept is that Trump can use it as a wedge issue to divide Democrats. Congresscritters' natural instinct is to love federal money in their districts. It will be very difficult for the D whips to get a member to vote against an agency headquarters with thousands of paychecks materializing in their state. Trump can even use it as a trade-off for all the frozen and eventually stopped earmarks.
JSM
Its irrelevant where the work gets done, its who you have employed to do it. You will have people in your office who take responsibility, are diligent, conscientious, share ideas and always go the extra mile; you will also have people who want to get through the day doing as little as possible. I agree --WFH exaggerates the behavior of both groups -- the first will work longer hours and be more productive, as they see the flexibility of being at home as an incentive and extremely useful benefit; the second will take advantage of the lack of oversight and contribute even less than were they in the office. if you have management in place who can identify those colleagues in the first group and more importantly has the skills available to remove those in the second, then your team will thrive, as will your business.
Vivek is running for Gov of Ohio. That requires stepping away from DOGE regardless if there were other conflicts or disgreements at DOGE. Campaigning will be a fulltime job in Ohio.
Fun fact of the day.
As of a week from Sunday Jalen Hurts will have stared twice as many Super Bowl games as Aaron Rodgers.
@Mason G: so noted. I should have checked it out more closely. Thanks.
The NASA model comes to mind. For that matter, every major complex weapons systems.
Whether Trump and DOGE can fire a large proportion of the federal workforce remains to be seen. I think the Administration might welcome a Supreme Court resolution of the extent of the Presidential power in this regard.
However, as has already been made clear (by earlier memos) to federal employees facing the decision of whether to “RESIGN” or not, if fed workers stay on they may well be reassigned to (e.g.) border patrol duty in the middle of the Rio Grande River. It would appear that certainly the President has that authority and power.
Mainline federal positions, contracts, and grants are funded with an eye to the FUTURE. They are sometimes still working with Fiscal Year 2022 funds, and have recently moved to FY2023 and FY2024 money.
The firings may or may not be legal, but Congress decides how it wants to spend money and the Executive Branch then spends it (with a degree of flexibility, yes). I never said or thought that political and de facto political positions were safe. Indeed, Biden came through like the Grim Reaper in 2021 too.
The buyout offer is extremely, absolutely, 100% lame. Many bad federal employees sit around doing nothing all the time, and the real troublemakers are often given make-work projects to keep it all nice and legal.
Some would say "That's cool!" and jump at the chance. In the middle of the river would mean they ride on a boat or get to swim for pay. The Feds already have routine work assignment rotations to fill gaps and gain experience. They fill random staffing roles for 3-6 months all the time.
Musk and Ramaswamy have childlike, comic-book imaginary projections of how government workers think. The reality is quite mundane, and government inefficiency frustrates most feds too.
Hi, Dinky. What is the FAAs primary function? (Dont expect an answer)
1) The people who make up the vast majority of the bureaucracy do need eyes on them to make sure they are doing their work. Yes, the work can be done remotely. No, it's not getting done remotely.
The majority of these workers do not have productivity-based performance measures against which they are held to a standard. And those who do really don't, the only real metric is job tenure. These are low-productivity individuals and their productivity decreases without direct supervision.
2) Everyone complaining about the back-to-office move seems to be assuming this is the final state. It's not. It's just the beginning (as alluded to above with Patel's comments).
3) Private-sector white collar workers have also been experiencing increased back-to-office pressure/requirements. Trusk (Trump-Musk) just made it more dramatic, probably for the chaos effect that currently informs the administration's M.O.
@One Fine Day:
1. No. The vast majority have objective deliverables. They must review X, write Y, process application Z. If they do not do it, everyone knows it is not complete. The bureaucracy manages contracts and grant programs, completes annual data collection/surveys, or database updates, customer service, and more.
Some agencies are broken, but they were equally broken before remote work.
2. No. The jobs follow what is mandated by Congress. Government could easily automate away many (most) federal jobs. Government standards are sometimes very, very, very low versus the private sector. Blame Congress for its gridlock and love of patronage. Back-to-the-office is an arbitrary change for work with steady workloads that was executed perfectly well during the lockdowns.
Updating how government functions would be fantastic, but tech and economic competition point to more remote work rather than less. Hire more low-cost right-wing people who want to live in Iowa and Kansas rather than pricey lefties in California or New York or DC. The Republicans say they want to relocate people out of DC and sell buildings -- do it immediately with closely monitored remote operations. Reduce staff over time as automation updates can be completed.
3. Yes, I agree. None other than DC's left wing mayor Muriel Bowser has pushed aggressively for return-to-work. She's trying to create make-work service jobs and support the office building owners (her tax base). Here the old money establishment is playing an ideological shell game to save their investments from bankruptcy.
The FAAs primary function is to insure our airways are operating safely. Both on the ground and in the air.
The question then becomes; do DEI hires enhance safety or do they detract from it?
Post a Comment
Comments older than 2 days are always moderated. Newer comments may be unmoderated, but are still subject to a spam filter and may take a few hours to get released. Thanks for your contributions and your patience.