- Via LGM: Trump/Vance want to do to the US what the Bush administration did to Iraq. I had a similar thought this week. I knew that the Bush administration made a fatal error when they let Iraqi government offices in Baghdad get sacked and when they thought just firing everyone and starting the state from scratch was the way to go. Now we are trying to do it to oursevlves.
- Via Axios: Scoop: 20,000 federal workers take “buyout” so far, official says.
- Via Politico: DOGE’s access to federal data is ‘an absolute nightmare,’ legal experts warn.
- Via The Guardian: Doge staffers enter Noaa headquarters and incite reports of cuts and threats.
- Via WaPo: Elon Musk is a ‘special government employee.’ What does that mean?
- Via the NYT: Trump Appointees Put Almost All U.S.A.I.D. Workers on Leave.
Midweek Tabs
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12 responses to “Midweek Tabs”
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https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-gsa-terminate-office-leases-f8faac5e2038722f705587c8dd21ab26
“One of the next moves in President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping effort to fire government employees and curtail operations is using the agency that manages thousands of federal employee worksites around the country to cut down on office space.
Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an email shared with The Associated Press by a GSA employee.”
This might actually rile up the Red States; for many mid-size town developers, government leases are gold. Some of those offices have probably been open for decades.
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@Not the IT Dept.: And for what? To cut 0.1% of the federal budget? This will not lower the cost of eggs or the cost of living, nor reduce crime.
20,000 employees here and 7,500 offices there is not going to save any significant amount of money tantamount to the time and money lost to future headaches.
Not to mention the cost to re-hire and re-open when frustrated Americans finally tire of yet another Republican failure.
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And now it’s the CIA’s turn. https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/politics/cia-workforce-buyouts/index.html
“The Central Intelligence Agency on Tuesday became the first major national security agency to offer so-called buyouts to its entire workforce, a CIA spokesperson and two other sources familiar with the offer said, part of President Donald Trump’s broad effort to shrink the federal government and shape it to his agenda.
The offer — which tells federal employees that they can quit their jobs and receive roughly eight months of pay and benefits — had up until Tuesday not been made available to most national security roles in an apparent cognizance of their critical function to the security of the nation….
CIA Director John Ratcliffe personally decided he also wanted the CIA to be involved, one of the sources said….the move is part of Ratcliffe’s efforts to “ensure the CIA workforce is responsive to the Administration’s national security priorities,” adding that is “part of a holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy.””
Unbelievable.
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Having one percent of federal employees—or even two or three times that many—agree to resign or retire later this year accomplishes nothing. This could represent just a portion of those who were already eligible for and planning to retire, or already planning to resign for personal, financial, geographic, or career development reasons. Firing those in their probationary period and freezing hiring during this administration, however, would actually hamstring a lot of organizations.
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@Eusebio: I’ve seen estimates that about half the takers are already retiring near-term. So essentially this program is going to cost…I dunno, an average portion of a salary that would not have been collected of maybe $50k/person * 10000 = $500M in excess payments.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a “bad deal”.
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Now this is interesting. Saudi Arabia is not onside with the Gaza plan.
“But on Wednesday, the kingdom’s foreign ministry said Saudi Arabia rejected any attempts to displace the Palestinians from their land and said Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had affirmed this position in “a clear and explicit manner”.”
And it looks like my earlier question about Egypt and Jordan being consulted about Trump’s claim that they’ll accept a couple million displaced Palestinians has been answered as well:
“Jordan’s King Abdullah said on Wednesday he rejected any attempts to annex land and displace Palestinians. Egypt said it would support Gaza recovery plans without Palestinians leaving the territory.”
Hard to believe Netanyahu signed on to this mess as a done deal.
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20,000 is 1% of 2 million and that is after VERA got added as a sweetener.
I didn’t know that VERA had been added. Now I’m thinking back to my last organization that offered, under more normal times, VERA and VSIP for a certain category of employees. By my estimate, about 3 to 5 percent took the offer; however, a) that employee category was probably older on average than the workforce overall, and b) VSIP was more popular–I’m not sure there was a single VERA.
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Hard to believe Netanyahu signed on to this mess as a done deal.
I’ve been assuming it’s Netanyahu’s plan. And I see no reason to believe the Saudis are being honest.
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@gVOR10:
@Not the IT Dept.:
The Saudi’s are not going to slit their own throats for the benefit of Trump, still less of Netanyahu, or Isreali’s various.
Netanyahu continues to maneuver for his primary goal of keeping the sweet Bibi behind out of jail.
The plan is not necessarily Netanyahu’s though.
There’ve been ideas like this floating around MAGA circles for some time, appealing to Trump’s “real estate developer” inclinations, perhaps.Some Americans have considerable difficulty really grasping the fundamentally ethno-territorial basis of most nationalisms.
See the frequent disparagement of such as “blood-and-soil”.
